Susie Wong – Of Pools and Paradise

Richard Koh Fine Art (RKFA) Singapore is pleased to present Of Pools and Paradise, a solo exhibition by Singaporean artist Susie Wong, featuring her recent paintings and gumoil prints alongside a selection of early drawings and studies from the 1980s, shown publicly for the first time. The exhibition will be on view from 22 November to 20 December 2025 at RKFA Singapore.

Of Pools and Paradise traces a poetic dialogue between Susie Wong’s early and current practices, reflecting the artist’s ongoing contemplation of place, identity, and memory. The exhibition opens with a rare presentation of her early drawings from a period of residence in Lembang, West Java, Indonesia, where Wong developed a close friendship with artists such as Erna Pirous. These intimate sketches—many of which portray individuals from her everyday life in an idyllic rural setting—capture an early sensitivity to the human figure and lived environment that continues to inform her work today.

In her recent practice, Wong extends her exploration of coloniality and othering through recurring motifs of the tropical island, the coconut tree, and bathers. Her latest gumoil prints respond to an archival interview with Ni Pollok, the Balinese wife of Belgian painter Adrien Le Mayeur, a figure emblematic of early 20th-century European artistic settlement in Bali. Through this historical lens, Wong re-examines the notion of the “tropical” and challenges the boundaries between the observer and the observed—between those deemed cosmopolitan and those considered native.

Her 2025 oil paintings mark a return to the medium after more than fifteen years. Inspired by personal photographs and the architecture of Singapore’s mid-century swimming pools and leisure spaces, these small, contemplative canvases evoke the hazy inexactitude of recollected memory—an interplay between nostalgia, image, and the passage of time.

Together, the drawings, prints, paintings, and a new videowork in Of Pools and Paradise offer an expansive view of Wong’s multifaceted practice, bridging past and present, personal and historical, intimacy and distance. The exhibition underscores the artist’s continual engagement with both the visual and conceptual dimensions of artmaking across different media.

SUSIE WONG (b. 1956, Singapore) is an artist, curator, educator, and art writer in Singapore. She studied painting at the former LASALLE College of the Arts (St. Patrick’s Fine Arts) in the mid-1980s, and pursued her Master of Fine Arts at LASALLE in 2007. She was an artist-resident at NTU-CCA Singapore in 2018. Wong’s work ranges across landscapes, still life, and portraiture, a recurring subject in her early oil paintings and drawings. Since the 1990s, Wong has curated, co-curated, co-organised, and/or participated in several solo and group exhibitions: Personae XX (1996, Kandang Kerbau), HOPE: w.a.p. [women artists’ project] (2000, Chijmes), The Machine Contemplating the Body (2014, Singapore General Hospital), among others. More recently, her work contemplates mass media and the circulation and consumption of images, the mistrust of representation, appropriating images or visual references for much of her work, extending to romantic tropes in media.  Her installation work with video/light projections includes Take Care of Me in the curated series, Opening Day, at the Upper Serangoon Shopping Centre in January 2018; and Dancing Alone, at Objectifs, 2020.

She was artist-in-residence at NTU CCA (Nanyang Technological University -Centre for Contemporary Art) from June to November 2018.

Wong has also written for numerous publications and monographs on art since the late 1980s. She is Assoc. Editor for ISSUE, an annual LASALLE journal publication since 2013.