Amanda Heng
Singapore
Amanda Heng Liang Ngim is a contemporary artist, curator, and speaker from Singapore, active both locally and internationally. Her multidisciplinary practice encompasses collaboration in contemporary art exhibitions, performances, forums, workshops, and art interventions.
1999 Womanifesto II:
The Second International Women’s Art Exchange
"Stolen Bodies" on Asia Art Archive
A set of 27 high-resolution photographs of ‘Stolen Bodies’ is available for viewing on the Asia Art Archive.
As long as the definition of โbeautyโ comes from outside women, we will continue to be manipulated by it.
There is a great discrepancy between what we see in the social representation of women and the self-awareness generated from our bodily experience. The female body has its own organic integrity and that must be respected. Women have to go back to their own bodies, to our primary source of information to seek a new narrative, a form of discourse in which our own experience as women is validated. Women do not need to change our bodies. We need to change the rules. We have to ask โWhat is beauty? Who decides?โ (Naomi Woolf in her research on the issues of beauty.)
1997 Womanifesto:
An International Women’s Art Exchange Exhibition
Mother was a distant love. Mother had never been a prominent figure at home until father passed away. In those days, living activities in the family depended on the mood of father. Mother became the intermediary between her !children and husband. When their father died, their mother turned her attention to her children, particularly her sons and their sons.
I had always wanted to speak to mother, to get her attention; to tell her how much I missed her whenever I was away from home. however, I could find no words to express this feeling to her in Teochew.
This work attempts to express the breakdown in communication in the relationship between the mother and daughter, In my attempt to involve my mother in the making of this work, I hope to articulate the support I find important in my life and more importantly the link between women, between two single women outside the conventional cultural context of a family structure imposed upon us by a patriarchal society.