The Contributors

Song-Ming Ang uses music and sound in different contexts, including the generation of awkward, kitsch and humorous moments, to loosen the grip of ‘high culture’ and flesh out occasions for earthy connectedness between people. No Man’s Band consists of recordings of school brass bands warming up, while The Robots features a female group attempting Kraftwerk’s electronic song of the same title but using just their voices – a song they obviously all love. At his recent residency at ARCUS, Japan, Ang invited the former students from an elementary school to sing what they remembered of their school song in Be True to Your School. Ang’s works provide pleasure along with cultural cringe, and in so doing, crystallise specific cultural affiliations with which different groups of people identify. http://www.circadiansongs.com/

Heman Chong is an artist, curator and writer. His art practice involves an investigation into the philosophies, reasons and methods of individuals and communities imagining the future. Charged with a conceptual drive, this research is then adapted into objects, images, installations, situations or texts. His current project, The Lonely Ones, is an independent observatory that looks at the representation of imposed solitude on individuals and communities of people. The observatory identifies specific examples in the fields of art, film, literature, and other diverse forms while performing a multitude of reflections on the selection. It is the basis for a novel due in 2013. The novel is tentatively entitled Prospectus. He has developed solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Milan (Milan), Motive Gallery (Amsterdam), Hermes Third Floor (Singapore), Vitamin Creative Space (Guangzhou), Art In General (New York), Project Arts Centre (Dublin), Ellen de Bruijne Projects (Amsterdam), The Substation (Singapore), Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Sparwasser HQ (Berlin). His work has also been shown extensively in group exhibitions including Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Kroeller-Muller Museum, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Nam June Paik Art Center, Gertrude Contemporary, Arnolfini, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Hamburger Bahnhof, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Kadist Foundation, Daejeon Museum of Art. He has participated in numerous international biennales including Manifesta 8 (2010), 2nd Singapore Biennale (2008), SCAPE Christchurch Biennale (2006), Busan Biennale (2004), 10th India Triennale (2000) and represented Singapore in the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). In 2006, he produced a writing workshop with Leif Magne Tangen at Project Arts Center in Dublin where they co-authored "PHILIP", a science fiction novel, with Mark Aerial Waller, Cosmin Costinas, Rosemary Heather, Francis McKee, David Reinfurt and Steve Rushton. http://www.hemanchong.com/

Jeremy Chu is a Singapore-born artist, trained in fine arts photography at the Art Institute of Boston. He also studied museology and exhibition making at the MIT List Visual Arts Centre, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institute of Contemporary Art and Art Interactive, all in Boston. Chu’s solo projects combine performance, installation and photography to explore issues of marginality, dislocation, identity, ritual and desire. He has developed his visual vocabulary around a sensuous, highly tactile aesthetic, which is combined with keen political awareness and a working method that often invites audience/viewer participation, signifying Chu’s belief in the capacity for art as a cultural practice to reshape social relations. His performance and installation project The Fisherman’s Net: A Journey towards Reconciliation (2003) was presented at the Art Institute of Boston and his photographic series I Dream of a Red Pavilion (2006/07) was exhibited at Castlefield Gallery during the Asia Triennial Manchester (2008). Since 2004, Chu has also collaborated in and organised community-based art projects that involve social research and interventionist-strategies as a mode of engagement and enquiry. Such projects included Sifting the Inner Belt (Boston Centre for the Arts, Boston, USA, 2005) and National Bitter Melon Council (Boston, USA, 2005-present). In April 2008, Chu collaborated with fellow-Singaporean artist Kai Lam and the local curatorial group P-10 to organise the Symposium of the Local at the Asia Triennial Manchester. As a professional fine artist, Chu is represented in private collections in the United States of America and Australia. Chu lives and works in Singapore. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jeremy-chu/2b/441/955

Biljana Ciric is the former director of the Curatorial Department at the Shanghai Duolon Museum of Modern Art. She is currently working as an independent curator based in Shanghai. Among projects she has conceived is Rejected Collection (2009).

John Hoppin is a producer, consultant, and logistics expert living and working in New York City. He is a founder of It Can Change, the president of Hoppin Records and a contributor to the Mary Meyer Clothing blog. http://www.marymeyerclothing.com/blogs/blog

Anthony Marcellini is an artist and writer. He co-founded and directed the collaborative art group It Can Change (2000-2004), a collective that produced art, interventions, and performances in public and private sites. From 2004-2007 Anthony was the Curatorial Assistant at the non-profit gallery Art in General, New York City. He received his MFA in Social Practice from California College of the Arts, San Francisco (2009). He has received an Alternative Exposure Grant from Southern Exposure, San Francisco (2008); Göteborgs Stads kulturförvaltning/Kulturstöd Projektstöd Pronto grant, (2010) and The Board for Artistic Development, Faculty of Fine Arts, Gothenburg University (2011). His work has been shown at Apex Art, New York City (2002), Kunsthall Fridericianum, Kassel (2003), Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York City (2004), Deitch Projects, New York City (2004), The Soap Factory, Minneapolis (2004), San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco (2008), Etc. Galerie, Prague (2010), Guest Projects, London (2011), Sequences Art Festival, Reykjavik (2011). He is a featured contributor to the online journal Art Practical. And is currently a guest lecturer at Valand School of Fine Arts, Gothenburg. http://anthonymarcellini.com/

Richard Streitmatter-Tran (b. 1972, Bien Hoa, Vietnam) is an artist living and working in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He received his degree in the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. In 2005 he received the Martell Contemporary Asian Art Research Grant from the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong for the research project, Mediating the Mekong. As co-curator he developed The Mekong exhibition with Russell Storer for the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial (APT6) in 2009. He is currently a lecturer at RMIT International University Vietnam. In 2010, he established DIA/PROJECTS, an independent studio and contemporary art space in Ho Chi Minh City. http://www.diacritic.org/

Yeung Yang is an independent curator, writer and university lecturer. Upon graduating from Yale University with an M.A. in anthropology, she worked as a documentary video director at Radio Television Hong Kong. She graduated in 2004 with a PhD in Intercultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Exhibitions she curated include in midair, sound works hong kong 2007 (Jun,2007), 14QK: Art Responds to 14K (Nov 2007), Nocturne, Alfred Ko solo photography exhibition (Apr, 2008), and Around sound art festival (2009 & 2010). She was also artistic director of October Contemporary 2009 - Now or Never. She currently teaches Chinese and Western classics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2008, she founded soundpocket to promote sound art and its research and education in Hong Kong. http://www.soundpocket.org.hk