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11 Years, 11 Interviews
Jeremy Sharma, Lucy Davis, Kent Chan, Kenneth Tay, Tania De Rozario, Vanessa Ban, Kray Chen, Bruce Quek, Melissa Tan, Geraldine Kang, Godwin Koay, Song-Ming Ang

Publisher • Grey Projects
Year • 2019
Pages • 112
Dimensions • 14.8 x 21 cm

“It’s been eleven years since Grey Projects opened its first program on the 3 April 2008 with a pamphlet essay by Guo Liang Tan and an exhibition of works by four of his friends. We’ve moved from the all-concrete, street-facing space with the perforated aluminium doors to a first floor of a shophouse at the foot of Mount Sophia, to our current, and largest space, on the third floor of the last mid-twentieth century building on Kim Tian Road.

I remark on our changed spaces in order to mark the time, but also to recognise the moving realities of the artists who have moved with and alongside us, who not only offer us their art but often their words, their humour, ideas, weirdness and the other emotional gratifications of being with each other. Vertical Submarine welcomed me as a temporary member of their collective while we worked on The Garden of Forking Paths in 2009. Subsequently, one VertSub member Justin Loke joined the Young Curators Programme as a participant in 2015, and another ex-member Joshua Yang has had two solo exhibitions of his drawings and paintings in our current space. From curating our first show, Guo Liang returned for a two-hander exhibition in 2017 with Sookoon Ang, on the vocabulary of movement, titled Alfa Tango. Kray Chen went on a Grey Projects residency to Barcelona in 2014, and later developed his first ever solo presentation and artist book It’s A Set Situation with us in 2016. The independent art space in Singapore is, in the cosmology of spaces, a Kuiper Belt through which artists mark these elliptical paths and generative collisions.

Of late I’ve noticed how the interview has become an inadvertent record of these collisions between these artists and I, sometimes as a result of an exhibition we worked on together, but other times the interview functions as a cut into an ongoing conversation (Lucy Davis and I have been speaking and writing to each other for some time now, and I very much believe we will continue), and sometimes it signals the end of one. The means for the interviews are decidedly early twenty-first century. Some of these are conducted over email but increasingly these interviews were more ‘live writing’ than ‘live speaking’, where exchanges were made on a shared online document that can track each writing as it happens, where editing and revising by one participant can be simultaneous to another’s reading and writing. Godwin and I for example sat diagonally across the same table and wrote most of our interview over a long afternoon. It is also possible for the responses to lag for extended, even over- extended, stretches. Jeremy’s interview ended two years after it began, the longest any interview I’ve done has taken, with our prompts and clarifications to each other leaping across WhatsApp, Google Docs and email.

In our way and time, the interview becomes a conversation without interruption, each writer with the affordances of electronic time to respond as slowly or as long as they wish. If the interview is its own species of dialogic space, it is one in which the artist’s voice is the means for any extrusion of space and, to borrow a term by the anthropologist Laura Ogden, what saturates that space itself. With the voice given expansive airing, the interviews offer a ‘first-handedness’ to the artist that is difficult for criticism or art history to reach. Even journalistic reportage and the documentary can often only do so by quotation or citation. Yet saturation isn’t the same as authority, it is not the same as privileging the artist’s intent and statements. It is one way to make artist writing the page upon which challenges, pushbacks, obtrusions, insistences and resistances are performed, a way of turning art writing and the artist voice into the grounds upon which these forms of generative agonisms can be placed and activated.

I’m not sure what the next eleven years will hold, for myself or for Grey Projects. I mean, can anyone know their future? I do believe the adage that to take stock is to prepare to die, and to archive is to take on a museological view, one downwards into the cold earth. This volume is meant for neither perspective. This volume is not comprehensive, it does not include all the interviews that took place till 2019; those we might leave for the next volume. Instead, how else can an artist’s speech intercut into an artist’s writing? How live and alive can art writing be? What else could an interview become? What manner of proximity is this, between artists, between words, between exhibitions? I’ll stay however long more, however necessary, with these questions.”

— Jason Wee

Click Candy
Vanessa Ban

Publisher • Vanessa Ban
Year • 2016
Pages • 52
Dimensions • 12 x 20 cm

Click Candy reimagines clickbait advertisements without their sex objects. Rather than parody or perform the strategies of clickbait, the work presents an alternative to conventional contemporary art strategies of critiquing the spectacle-driven consumption that underlines information and capital flows on the web, and what is left behind when the clickbait object is consumed.

In Short, Future Now
Jason Wee

Publisher • Rockbund Art Museum & Sternberg Press
Year • 2021
Pages • 105

The artist and writer Jason Wee’s latest volume of poetry claims the imaginative terrain of Asia as one of flooded ruins and mobile islands, and as times of repair and self-interrogation. Taking cues from renga and haiku forms, In Short, Future Now is a single poetic sequence where Asia appears as an archive of the future, one always already at the cusp of arrival. This is Asia as an event, a post-authoritarian territory, a body in the aftermath of new pathologies and surveillance, a demand, a Fermi question, a wilder post-super-future Asia.

This book was a finalist for the Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize.

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About the Author

Jason Wee is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Monsters Between Us and An Epic of Durable Departures. He is an editor of Softblow journal.

He founded and runs Grey Projects, an artist library and residency in Singapore. He lives in New York.

La dépense
Francis Alÿs

Publisher • Rockbund Art Museum & Sternberg Press
Year • 2019
Pages • 160

Published by Rockbund Art Museum Shanghai and Sternberg Press, ‘La dépense’ is an accompanying publication to Alÿs’s first large-scale solo exhibition of the same name, presented at Rockbund Art Museum Shanghai, back in 2018.

Images of some of Alÿs’s 1,300 works presented in ‘La dépense’ are intricately bound together with an essay by curator Yuko Hasegawa, who writes about Alÿs’ work as having a “deliberately amateur, handmade quality of bricolage, or a generally anti-logical attitude based on intuition as if modelled on children’s play… thus [appearing] to criticise entrenched systems and values, such as modernism and capitalism, attempting to derail, transform, and criticise the logic of economic thinking”. More specifically, Alÿs’s referencing of French philosopher Georges Bataille’s writing on the “paradox of utility” in the title ‘La dépense’, centres the exhibition in the artist’s interrogation of the meaning of consumption of labour, a theme especially relevant in the context of present-day China.

Tell me something I don’t know
Geraldine Kang

Publisher • Grey Projects
Year • 2014
Pages • 24
Dimensions • 21 x 29.7 cm

Tell me something I don’t know is Geraldine’s personal dialogue with Singapore. Connoting both a resignation towards circumstances and a renewed curiosity, the show is a result of Geraldine’s physical explorations of the land. The exhibition consists of three distinct sets of photographs: Under the guise of surface, This city by any other name (Will smell just as white), and As quietly as rhythms go. The latter is a book of abstract movements and moments taken at a construction site at Sungei Serangoon. A study of shadow, men and machines, As quietly... is an awkward celebration of beauty and mourning over the loss of greenery, a seemingly perennial local trauma. This book is available from Math Paper Press.

Publisher • General Practices
Year • 2022
Pages • 26
Dimensions • 105 x 74 mm

The chapbook forms a part of Wee's 2022 Kochi-Muziris Biennale installation, as a sculptural stack of paper floating off the wall. The chapbooks is a diary that traces through the single biography of a poet-publisher, the history of small press publishing in se asia in the late 20th century. The chapbook records their dreams and desires, in three phases that mirror the history of small-press publishing.

The first chapter describes the excitement of setting up one’s press and receiving manuscripts, like so many trade unions, community newsletters, journalists and writers in the early days of the post-colonies. The second describes the publishing life under regulations and constraints newly introduced. The diary turns to poetry as a transmutation of language in order for words to survive. The final chapter occurs in the wake of the press shutting down. The Biennale installation corresponds similarly to each of these three chapters, with the chapbook forming a vertical column that can be seen as present but still illegible poetry.

Night of Desirable Objects
Bruce Quek and Melissa Tan

Publisher • Grey Projects
Year • 2016
Pages • 24
Dimensions • 21 x 29.7 cm

“Our conversation together has had a long gestation. Bruce Quek, Melissa Tan and Andrea Fam first traveled to the Dena Foundation in Paris for a residency, ending with a exhibition curated by Valen- tine Meyer and Andrea in late 2013. The collaborative possibilities initiated by the residency offer remained larval rather than extensively developed, and the following year, a discussion began at Grey Projects around the forms for talking/making/thinking together. To assume nothing in common about our understanding of objects and materiality, I devised a series of reading sessions centered on the philosophy of the object, around the writings of authors such as Levi Bryant and Graham Harman, with a colloquium where Bruce, Melissa and Andrea speak their thoughts, and selected individuals—fellow artists, curators—are invited to respond. The short writings you encounter here are their responses for the colloquium, written in the churn of thinking. The exhibition took place in May 2015, more than 20 months after they first left for Paris. The conversation published here began in 2016, taking shape over many months, closing as the year itself winds up.”

— Jason Wee

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.