On 8 August, independent art studio Supper House SG saw over a hundred people — its largest number of attendees — at the opening of its newest exhibition. For 折摄 – a light flashes, and a box drops from the sky, eight Singaporean artists found ways to create art that fit the dimensions of 10 by 10 millimetres under the curatorial direction of up-and-coming artist Siew Guang Hong.
“It does bring me happiness,” Siew told us — referring to bringing artists together to do independent arts shows. “If it fails, we fail together. But if we succeed, we succeed together.”
Siew, 23, graduated from the LASALLE College of the Arts in April with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts with honours. He has numerous art exhibitions, curatorial experiences, and accolades under his belt. He is also the recipient of the LASALLE-Administered Scholarship and David Marshall Scholarship, and the 2024 LASALLE Winner of the Award for Academic Excellence.
We sat down with Siew to discuss his body of work at LASALLE and beyond.
The Superhuman
Forty grams of protein. Eighty grams of protein. When he drank another litre of soy milk, he would have consumed 120 grams of protein in total. And he had 12 more litres to go.
Standing in an outdoor space in Gillman Barracks with his head tilted back, Siew poured another carton of soy milk into his mouth. What he could not consume flowed down the sides of his mouth, through his white clothes, and splattered onto a sheet on the ground. He picked up another carton and continued.
Around 20 to 30 people watched in horror as he gurgled, gagged, and dropped to his knees, bloated to the point he could not stand or sit comfortably. He alternated between writhing on the ground and standing back up. When faced with the final three cartons, Siew poured the soy milk on his face, then took his drenched shirt off to dry his eyes. He squeezed his shirt dry to drink the last drops. Both Siew and the audience were overpowered by the sight and stench of soy milk across the space.
“I always view it as a sort of violent control over my organic body,” Siew said. He is a vegan bodybuilder who primarily consumes protein through soy products. His performance, Soyfed Beef — 640grams (2024), showed eight days’ worth of his daily soy milk intake at once. His rigorous discipline fell apart. But even after the performance, he continues to drink soy milk in his daily life, to work out and look like the ideal man — muscular without weakness.
“Because as a young gay child growing up in Singapore, I always thought to myself, if I ever come out, or if people ever find out I’m gay, I must be the acceptable kind of gay person,” Siew said.
Siew performed Soyfed Beef at the exhibition Of placebos that sing sweet in the mouth and ache in the soul at Richard Koh Fine Art. He did it in June on the day of Pink Dot, the most prominent Pride event in Singapore.
This performance is part of his larger series, Superhuman, where he performed more feats of strength until he collapsed. In The Myth of Sissypuss (2023), Siew carried a fluorescent pink and yellow queen-sized bed frame on his back for almost two hours. First, the feat of strength accentuated his muscular physique. But he visibly endured an immense amount of strain and eventually dropped the frame to lay down on the ground. Again, an audience was present to watch his pain.
“The rest of the world sees, you know, queer or marginalised groups of people as like — these bodies are struggling,” Siew said. “You can’t help but to watch.”
The social pressure to appear masculine is prevalent among Singaporean gay men. A study by Langcheng Zhang and Edson C. Tandoc, Jr. at Nanyang Technological University analysed hashtags used by Singaporean gay men on Instagram. They found that some gay men anchor their sexual identity to being “manly,” muscular, and fit. Others tie themselves to patriotic and/or traditional values, like being a good Singaporean citizen or Asian son.
Zhang and Tandoc Jr. identify this behaviour as homonormativity, where gay people believe their sexual orientations are socially acceptable as long as they follow heterosexual society’s norms as much as possible — which includes appearing very masculine and hiding any elements of femininity when posting to Instagram.
Yet as Siew showed in his Superhuman series, the pressure proves too much. Homonormativity is a dam that eventually breaks.
Siew calls Superhuman an embodied series of work, where his body serves as the conduit to explain his queer experience. But his final year project at LASALLE, which spans the breadth of two years of queer explorations, uses an entirely different body — the crab.
The Posthuman
In his of crabs and Absurd Self-Obliteration series, Siew explored queerness through the bodies of crabs. For his final year project becoming: mimesis, convergence, radiation (2023–2024), he printed X-rays of crabs on various surfaces, from hand-sized cards to a two metre-long piece of paper laid on the floor.
In becoming, the crab’s species is unknown, and there are no descriptive labels. Some viewers have expressed frustration to Siew on not being able to understand his crab-based work without explanations.
But, he does sometimes write to complement his crab-based works. In all crabs are just sand, all sands are just crushed crabs (2023), Siew paired prints of 3D wire mesh models of crabs with an essay titled I Eat Shit.
The essay detailed Siew’s parents’ Buddhist viewpoint on animals and humans. They told Siew that humans have the ability to restrain their desires to achieve nirvana, or freedom from reincarnation. Those who do not let go of their passions may reincarnate as animals instead and live nonideal existences, like crabs, eating waste off the seafloor, which Siew wrote was “very queer.”
“Humans can refrain from non-procreative sex to attain nirvana,” Siew wrote. “Crabs cannot.”
Yet crabs can participate in a separate process of renewal. Crabs can autotomise, which is the ability to remove a part of themselves to escape threats. This can also be done to begin a moulting process and remove old limbs from their bodies. Siew highlighted this during his open residency at Supper House SG — in the autotomy reflex (2023-2024), he created crab claws out of polymer clay and stippled them with brightly coloured acrylic paint, representing sand eroding from dead claws and falling to the sea floor.
“The idea of amputating ourselves is very scary,” Siew said. “We’re scared of change. We’re always scared of taking away things that have always been there, even if they are harmful for us.”
Siew refers to the persistent existence of homophobic policies and societal norms in Singapore. In 2022, when Singapore’s parliament voted to repeal 377A (a British-era law banning sex between two men), they also amended the constitution to clarify that marriage is only between a man and a woman. This puts a question mark on the future of legalising same sex marriage in Singapore. Siew showed that where crabs can shed what is old to grow and transform, humans struggle to do the same.
But Siew’s connection with crabs is not just a metaphor for the queer experience. If, in Superhuman, he displayed the pain of being different, then in of crabs and Absurd Self-Obliteration, he released himself from his human body to identify with something different, through the crab.
Here, he draws from posthumanism, which rejects the idea that humans are the most important beings on planet Earth. Similarly, Siew seeks to defy being categorised by society’s norms.
To Siew’s parents, homosexuality would deviate a person from the path of nirvana, and he could become an animal in the next reincarnation cycle.
But, Siew argued, if gay folk let go of pursuing social ideals, to forgo human bodies altogether, to own their queerness as strange, alien, unidentifiable crabs — they may break free from society’s vicious cycle.
In that respect, Siew said his supervisor at LASALLE viewed of crabs and Absurd Self-Obliteration and Superhuman like heaven and earth.
“Because the crab work is really about me leaving the human body, like I’m going to heaven, whereas the earth work is about me being inside my body,” Siew said.
In the end, Siew’s crab-based works are open to viewers’ personal interpretations. One person might feel the freedom of breaking away from human society; another might see nothing but a simple crab.
Doing more in shrinking spaces
At first, the 10 by 10 millimetre restriction of Siew’s current curatorial project 折摄 – a light flashes, and a box drops from the sky was inspired by Soyfed Beef. Supper House SG’s curator Ashley Chiam noticed how Siew would place each finished carton of soy milk within a grid on the waterproof sheet beneath his feet.
But then Siew and Chiam encountered difficulties in sourcing funding and a space to stage the exhibition. The 10 by 10 restriction became less about the way the art would be made, and more about the shrinking amount of art spaces in Singapore.
“It brings me joy when these things don’t fall through, and I’m able to continue producing and connecting with other people.” Siew said.
A junior LASALLE student, Meng Ying, asked Siew if she and her course mates could view the exhibition on Monday, 12 August, in lieu of missing the opening day. Siew agreed, and was surprised to see 10 students arrive for his tour. Meng Ying said her and her friends’ interest came from seeing how well Siew curated LASALLE’s student art exhibitions.
“There was this bar he set which gave the impression that his participation in this show would mean it was something worth going for,” Meng Ying told us. She said she also knew some of the exhibiting artists like Amien, Genevieve Leong, and Supassara Ho, and wished to see their works as well.
Siew loves generating communal support through exhibitions to keep growing Singapore’s independent art scene. But in the end, his focus is not on hitting high viewership numbers — it is to make the art he wants to make.
“I think that’s what keeps me doing my work. Because this is true to me,” he said. “Just keep making. Just keep finding purpose in what you do.”
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Curated by Siew, Supper House SG’s exhibition 折摄 – a light flashes, and a box drops from the sky runs at the Ann Siang House till 25 August 2024. Click here for details.
Header image: Siew Guang Hong performs Soyfed Beef — 640grams at Gillman Barracks on 29 June 2024. Exhibited during Of placebos that sing sweet in the mouth and ache in the soul (2024) at Richard Koh Fine Art, curated by Louis Ho. Image courtesy of Valentino Tan and Siew Guang Hong.
