Urban Screens: Dancing Alone (Don’t Leave Me)
January 17, 2025 - January 26, 2025
Free
A video art showcase by Susie Wong
17 to 26 Jan 2025
Venues: Digital billboard at Fortune Centre and Digital billboard at Wilkie Edge
Dancing Alone (Don’t Leave Me) is a series of onscreen vignettes of solitary women dancing by themselves, for themselves. The work is inspired by a scene from the film, The King and I, where the female protagonist says, “No woman would dance alone when a man is looking at her.” In Wong’s work, the dancer is both the centre of attention and wholly indifferent; her occupation of the screen gives momentary respite and joy.
Yet her ability to escape the gaze of others is constrained by her own longing to be seen. Exaggerated by a highly visible medium, these strange tensions speak of Wong’s long term preoccupation with romance and agency in relation to cinematic tropes, and the complex negotiations that ensue.
This work is curated for Urban Screens, which is presented by Objectifs as part of Singapore Art Week, supported by the National Arts Council and Plan B Media.
About Susie Wong
Susie Wong 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 artist-resident at NTU-CCA Singapore in 2018. Wong’s work ranges across landscapes, still life, portraiture, a recurring subject in her early oil paintings and drawings. Since 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.
