2016 UNTAPPED EMERGING

Group exhibition exhibition featuring: Yanyun Chen, Prakash Haridas, Ryan Benjamin Lee, Nandita Mukand, Jodi Tan, Danielle Tay, Tay Ining, Leonard Yang, Yeo Tze Yang

Exhibition Dates:    4 – 26 June 2016
Opening Night:       Saturday, 4 June, 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Open House:           Saturday, 4 June 11:00 AM - 7:00 PM & Saturday, 18 June 11:00 AM - 7:00 PM

VADA is proud to present the inaugural exhibition of UNTAPPED EMERGING. The exhibition features nine up-and-coming, Singapore-based artists. Hand-picked by the UNTAPPED Advisory Committee, these nine artists present work in a notably diverse selection of media including metalwork, cross stitch, paper cut, photography, charcoal, new media and painting.

Advisory Committee Member Martin Constable (Assistant Professor, School of Art Design and Media, NTU) says of the programme, “As an ‘older' artist and a teacher, one inevitably develops an engaged concern for the up and coming generation of creatives. Their world is different to the one that we grew up in; its frames of reference are different as are its terms of success. What young artists need is room for these differences to flourish, and such room is not always so easy to come by. We hope that our art schools could serve this purpose, but even the best art school is a compromise between the needs of the institution and those of its students. The most exciting, and perhaps the toughest, growing environment for any young artist is the gallery. Upon its cruel white walls, work either sinks or swims. For the experience to be valid, it must be allowed to do either, and this is at the heart of VADA’s purpose. In making their selections, the judges were very reassured by the scope of work that was submitted. Clearly our future is in good hands.” 

About the Artists

Yanyun Chen (b.1986, Singapore) is a studio-based visual artist. She draws in charcoal, and her practice is driven by questions, craft, and a contemplation of the relationship between theory, process, method, and the artwork. Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, where she obtained her Masters in Communications. She received the Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medal Award and the Nanyang Scholarship for her undergraduate degree in animation from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore; and has been trained at the Florence Academy of Artin Sweden, The Animation Workshop in Denmark, and under puppet makers Miroslav Trejtnar and Zdar Sorm in the Czech Republic. She teaches drawing at Yale-NUS College and Nanyang Technological University. 

Prakash Haridas (b.1989, Singapore) is a visual artist and an animator. He works primarily with geometric forms, procedural systems, technology and process to create experimental hybrid works. His works often place a strong emphasis on iterative elements and patterns derived from a preset array of rules.

Ryan Benjamin Lee (b.1997, Singapore) focuses his artistic practice on chance encounters in his daily environment, whether through everyday objects and images on the streets or the audience’s encounters with the artwork itself. While working primarily in video art and animation, he seeks to bridge the gap between virtual and physical spaces by encouraging a sense of spatial awareness and site-specificity in his artworks.

Nandita Mukand (b.1975, India) is a Singapore-based visual artist exploring the poetic and visceral aspects of Nature and its materiality in her artistic practice. She quit her corporate career with Proctor and Gamble to devote herself full-time to art making in 2008. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore where she was also the recipient of the LASALLE Award for Academic Excellence. She has exhibited in Singapore, Australia and currently Spain. She has been awarded artist residencies by BigCI in Australia, the Hawkesbury Regional Gallery in Australia and the Fundacio L’Olivar in Spain.

Jodi Tan (b.1990, Singapore) is a Singapore-based artist. She is interested in the ‘visual’, and creates/re-creates images by establishing constants and variables that she experiments with. Tan graduated with a BA (Honours) in Fine Arts in 2011, from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. She was awarded The Winston Oh Travel Research Award in 2011 and has also participated in exhibitions locally. Tan is a founding member of The Collective, a group of individuals that have gathered to execute artist-initiated projects.

Danielle Tay (b.1990, Singapore) graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London in 2014. She has exhibited both locally and internationally since 2008 – solo exhibitions include The Important Bits, Artify Gallery, Hong Kong 2013 and Disposable Cities, Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore 2010. Select group exhibitions include: In/Visible Structures, OCBC/Galerie Steph, Singapore 2015, PODS, Art Experiment, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow 2013 and Bloomsbury Festival, London 2012. Her entry for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize was also selected and exhibited under the next 20 best Singaporean artworks section for the 2010 Sovereign Asian Art Prize exhibition in 2010.

Tay Ining (b.1988, Singapore) works at a small metalworking shop. She did her B.F.A. at Nanyang Technological University, School of Art, Design and Media in 2011, majoring in Interactive Media. She is a participant of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology GAMBIT (2010) program and a recipient of the National University of Singapore SHAPE (2014) grant, both of which were overseas internship experiences in the United States. As an artist, she explores the neglected creative potential of fabrication industries in Singapore. Her recent works have taken the form of mechanical phenomena and depicted objects. They are inspired by her encounters with the transformation of metal in the factory. Ining’s recent project BARE STEEL, SNOW BLANKET won the Noise Singapore Award 2015.

Leonard Yang (b.1989, Singapore) is interested in the rapidly changing, eclectic, and subversively transient landscape within the everyday. Having graduated from the School of Art, Design and Media (NTU) with a BFA in Photography and Digital Imaging in 2015, Yang uses the photographic image as a malleable latent object, which he extends and combines with other media to address the notion of landscape. Yang has exhibited in the ASEAN-Korean Multimedia Competition Exhibition, 2014, and The Society of Korean Photography’s 7th International Festival for Photography and Video, 2015. In 2016, he was a finalist in the Harper’s Bazaar Art Prize. He currently divides his time between artistic practice, and working as a Photography Technical Officer at Lasalle College of the Arts.

Yeo Tze Yang (b.1994, Singapore) works in oil painting, and occasionally with ink, pencil and video. His paintings capture his immediate surroundings, often chancing upon neglected and forgotten elements in everyday life. He has exhibited at Goodman Arts Centre, Institute of Contemporary Art, Art Apart Fair and the Affordable Art Fair in Singapore. He was a finalist in the Cliftons Art Prize in 2014, and was recognized as one of “15 Singaporeans Aged 25 And Under To Watch In 2015” by mustsharenews.com. He is pursuing a BA at the National University of Singapore. His works are part of private collections in Singapore, Australia, the UK and the USA. His first solo exhibition, A Place Behind My Eyes, was held at ION Art by Utterly Art in 2015.