Selection Panel for Curator Open Call 2020

Veejay Villafranca
Photographer

Veejay Villafranca was born in Manila. He started out in journalism as a staff photographer for the national news magazine Philippines Graphic, covering socio-political events in the Philippines. After becoming a freelancer in 2006, he worked with several international news wire agencies before pursuing personal projects that later paved the way to his career as a full-time documentary photographer. In 2008, he was awarded the Ian Parry Scholarship and a residency at Visa Pour l’Image for his project on the lives of former gang members in Manila and in 2013 attended the prestigious Joop Swart Masterclass program of the World Press Photo Foundation.

Veejay is based in Manila and works around the Asian region contributing to different news outlets while pursuing his personal work in the Philippines. 

 

Guo-Liang Tan
Visual Artist

Guo-Liang Tan (b. 1980, Singapore) is a visual artist working primarily in the field of painting, from which works in other mediums such as text, collage and video sometimes emerge. In his work, surfaces, painterly or otherwise, becomes a space for performing gestures of affect and conjuring a haunting that converses the ghosts of abstraction. Tan completed his BA in Fine Art & Critical Studies at Goldsmiths College, London and his MFA at Glasgow School of Art. He was also a guest student at The Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany and an artist-in-residence at the NTU Centre of Contemporary Art. He is a recipient of Singapore National Arts Council Scholarship, the Antje und Jürgen Conzelmann Preis and a finalist in the Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2018. His work has been exhibited and collected in Asia and Europe. Recent exhibitions include Ghost Screen (2017) in Ota Fine Arts, Singapore, A Different Way Of (Thinking About) Painting? (2017) at Langgeng Art Foundation, Yogyakarta, Ethereal Machines (2018) at Ota Fine Arts, Shanghai and Reformations (2019) in NTU ADM Gallery, Singapore. Alongside his own work, Tan also collaborates with other artists on curatorial and publication projects, including Aversions and Found & Lost (2009) for Osage Gallery, We Who Saw Signs (2011) for Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Side Affects (2019) for Ota Fine Arts and Rushes Of Time (2020) for Asian Film Archive.

 

Wei Leng Tay
Visual artist

Wei Leng Tay is an artist working with mediums including photography, audio, video and installation. Her works begin with conversations and interactions with people, and draw links between how desires, personal relationships and histories are tied to family, society and the state. Tay’s most recent four-part solo exhibition, Crossings, was presented at NUS Museum (2018-2019). She has collaborated with organisations such as ARTER Space for Art, Istanbul, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Vasl Artists’ Association, Pakistan, and the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre through group exhibitions and residencies, and her works can be found in museum collections in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. She is in the collective project Sightlines (2016-) which questions collectivity through conversation and image-making. Previously, Tay worked as Deputy Picture Editor for TIME Magazine’s Asia edition and as a photo editor for Bloomberg News in Hong Kong. She holds an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. 

 

Ian Teh
Photographer

Ian Teh is a Malaysian-born photographer. He has published three monographs: Undercurrents (2008), Traces (2011) and Confluence (2014). His work is part of the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The Museum of Fine Arts (Houston) and the Hood Museum in the USA. Selected solo shows include the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York in 2004, Flowers in London in 2011 and the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam in 2012.

Teh has received several honours including the Abigail Cohen Fellowship in Documentary Photography 2014,the International Photoreporter Grant 2016, and a travel grant in 2018 from the Pulitzer Centre for Crisis Reporting. In 2018 he also presented his work on climate change at the prestigious 2018 National Geographic Photography Seminar.

Teh’s work has been published internationally in magazines such as National GeographicThe New YorkerBloomberg Businessweek and Granta. Since 2013, he has exhibited as well as conducted masterclasses at Obscura Festival of Photography, Malaysia’a foremost photo festival. He is a tutor at Cambodia’s Angkor Photo Festival since 2014. Teh is a member of the British agency Panos Pictures.

 

Emmeline Yong
Centre Director / Co-founder, Objectifs

Emmeline Yong is the co-founder and director of Objectifs, where she oversees the artistic direction and general management at the non-profit gallery and educational space. Since its establishment in 2003, Objectifs has aimed to cultivate original voices in visual storytelling, and to inspire and broaden perspectives through the power of images with a year-round program of exhibitions, screenings, residencies, talks and workshops. She has been a nominator and juror for several international photography awards. She has also curated several exhibitions, with a particular interest in works by women photographers that speak to local and international concerns.