Curatorial turn to art books and printed matter
By Berny Tan

'My Own Words' is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.

In the arts, the struggle of explaining our work to a stranger is a common one. More often than not, our approaches cannot be easily distilled into one medium, subject, discipline or role. Yet we find ourselves in situations where we must succinctly introduce practices that are multifaceted, continuously evolving, and elusive even to ourselves.

I have faced similar challenges discussing my project ‘Page Break’, which occurred at the intersection of various otherwise familiar structures within contemporary art. Its most basic description already hints at these complexities: ‘Page Break’ was a Curatorial & Research Residency at Singapore Art Museum (SAM), which was presented as part of Singapore Biennale 2022, named Natasha. Its focus was the medium of the art book, specifically those exploring everyday objects, environments, and phenomena. For ten weeks, the public could access an open studio that hosted my workspace, a metamorphosing showcase of book projects, an art book library, and occasional programmes. All these were built on my relationships within the visual art community in Singapore, involving collaborations with local artists, designers, and initiatives.

Installation view, ‘Page Break’ (Third Draft), 2022-23, curatorial and research residency at SAM Residencies. Presented as part of Singapore Biennale 2022 named Natasha, Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Photo by Marvin Tang. Image co — Berny Tan, ‘Page Break’ (Third Draft), 2022-23, curatorial and research residency at SAM Residencies, installation view. Presented as part of Singapore Biennale 2022 named Natasha, Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Photo by Marvin Tang. Image courtesy of Berny Tan.

At once a personal residency, a collective endeavour, an exhibition project, and a contribution to a larger biennale, ‘Page Break’ was the result of a progressive entanglement of circumstances and coincidences. It began with my selection for the residency at SAM, which came months before I was included in the biennale. The positioning of the former within the latter was partially due to serendipity: the residency dates, November 2022 to January 2023, overlapped with the biennale’s dates of October 2022 to March 2023. Organised by SAM itself, the Biennale was to take place primarily within Tanjong Pagar Distripark, the temporary home of SAM’s galleries, offices, and residency spaces, including mine. Furthermore, the residency format lent itself well to the philosophy of Natasha, which sought to foreground process-oriented practices that reflected the everyday lives of participating artists.

“I am both an artist and an independent curator, and consider them equally important and inherently tethered.”

Perhaps the most pivotal factor – and the one I am most grateful for – was how the biennale’s Co-Artistic Directors recognised the chameleonic nature of my practice. I am both an artist and an independent curator, and consider them equally important and inherently tethered. With ‘Page Break’, I was able to present a work-in-progress curatorial project as an “artwork” within Natasha. This, however, led to an interesting conundrum: while I had room to define the parameters of the residency, I was also aware of my responsibility to mediate between the project and the public, in light of the broader exhibitionary experience of the biennale. In contrast, conventional residencies might entertain an audience only during isolated open studio events, if at all. Outside of inviting specific people to engage with their research, or working with a given community to develop their project, rarely would a resident allow a constant, unfiltered audience into their workspace. Residencies are, after all, sites of uncertainty and vulnerability, which one might wish to keep relatively private.

‘Page Break’ (Workspace), 2022-23. Photo by Marvin Tang. Image courtesy of Berny Tan. — Berny Tan, ‘Page Break’ (Workspace), 2022-23, installation view. Photo by Marvin Tang. Image courtesy of Berny Tan.

Still, I was conscious that this was a rare opportunity to create a visible platform for my peers, and to share with them the space, resources, and audiences that both SAM Residencies and the Singapore Biennale provided. This came at a time when I was beginning to cement exhibition-making as a form of advocacy for my community, creating spaces for generative conversations among practices. Therefore, I made the decision to approach the residency as a collaborative public-facing project. In a sense, this aligned with my choice to focus on art books, a medium which has become increasingly popular in Singapore over the past decade. In the year before ‘Page Break’ was conceptualised, I happened to deepen my connections within the local art book ecosystem, mainly from being part of the organising team of the 2021 Singapore Art Book Fair. It seemed natural to make this curatorial turn to printed matter, a key component of many creative practices around me.

“It seemed natural to make this curatorial turn to printed matter, a key component of many creative practices around me.”

For the sake of clarity, I will loosely define the art book as an artistic idea realised in the form of pages that are bound together. More abstractly, I think of art books as worlds in themselves, to be experienced first-hand by a reader with their full attention. Yet institutional methods of exhibiting books tend to dampen this experience. Books are encased in a vitrine, with one spread visible or with pages unbound and laid out. In other settings, they are placed on furniture on the periphery of an exhibition, functioning as supporting documents. Both methods have their justifications, and I particularly sympathise with the first. Art books are precious objects often printed in small runs, whether by artists themselves or by independent presses. Allowing them to be read is to risk them being damaged. Nevertheless, my hope for ‘Page Break’ was to gently contemplate the medium of the art book, and its appeal as a means of archiving and reflecting upon our lived environment. To do so required an intimate space in which this contemplation could unfold in various ways, where I could explore more engaging exhibitionary methods.

‘Page Break’ (Library/Second Draft), 2022-23. Photo by Marvin Tang. Image courtesy of Berny Tan. — Berny Tan, ‘Page Break’ (Library/Second Draft), 2022-23, installation view. Photo by Marvin Tang. Image courtesy of Berny Tan.

‘Page Break’ took place in an EX-SITU Art Space, which is essentially a white cube. As a curator who is more comfortable responding to the unique architectures of alternative exhibition venues, I knew I had to collaborate with a designer who could help me transform this blank canvas. I chose to work with Pixie Tan, an art director and educator who has herself worked with the book medium. I told her that the space should be rooted in four gestures: “thinking”, or my personal workspace; “reading”, which would be the library; “talking”, for workshops and discussions; and finally “drafting”, referring to my intention to present small-scale exhibitions that would change throughout the residency.

Pixie eventually proposed that we repurpose waste materials from print production to create partitions and modular furniture. This included a tiered seating construction which sectioned off my workspace, bookshelves for the library, as well as other structures that could serve as either seating or display surfaces. She then secured a paper recycling company that not only provided us with the necessary materials, but would also recycle them at the project’s conclusion. We put everything together in the first two weeks of the residency, working with Sean Gwee of fabrication collective Made Agency, who was assisted by Quek Yu Han. Sean’s design background and flexibility as a fabricator was crucial to adapting Pixie’s vision once we were finally working within the physical space.

The conditions of ‘Page Break’ necessitated a disproportionate amount of work to be completed before the residency and in its early days. When its “First Draft” opened to the public in mid-November, I was already exhibiting book projects by Catherine Hu, Chua Chye Teck & Liu Liling, and Marvin Tang, with plans to introduce projects by Genevieve Leong, Lai Yu Tong, and Atelier HOKO down the road. The library, too, was stocked since the start with books curated by two local initiatives – the Singapore Art Book Library, helmed by Renée Ting, director of the Singapore Art Book Fair, and THEBOOKSHOW, co-founded by artist-educator Ang Song Nian and Leanna Teoh.

Yet I believe that putting these elements in place allowed me to be responsive to events that transpired during the residency itself. A conversation with designer and educator Gideon Kong led to the organisation of a showcase featuring student-made books from four tertiary institutions: LASALLE College of the Arts, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, NTU School of Art, Design and Media, and National University of Singapore. It was a way to make space for a younger generation of bookmakers, bearing in mind that one major reason for the popularity of the medium is the active encouragement of it in schools. In another conversation with design critic Justin Zhuang, he revealed his personal collection of art, design, and photography books predating the ten-year-old Singapore Art Book Fair. I invited Justin to bring these in for a “book club”, accompanied by artist Robert Zhao Renhui, who brought in publications that have informed his extensive art book practice.

‘Page Break’ (Fourth Draft), 2022-23. Photo by Marvin Tang. Image courtesy of Berny Tan. — Berny Tan, ‘Page Break’ (Fourth Draft), 2022-23, installation view. Photo by Marvin Tang. Image courtesy of Berny Tan.

I have not said much about the “research” aspect of this residency, and truthfully, there was very little of it in a traditional academic sense. Looking back now, I see the crux of my research as located within the execution of the residency, in exactly the four gestures that I had articulated to Pixie. “Drafting”, in particular, was something I was already exploring within my practice: conceiving an exhibition not as a finite thing at the end of a long period of development. Rather, I think of it as something fluid, porous, and alive, emerging in the process of one trying to make sense of the world. ‘Page Break’ ultimately manifested as four exhibition “Drafts”, and with each iteration, one or two more book projects were added into the rotation. Thus, over three months, the space and its elements engaged in gradual and continuous shifts, as notes and sketches might do within the blank pages of a book.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of A&M.

This essay was first published in CHECK-IN 2023, A&M’s third annual publication. Click here to read the digital copy in full, or to purchase a copy of the limited print edition.

Read all My Own Words essays here.