7 October 2022: 10×10 hosted a salon with artists Sim Chi Yin and Odette England at the loft of Steven Sicular in Manhattan. Sim discussed She Never Rode That Trishaw Again (self-published, 2021) with designer Teun van der Heijden and England presented Dairy Character (Saint Lucy Books, 2021).
She Never Rode That Trishaw Again (self-published, 2021) tells the story of Loo Ngan Yue, a woman widowed by the British war against anti-colonial forces in Malaya — a 12-year conflict that became a template for other counter-insurgency campaigns. Artist and author Sim Chi Yin juxtaposes vacation photographs of Loo — her late paternal grandmother — with oral history excerpts on the family’s trauma. This intimate volume, using vernacular photographs to create a filmic experience, takes us inside the emotional world of a family shattered by geopolitics. It is the first in a trilogy of books Sim is making on the “Malayan Emergency” of 1948 to 1960, painting a picture of anguish, loss and amnesia — an allegory for Southeast Asia’s lingering traumas as a Cold War battleground. The book is designed by Teun van der Heijden.
Sim Chi Yin is an artist from Singapore whose research-based practice includes photography, moving image, archival interventions and text-based performance, and focuses on history, conflict, memory and extraction. She is currently based in New York, where she is a fellow on the Whitney Independent Study Program. Recent solo exhibitions include Zilberman Gallery Berlin (2021), Les Rencontres d’Arles (2021) and Landskrona Foto Festival, Sweden (2020). Sim was commissioned as the Nobel Peace Prize photographer in 2017. She is also doing a visual practice-based PhD at King’s College London.
Dairy Character (Saint Lucy Books, 2021) is a loose chronicle of Odette England’s experience growing up on a rural dairy farm in southern Australia. Combining recent photographs, family snapshots, archival images and autobiographical short stories, England examines the male-dominant farming community in which she was raised and the gendered repression that rural females experience. Her images and texts evoke a girl introduced to reproductive labor at an early age. A girl who wanted a pink room. A girl fenced in by interconnecting forms of vulnerability. A girl who had a cow named after her. Dairy Character is the 2021 winner of the Light Work Book Award.
Odette England is a photographer and writer, and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. Her work has been exhibited in more than 100 museums, galleries and art spaces worldwide and is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art. She has an MFA, a PhD and teaches at Brown University.
A big thank you to Steven Sicular for hosting and Caitlin Scanlon for facilitating this salon.