Siew Guang Hong – the body improper

Richard Koh Fine Art (Singapore) is pleased to present the body improper, a solo exhibition by Siew Guang Hong. This exhibition marks the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery, bringing together a new body of work spanning expanded photography, sculptural print, and performance.

Comprising 19 works, the body improper unfolds through an exploration of the body as a site of transformation, instability, and projection. Drawing from biological systems, ecological structures, and performative gestures, Siew reconfigures the human form into mutable and often indeterminate states. Across the exhibition, the body is stretched, fragmented, and reassembled—appearing at once familiar and estranged.

Central to the exhibition is Siew’s sustained engagement with image construction. Works such as orchid: courting and second birth employ intricate digital collaging techniques, in which photographs of the artist’s hands and feet are layered, manipulated, and abstracted to approximate non-human forms. These compositions evoke entomological and ichthyological subjects, blurring distinctions between human and organism, and between representation and simulation. From a distance, the images suggest recognisable flora and fauna; upon closer inspection, they reveal themselves as constructed from the human body, unsettling processes of perception and recognition.

This inquiry extends into the supra and dancing naiads in rivers and streams series, where Siew draws from the organisational logic of siphonophores and the metamorphic life cycle of dragonflies. Bodies are presented not as fixed entities but as accumulations of transitional states—layered, modular, and continually in flux. Fragmentation, repetition, and opacity operate as visual strategies that resist totalisation, positioning the body as an unstable composite rather than a coherent whole.

Alongside these image-based works, Siew’s performance-based practice introduces the body as both material and subject. In video works from the Medusan Pink series, the artist positions himself within public environments, rendered in a chroma key suit and holding prolonged states of stillness. These durational performances operate at the threshold between image and event, where the body oscillates between presence and erasure. Subtle movements—breath, fatigue, and environmental shifts—gradually disclose the temporal dimension of the work, challenging the perceived fixity of the image.

Other performative works examine cycles of labour, repetition, and endurance. Through gestures that border on futility or excess, Siew reflects on systems of visibility, assimilation, and compensatory behaviour within constructed social and spatial frameworks. These actions foreground the body as both agent and site of negotiation, subject to pressures that shape its form and expression.

Throughout the body improper, the body is reimagined as landscape, organism, and assemblage. It is camouflaged, displaced, and reorganised into shifting configurations that resist stable identification. Moving between the human and non-human, the physical and the constructed, Siew’s works propose a mode of being that is contingent, relational, and continuously in process.

SIEW GUANG HONG (b. 2000, Singapore) is an interdisciplinary artist using biology and anatomical investigation to explore non-normative subjectivities. Through assemblage and abject aesthetics, he develops posthumanist modalities. A multi-scholarship recipient and winner of the 2024 LASALLE Award for Academic Excellence, Siew has exhibited and performed extensively across Southeast Asia.