Artisan 2021
19 April to 30 september 2021, Contemporary Art & Photography
A virtual-reality art and photography exhibition, ‘ The Unseen A Precursor’, serves as a prelude to our multi-disciplinary arts and fashion event, to be held in 2021/22.
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Participating artists 2021
Agatha lee
Agatha Lee “Agy” is a textile artist whose practice straddles fashion artefacts, craft, art, nature and environmentalism. Her exquisite hand and free motion embroidery canvases and objects have been exhibited in Australia, Singapore UK and the Netherlands.
Agatha “Agy” sees making as a precursor to temporalizing a fast-disappearing world. Her practice is a discourse in traditional craft, synonymous with a slower pace of life. By painstakingly stitching ubiquitous motifs, she brings the natural world into the built environment. Agatha “Agy” displays the finished art-craft-fashion, as object trouve, an act of personal agency and activism; making the unseen or ignored visible.
Agatha Lee
Title: Leaves in the Rain, 2018
An experimentation with eco-printing, the piece is adorned by hand and free-motion embroidery. Alluding to the interaction between nature and the built environment, but not necessarily prioritizing nature. The often ignored evidence of a natural world (swept away or tamed), is painstakingly embroidered on cloth, mimicking a gentle layering of falling leaves - creating a print by happenstance.
Artisan 2021 invites participants to consider our impact on the natural world. By taking time to dissect what is ignored and taken for granted, even perhaps slowing down the pace and focusing our attention on the unseen.
100 X 40 cm
Textile, Iron Solution, Eucalyptus Leaves
divyam Raghunath
Originally from India, Divyam Raghunath is a fine artist based in Singapore, currently completing a BA in Fine Arts from LASALLE College of the Arts. Using canvas as an aide-memoire, each colour and brushstroke has significant meaning to him personally and figuratively. Divyam’s art practice is concerned with perception and identity both personal and cultural. Whether using traditional canvas, found objects or performance art highlighting the corporeal, all gestures and movements are ripe for use in his work. Changing the perception about art is his driving force.
Divyam Raghunath
Title: I LOVE YOUR SKIN, 2020
Photo series taken from an intimate performance piece. In I Love Your Skin the artist, blindfolded, urges participants to paint him with colours of their choice. Since the blindfold stops the artist from seeing the colours, he cannot participate. An allegory to identity and discrimination, enabled by a stranger’s gaze. The piece deals with the narratives surrounding ‘the other’ whilst unravelling a universal discourse on choice and self acceptance.
Artisan 2021 invites participants to consider their own participation in the fashion system, whether one of choice and self-acceptance or unwitting subjugation of the majority whilst a minority pursue fleeting fashion trends.
Performance, Photography
KEvin Lau
Fashion photographer Kevin Lau who also goes by the moniker Kevin West picked up a camera in 2009 and has not looked back. Known for his signature black and white portraiture, his clients range from magazines to fashion and lifestyle brands.
Pushing the boundaries of fashion photography in Singapore, Kevin has exhibited in numerous group shows, including M1 Singapore Fringe Festival (2018) at Objectifs, Centre for Photography and Film; and received the Singapore YFest PaperMoon Esplanade - Artist Of Appreciation Award (2010)
Kevin Lau
Vlada, 2014
For Fashion Photographer Kevin Lau, photography has been a way to express his own identity as an artist and explore his thoughts whilst fighting his deepest anxieties. Inspired by the French New Wave, the series explores his oeuvre from both a high fashion and art practice perspective; creating cinematic images with a focus on subject and their interaction with light.
Although narcissism in fashion maybe considered inevitable, Kevin’s portraiture uses the body as a metaphor for exploring and questioning our emotional reality. His signature portraiture plays with light and shadows akin to how we seek positive experiences rather than negative ones. The subtlety of the work showcases his skill in lighting and composition; capturing the unique essence of each sitter. In this series created as a personal project, the sitters face is often obscured - playful yet serious.
Artisan 2021 invites participants to consider the duality of the fashion system. Glamour and lightness on the surface, yet systemic exploitation beneath.
Kimberly Gloria Choi
Kimberly Gloria Choi was born and raised in the UK before moving to Hong Kong. Majoring in music, fine art & visual communication, Kimberly embraces her multi-cultural background and infuses her work with traditional and modern art techniques.
Japanese & Chinese poetry and calligraphy have become crucial elements that inspire her art. Using hand-drawn and digital manipulation to create detailed brush strokes in hyper-real colours, her work celebrates strong female figures. In addition, by using traditional techniques in pencil, acrylic and ink, her eclectic style has evolved to encompass abstract art, Asian-expressionism and manga-style hand-rendered illustrations.
Kimberly Gloria Choi
Left to Right: Portrait U, 2020 I Kira No.1 , 2021 I Hana 2018
Feminism or fetishism? Three distinct fantasy portraits are hand -illustrated in a manga-style usually created for the male gaze. Instead, defiant and triumphant, the heroines of Kimberly’s world inspire women to take control of their own destiny. Traditional techniques are combined with a hyper-real anime sensibility; juxtaposing the old and new, reflecting the position women find themselves in.
Artisan 2021 invites participants to consider fashion sustainability as a feminist issue. The majority of garments workers are female, often receiving below minimum wage for long hours work. Resulting in the exploitation of one group of women to aid self-expression and personal gratification of another.
Rowan Chanen
Rowan is an international award winning Creative Director. His primary photographic interest is in exploring the unseen forces that surround us. Often, those forces compete and conspire to obscure truth and conceal reality. In seeking to reveal them, the camera compels us to find new meaning and understanding in what we might otherwise take for granted. Rowan was a contributing artist at Artisan 2019, and most recently he exhibited “A Dangerous Smile: Portraits from Tibet 1998” in Melbourne, Australia, featuring images processed from 35mm B&W film negative.
Rowan Chanen
Title: Shadow World
What lies underfoot is often overlooked. Shadow World invites the viewer to consider the microcosm of contradictions that lie beneath us. Seen individually or as a whole, these photographs reveal the constant interplay of surface and substance, the tangle of depth and proximity and the duel between darkness and light. With layer upon layer and worlds within worlds, these counterforces are at constant odds and serve to remind us that we often look, but seldom see.
Artisan 2021 invites participants to examine the hidden contradictions in the world of fashion which can no longer be ignored. Beneath the surface of glamour and the excitement of new trends is a world of waste, poor quality non-recyclable materials, cheap exploited labour, the illusion of necessity and the pressure to conform. When we look at fashion, are we prepared to really see?
Sheenu Kapoor
A self-taught watercolour artist, Sheenu has a unique ability to harness the fluidity of watercolours, while playing with shadow and light. Her work employs stark contrasting blocks of colour, usually attributed to acrylic or oil, while still retaining a light, ethereal otherworldly quality.
Sheenu’s portraits often depict her subjects in black and white, capturing intimate moments of thought and reflection, while leaving the viewer with unanswered questions. Whether rendered in monochrome or colour, her much sought-after portraits have a surprising photo-real like quality.
Sheenu’s artworks also bring urban landscapes to life, featuring picturesque architecture that varies from the shophouses of Southeast Asia to the colourful buildings of old-world Cuba.
Sheenu Kapoor
Title: Various
Playing with shadow, light and monochromatic colours each piece is created with a specific theme with a continuing thread. Time Out, Reflection, Conviction are titles that encourage us to participate, rather than sit as bystanders to the world the artist creates.
Experimenting in gouache, and developing vivid watercolour techniques, each image expresses a reality sustained by a commitment to re-identify our relationships and confront what we see. Every landscape, still life and portraiture is a complete ecosystem or an imagined world to lose yourself in.
Artisan 2021 invites participants to consider how fashion is used for self-identification but as a consequence leads to inequality.
Available in 29.7 x 42 cm (A3) & 21 x 29.7 cm (A4)
320gsm Hand Textured Paper
Artistic Director
Anisa Johnny
Anisa Johnny
Anisa has spent over 15 years doing a variety of roles in the fashion industry in the UK and more recently Singapore. From training in the buying office at Marks & Spencers Head Office, launching her own fashion brand with clients across Europe, to working her way up to a consultant for TopShop. Anisa cut her teeth on design thinking and branding whilst establishing one of London's best heritage buildings into a unique venue as part of her postgraduate research. She then transitioned to academia, spending the last 7 years as a Senior Lecturer in Fashion Marketing & Management. Her area of expertise is in sustainability, branding and entrepreneurship.
Successfully, managing projects that bridged education and industry inspired her to build a network of leading young talent and established experts in fashion and lifestyle throughout Asia. Design thinking and business innovation is at the core of her practice and she believes the future is educational institutions that blur the line between work and learning. In 2019 Anisa with a group of graduating students, conceived and executed a fashion x art hybrid event showcasing local fashion brands and artists.
Artisan Singapore was created to promote and support fashion brands and emerging artists giving consumers a chance to discover local fashion through art, music and performance.
Kerryn Salter
Curatorial Advisor : Kerryn Salter
Kerryn has a comprehensive background in visual art, design, and creative writing, including a BCA in Creative Arts from VCA/University of Melbourne. After years of entrepreneurship and dabbling in her own artistic/photographic practice, Kerryn is pursuing an MA in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices at the School of Art, Design and Media (ADM) at NTU. Her focus is on exhibition design, narrative, and branding; and on advocating the use of inclusive vocabulary for communicating contemporary art to the public.
Kerryn’s goal for Artisan Singapore 2021 is to support Anisa Johnny in her vision to create an accessible aesthetic platform that has a strong community impact and generates urgent conversations - a platform that will both elevate the visibility of the exhibiting artists and enable their individual concerns about fashion and identity politics to be better heard through the collective expression that emerges as part of this group show