Sim Chi Yin intends to trace the trajectories of the Malayan deportees, excavating both their individual experiences and the institutional circumstances which lead to their disappearance from collective memory.
Sim Chi Yin
26 October 2020 - 28 May 2021
The period between 1948 and 1960 witnessed the forced exodus of over 35,000 Malayan leftists to Southern China, including the artist’s own grandfather. Expanding on her long-term research project which excavates overlooked and contested histories of the Malayan anti-colonial war and her own family histories, Sim Chi Yin intends to trace the trajectories of the Malayan deportees, excavating both their individual experiences and the institutional circumstances which lead to their disappearance from collective memory. With the ports of Singapore being both sites of transit and origins of deportation, during the residency Sim will further her investigation through archival research and oral history interviews working towards the development of a new work. Often evoking a sense of spatial haunting, her aesthetic approach consistently slips away from the documentary into the realm of the affective, the imaginary, and the spectral.
