ANIDA YOEU ALI

Anida Yoeu Ali (b.1974, Battambang) is an artist whose works span performance, installation, video, poetry, public encounters, and political agitation. She is a first generation Muslim Khmer woman born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago. After residing for over three decades outside of Cambodia, Ali returned to work in Phnom Penh as part of her 2011 U.S. Fulbright Fellowship researching creation mythologies in contemporary Khmer performance.

Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to artmaking, her installation and performance works investigate the artistic, spiritual and political collisions of a hybrid transnational identity.

Ali is the winner of the 2014-15 Sovereign Asian Art Prize for her series The Buddhist Bug. Her pioneering poetry work with the critically acclaimed performance group I Was Born With Two Tongues (1998-2003) is archived with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program. Ali has performed and exhibited at numerous public institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, The Smithsonian, and Queensland Art Gallery, amongst others. She is a collaborative partner with Studio Revolt, an independent artist run media lab launched in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2011.

Anida Yoeu Ali’s White Mother series was inspired by her residency in Fukuoka, Japan, in 2014. A set of photographs show Anida pushing her daughter in a pram in Fukuoka’s public areas, with her face painted white, inspired by the tradition of Japanese dance theatre form Butoh. “During her residency, she invited Japanese mothers to be her collaborators. And through their stories of feeling uncomfortable or unseen in public spaces when they bring their young children out, Anida created this performance — by giving it a hyper-visibility, she uses performance to make the invisible more present,” explains curator and art historian Wulan Dirgantoro. (courtesy Mae Chan, Options, 22 Dec 2019)

SAM LO

Sam Lo (who also goes by the moniker SKL0) is a self-taught Singapore-based non-binary visual artist who has a distinguished reputation in Singapore as an activist and artist critiquing the social-political norms of her first world island state home. 

Whether using stickers or spray paint as the medium, Lo’s work reveals a fascination at the way Singapore’s inhabitants interact with the urban landscape and how their lives are directed by social expectations, government directives and collective habit. In the urban sticker series, documented by archival photographs, Lo uses ‘Singlish’, the hybrid language of multiracial Singapore, to challenge social hierarchies and bureaucratic bans.

Lo’s evolving multi-media practice which incorporates installations, large scale murals and digital designs, include projects for the Singapore Tourist Board, Lodhi Art Festival, New Delhi, Georgetown Festival, Malaysia, Melbourne International Festival, Art Central Hong Kong, National Arts Council, Singapore, National Heritage Board, Singapore and commission partners including Air Asia and Nike.