Two renowned Southeast Asian artists, Yee I-Lann and Pratchaya Phinthong, present powerful exhibitions at SAM, exploring cultural, social, and economic narratives.
Singapore, 3 December 2024 – Singapore Art Museum (SAM) proudly presents two compelling solo exhibitions of mid-career Southeast Asian artists Yee I-Lann and Pratchaya Phinthong, opening in Gallery 1 at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Titled Yee I-Lann: Mansau-Ansau and Pratchaya Phinthong: No Patents on Ideas, these exhibitions showcase the practices of two leading artists from the same generation. Together, they reaffirm SAM’s commitment to profile key Southeast Asian artistic practices and voices, driving global critical discourse on contemporary art by serving as a key platform for meaningful conversations within and around art.
Featuring new commissions, loans, and works from the National Collection, each exhibition provides a comprehensive view of the artist’s multidisciplinary practices up till now. They are each shaped by their artistic journeys and collaborations driven by their distinct research and methodologies.
“Yee I-Lann and Pratchaya Phinthong are important voices in Southeast Asian contemporary art, each offering nuanced insights into the region’s evolving socio-political, environmental and cultural landscapes”, said Eugene Tan, CEO and Director of SAM. He added, “Their practices challenge and enrich our understanding of contemporary issues. Yee, for example, addresses historical and contemporary narratives that navigate power, while Phinthong examines cultural and economic systems that structure modern life, inviting audiences to engage deeply with art that resonates with universal themes yet remains deeply rooted in Southeast Asia. These exhibitions continue our efforts to profile regional artists internationally, with Yee I-Lann: Mansau-Ansau curated with the intent to travel beyond and reach new audiences, further contributing to the global dialogue on contemporary art and its role in society, but from the perspective of Southeast Asia.”
Yee I-Lann: Mansau-Ansau
Yee I-Lann: Mansau-Ansau presents recent and seminal works by Sabah contemporary artist Yee I-Lann, including two new commissions that reflect current aesthetic and material trajectories. The exhibition’s title, Mansau-Ansau – a phrase meaning “to walk and walk” in the Dusun and Kadazan languages – symbolises an open-ended journey that encourages discovery for deeper cultural insights. The exhibition traverses two decades of Yee’s creation, addressing historical and contemporary narratives and knowledge with a focus on power, identity, and community. Through these themes, Yee invites audiences to consider the forces that shape Malaysia and, extending beyond Southeast Asia, global cultural and aesthetic landscapes.
Yee considers herself a “reader” rather than a “maker” of photographs, often working with found images and collages to highlight embedded and underlying histories and narratives, thus providing an aesthetic space of observation and critique of visual representation and their alternatives. In Sulu Stories, the shared seascape between Sabah and the southern Philippines unfolds in photo-media dioramas reflecting the histories of the community as much as the conflict. Yee’s multi-layered visual vocabulary is further demonstrated in the The Orang Besar Series: Kain Panjang with Parasitic Kepala, Kain Panjang with Petulant Kepala, Kain Panjang with Carnivorous Kepala. “Orang besar” (big person) refers to those with economic wealth and sociopolitical influence. Applying the traditional batik technique to the familiar clothing of the kain panjang (long cloth), the work explores the complex relationship between the powerful and powerless in society.
Drawing on archives from Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum, Picturing Power confronts colonial pasts in Malaya through the mechanics of governance, education, and hierarchy. Created a decade later, Measuring Project: Chapters One to Seven offers an anti-colonial perspective using the egalitarian form of the woven mat. The grounded orientation of the mat invites viewers to re-examine value systems and reconnect with ancestral knowledge and their lineages.
Yee’s collaborations with sea and land-based communities bridge cultures, allowing audiences to discover and understand their particular circumstances and, by extension, speak to the human condition at large. PANGKIS, a video work titled after the unique warrior cry of the Murut in Sabah, captures the performance of the Tagaps Dance Theatre whilst wearing a customised and conjoined Murut lalandau jungle hat for an uncanny and powerful performance of new possibilities.
Extending the sonic experience to cultural transmission and finding community, Yee’s “hello from the outside” highlights karaoke’s propensity for shared memory and friendship. Presenting the song list of the weavers, the work illustrates the borderlessness of the song and invites audiences to join in this lyrical community.
As part of SAM’s aim to profile Southeast Asian artists in and beyond the region, Mansau-Ansau will be travelling to Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland, in May 2025 for Yee’s first solo exhibition in Europe.
Pratchaya Phinthong: No Patents on Ideas
No Patents on Ideas, the first solo exhibition of Bangkok-based artist Pratchaya Phinthong in Singapore, explores the relational processes, fleeting gestures, and global transactions that shape the cultural and economic systems that underlie everyday interactions. Drawing references from his observations of the city-state, the exhibition weaves local context into Phinthong’s broader conceptual framework, offering a dynamic exploration of critical themes central to Phinthong’s two-decade multidisciplinary practice. His conceptual process translates elements such as research, scientific findings, economic theories, and rumours into form, reflecting a practice grounded in subtle yet incisive engagement with global systems of value, labour, and exchange.
No Patents on Ideas challenges the way we understand the world’s systems—both seen and unseen—through a constellation of elements that reference airspace and aeronautics as an expression of freedom. Through his merging of found objects, relational significance, and institutional negotiations, Phinthong underscores the idea that a trace or remnant may become shape-shifting epistemological conduits to an array of interconnected political and cultural notions. This moment is captured in the installations Undrift and Untitled (Singapore), which occupy a central place within the exhibition. In Untitled (Singapore), a photograph taken from Udon Thani in northeastern Thailand captures the sky above the city with an F-16 fighter jet flying overhead as part of a military training exercise. The recurring presence of these jets is linked to a 15-year agreement between the Singapore and Thai governments to exchange resources and provide training facilities. Engaging the help of friends living in Udon Thani, Phinthong captures the aircraft as they appear, creating not only a record of military aviation but also a kind of map—encouraging audiences to rethink airspace, navigation, and control.
Undrift, a newly commissioned work, functions as an agent of subtle iconoclasm to the material and psychic terrain of Singapore’s currency system. For this, Phinthong recreates a stock screensaver downloaded by a Bangkok repair shop into his computer, animating banknotes from his collection of foreign currencies as they drift across the screen. Details like handwritten notes and folds on the banknotes reflect Phinthong’s personal touch, while their movement is synced to real-time wind speed data from meteorological stations across Singapore. This reinterpretation of a commonplace digital object illustrates Phinthong’s use of generic, readymade goods to highlight global systems of value, labour, and exchange.
Phinthong’s preoccupation with social, cultural, and symbolic universes that drive economic activity can be traced to his early works, which are often oriented towards the actual practices of economic actors that are culturally inflected, exposing the situated intersections of economic practices and cultural logic in the process. Suasana, a series of photographic film strips, captures Phinthong’s connection with Zauquna, a community of widows in Pattani, southern Thailand, whose lives are marked by conflict. In this region where the impact of differences in cultural identity, nation-state, and faith on life is keenly felt, Phinthong invited the widows to unravel rolls of film, exposing them to light. The resulting strips of darkened film, devoid of images, bear imprints of the presence and absence of the women, highlighting the contradictions and uncertainty of life under insurgent violence.
During his visit, Phinthong also engaged with Zauquna’s home-based food business centred around the production of nam prik, a type of chili paste, from local ingredients as a means to achieve financial independence. In support of their community, Phinthong continues to place orders for their chili paste and shares their stories through his exhibitions. Suasana will continue with a second phase, where the nam prik will be distributed through the Singapore non-governmental organisation (NGO) Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) as part of their food programme, The Cuff Road Food Project.
Audiences can participate in free programmes such as curator-led tours and artist talks, designed to foster a deeper connection with the exhibitions’ themes and offer insight into the distinctive practices of both artists. Both exhibitions will be on show at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark from 4 December 2024 to 23 March 2025. General Admission (free for Singaporeans and PRs) applies, with limited-edition exhibition merchandise available for purchase at SAM.
