Notes for the Future
Green Zeng

Publisher • Green Zeng
Year • 2021
Pages • 152

This year, during the nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus in Singapore, I found myself wondering whether it still made sense to make art when so many people had been affected by the deadly virus. It reminded me of the period when I had decided to step away from making art in 2000 because artistically I felt I was heading nowhere and was disillusioned with the art that I was making then.

So I left the art scene and became a filmmaker instead, making mostly narrative films. In 2007, I made a short film called Sentosa, about a political detainee who was exiled to the island of Sentosa. As I did more research into the topics of detainees and the left, I became interested in how history was written, interpreted and disseminated. Before I knew it, I found myself working on a new series of artwork.

When I created the Malayan Exchange works and eventually exhibited the series at The Arts House in 2011, I thought it would be a one-off affair and never imagined that I would continue to make art for a decade thereafter. I did not have a long term plan of what I was doing and most of the time, the making of one series of work would somehow lead to the creation of another. As such, I sometimes look at all the works of the last 10 years as just 1 work.

This book features some of my works and projects from 2010-2020. It is a celebration for reaching a milestone and for not throwing in the towel since I ‘returned’ to art-making in 2010.

—Excerpt from Preface by Green Zeng, Notes for the Future, p.2

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About the Artist

Green Zeng is a multi-disciplinary artist from Singapore. His art practice explores issues of historiography and identity, and examines how history is written, interpreted and disseminated. His earlier work focused on topics such as alternative histories, the history of student activism, the left and communism, and political detainees and exiles in Singapore. His recent work questions the connection between the archives, the state and the individual, and the role that an artist plays in Foucault’s notion of ‘parrhesia’ (truth-telling).

In 2015, his debut feature film, The Return, made its international premiere in competition at the 30th Venice International Film Critics’ Week. Zeng has also directed short films such as Blackboard Whiteshoes, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, and Passenger, which in the same year was awarded the Encouragement Prize at the Akira Kurosawa Memorial Short Film Competition in Tokyo.

As a practicing artist, Zeng has exhibited widely in Singapore and abroad. In 2012, he was a Finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in Hong Kong. In 2014, he was nominated for the Asia Pacific Breweries Signature Art Prize. He won the Bronze Award (Established Artist Category) in the 26th UOB Painting of the Year in 2018. His most recent solo exhibition, Returning, Revisiting and Reconstructing, was held at Foundation Cinema Oasis in Bangkok in 2019. In 2020, he was an Artist-in-Resident at the NTU-CCA Singapore Residencies Programme.