This year’s MA Fine Arts Postgraduate Symposium foregrounds the urgency of ‘praxis’ as an embodied process of making in the face of our global polycrisis.
As an annual platform that facilitates dialogue on research practice, the event features a keynote address by Chow and Lin, followed by presentations from 14 students from the MA Fine Arts programme, who articulate the centrality of making, experimentation and reflexivity in their journeys as artists.
Since its inception in 2001, the postgraduate symposium has served as a platform for dialogue on research practice within the founding postgraduate programme at LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore.
Image: The Poverty Line | Myanmar, 2016, Eggs, courtesy of Chow and Lin
In this talk, Chow and Lin will share their journey which started from questions about societal phenomena. Connecting global systems to individual experience, their works draw in audiences and expertise across art, policy, education and communities.
Their works accumulate scale across geography and time to invoke new ways of viewing. On The Poverty Line project, they traveled more than 200,000 kilometers over 16 years to create case studies of 38 countries and territories spanning six continents. This work traverses cultures and economic frameworks to examine local social structures and global food systems. They have also embarked on a 40-year project The Conversation to create a living cognitive archive of two humans living through these times.
Chow and Lin are an artist duo working on scale across geography and time, connecting complex systems to daily lived experience. The crux of their practice lies in their methodology of statistical, mathematical and research techniques. Their projects are driven by the discursive backgrounds in economics, public policy and media, and these are augmented by exchanges with specialists across disciplines.
Chow and Lin have exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Arles Les Rencontres De La Photographie, Art Basel Hong Kong, Lahore Biennale, National University of Singapore Museum and the United Nations Conference Centre in Bangkok. Their works are in the permanent collections of MoMA, China Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Art Vontobel. They are authors of The Poverty Line (published by Actes Sud and Lars Müller Publishers, 2021) which is in the collections of the MoMA Library, Centre Pompidou Bpi and V&A Museum Library. They are recipients of the Berlin Falling Walls Breakthrough Awards – Science in the Arts (2020), IMPART Art Prize (2022), Global TED Fellows (2024).
Chow and Lin comprises Stefen Chow and Huiyi Lin. They are a Singaporean artist duo based in Beijing.
