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My story
I am a product of two eras — the pre-Internet years and the information age. I am lucky to have spent my childhood in the long-gone kampung-kampung (villages) of modern Singapore. We had our own coconut, jackfruit, mango, rambutan, soursop, star fruit, and sugar cane trees. We reared ducks and chickens, and kept a hen as a pet (she was special). We owned a stone mill with which my brother and I ground rice into flour for our mother to make the most delicious confectioneries. We used wood to cook until we had to move into a flat around the mid-’90s.
For as long as they could, my parents resisted the government’s plans to resettle us into small cookie-cutter apartments that today house about eighty percent of the population. They were trying to hold on to a way of life that was simpler and freer than the networked and always-on world that we live in now. My late father, a karung guni man, lived a life of precarity.* We had little, and growing up helping him with his trade had a deep impact on my love for found and humble materials, and how I treat them. It helped me to see possibilities in the discarded and overlooked, and poetry in the modest and flawed.
I have moved across the world 15 times thus far. My works reflect the places I have been, both physically and mentally. They are heavily influenced by those formative years in multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Singapore, as well as time spent in Brunei, Thailand, San Francisco, London, Baltimore, and New York. They often contain personal stories and significant moments in time, drawn from childhood memories, familial history and relationships, an international education, a multilingual background, and everyday living.
I have so many memories of those days that I am afraid I will lose if I don’t record and share them somewhere. I hold close to my heart all that belonged to those analog years, and ruminate on their juxtaposition with the hyper-(dis)connected complexity we inhabit today.
* The karung guni man is the Singapore equivalent of the 19th century rag-and-bone man in the UK, who scavenged unwanted rags, bones, metal, and other waste from the towns and cities where they lived and sold them to merchants. In America, they are called junk men, and in many developing countries, waste pickers. Karung guni are the Malay words for gunny/burlap sack, which was used in the past by Singapore karung guni men to hold the used newspaper they collected for resale.
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My bio
Yam Chew Oh is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and storyteller whose work explores circumstance, time, and attention through history, relationships, and the everyday. His work has been exhibited in the United States and Asia, including the Downtown Community Television Center, SVA Flatiron Gallery, and Starta Arta in New York City; the Art Lot in Brooklyn; the International Independent Art Fair in Harlem; the Satellite Art Show in Florida; the Creative Alliance, Fox 3 Gallery, Graffiti Warehouse, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Maryland Art Place, Rosenberg Gallery, and Space Camp in Baltimore; Gillman Barracks and Orchard Road in Singapore; and Lankai Gallery in Anshan, China. Oh’s work has also been featured in Commotion, Lumina Journal, The Match Factory, Studio Visit, and Velocity.
Oh is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, New York, where he received an MFA in Fine Arts, and an academic assistant at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. He serves on the Alumni Council Board of the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, where he received a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Fine Art. In 2020, Oh founded Fiber4, a collective that supports work in the namesake medium and engages in ideas of labor, the maternal, and domesticity. Previously, Oh was Strategic Development Director and Treasurer at New York-based Asia Contemporary Art Week.
Oh has under his belt more than 18 years of experience in international public relations, during which he managed media relations for Singapore’s inaugural biennale (2006) and community arts programs at the country’s national library and oldest philanthropic hospital. He also holds Bachelor’s degrees in Geography, Southeast Asian Studies, and Chinese Studies from the National University of Singapore.