Inhabitants

Chen Cheng Mei was undoubtedly one of the most resolute figures in Singapore's art history, having been one of the few Singaporean women of her generation to sustain a lifelong artistic practice.

Chen graduated from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1954, where she studied under masters Cheong Soo Pieng and Lim Hak Tai. She spent her weekends sketching alongside them and became a founding member of the influential Ten Men Art Group — a contribution not often credited to her. She travelled across Southeast Asia with the group, but found her love for travel and artistry blooming beyond them.

She spent the bulk of her life journeying extensively through Asia, Africa, and the Americas alone, Chen documented the people and scenes she encountered with honesty and an unhurried eye, becoming one of the most well-travelled Southeast Asian artists of her time.

Her paintings, etchings, and prints carry a quiet intensity. Appearing simple at first, they reveal a unique understanding of texture and form, shaped by years of printmaking and a deep engagement with literature and the natural world. Chen believed that culture is the backbone of a country, and her works reflect this: each one a page in a personal visual diary, bearing witness to the rhythms of lives across regions and continents.

In Inhabitants, Chen's work is a reminder that inhabitation need not be fixed. To travel alone, to look closely, to record faithfully — these too are ways of occupying space.

Chng Seok Tin was a printmaker, sculptor, writer, and one of the most formidable figures in Singapore's art history. She grew up poor with 7 siblings in Katong, but built her practice through sheer determination. In 1980, after earning her diploma from the Nanyang University of Fine Arts, she received an award from the Ministry of Culture to study advanced printmaking. She went on to earn her Postgraduate degrees in the United States.

In 1988, while leading students through European museums, Chng fell and hit her head on a pavement in London. The injury left her with a brain abscess, and surgery to treat it cost her 90% of her vision. For a year after, she felt tormented, but slowly became philosophical after meeting and speaking to other blind people.

A turning point came when LASALLE's president reached out, telling her that even without sight, her printmaking technique remained commanding. She returned to teach, learning to visualise colour in her mind and to let feeling guide her hands. Of returning to the work, she said simply: "I had all the basics in my mind and I had to slowly start using them."

What followed was a career that expanded rather than contracted. She held over 26 solo exhibitions and 100 group shows internationally, became the first Singaporean to hold a solo exhibition at the United Nations headquarters in 2005, received the Cultural Medallion that same year, and was inducted into the Singapore Women's Hall of Fame in 2014. She was also a prolific writer, publishing 11 collections, and an outspoken advocate for artists with disabilities.

In Inhabitants, Chng's work stands as a testament to what it means to inhabit a practice fully: to refuse the boundaries society might impose, and to keep making, on one's own terms.

Lin Hsin Hsin is a painter, printmaker, mathematician, poet, composer, and inventor. In her practice, no single discipline takes precedence, instead, each informs and inhabits the others.

Trained in Mathematics at the University of Singapore and Computer Science at Newcastle University, Lin also studied fine art at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts under pioneering master Cheong Soo Pieng, printmaking at the University of Ulster, and papermaking in Japan. Under Cheong's mentorship, she went on to become one of the pioneers of abstraction in Singapore, producing works that feel remarkably fresh decades on.

Her practice spans oil painting, collographs, monoprints, papier collé, and paper sculpture — grounded in a rigorous understanding of material and form, and in close observation of the natural world. The migratory patterns of birds, the forms of insects, the rhythms of wildlife: these find their way into work that is equally preoccupied with time, movement, and the philosophical complexities of human existence. Music and poetry wove their way in too; she composed through abstract visual form, and at times inscribed verses directly within her paintings.

She carried this raw love of creation into digital territory, creating digital music in 1985, 3D digital art in 1987, and digital animation in 1989: years before such practices entered mainstream artistic conversation in Singapore or elsewhere. In 1994, she launched what is widely recognised as the world's first virtual museum.

In Inhabitants, Lin's works are a study in what abstraction can hold — observation and imagination, discipline and instinct, the world as it is and as it might be felt.

Tan Chin Chin came of age as an artist in Singapore during the 1990s, winning top prizes at the Apple Art Affair Exposition, the Philip Morris Singapore Art Awards, and the UOB Painting of the Year Competition before pursuing postgraduate study at Byam Shaw School of Art in London and Parsons School of Design in New York.

These years abroad were formative - exposure to Western cultural sensibilities expanded her material vocabulary, while her time at Parsons opened the door to uninhibited experimentation in form and dimension, leading her toward three-dimensional wall pieces, sculpture, and installation. She found the distance to sharpen her own cultural roots.

Her practice centres on the meeting point of culture and religion, worked through textiles and paper in collage across varying surfaces. Drawing on cultural and religious motifs, her works bring inherited histories into conversation with contemporary form. Tradition is her subject, but her methods are inventive — fabric collage, laser-cut material, surfaces that speak to both craft and technology. The tension between old and new runs through everything she makes, sitting side by side without resolution.

Tan's commissions include large-scale works for the Singapore embassy in Brunei and the Crockford Tower in Sentosa, and her works are held in the collections of the Singapore Art Museum.

In Inhabitants, her work sits quietly but firmly within the exhibition's larger argument: that to inhabit a practice is to negotiate, constantly, between what has been handed down and what one chooses to make of it.