SEA AiR project offers residencies for artists from Southeast Asia in Europe during 2022-2023 and culminates in a group exhibition in Singapore in late 2023. The residency partners of the inaugural cycle of the project are HIAP (Helsinki, Finland), WIELS (Brussels, Belgium) and Villa Arson (Nice, France). The project is coordinated by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (Singapore) and will culminate in a group exhibition in Singapore in late 2023.

Selected from a pool of 24 candidates nominated by curators and artists from across Southeast Asia, the participants in the first cycle of SEA AiR are: HOO Fan Chon (Malaysia) at HIAP; Citra SASMITA (Indonesia) at WIELS and VUTH Lyno (Cambodia) at Villa Arson.

Fan Chon Hoo is a visual art practitioner. He was the co-founder of an art collective Run Amok Gallery (2012-2017). He completed his BA in Photography at the London College of Communication in 2010. He took part in No Man’s Land Residency Project in Taiwan (2017-2018). He participated in the 3rd edition of Makassar Biennale and had his first solo exhibition “The World Is Your Restaurant” in Kuala Lumpur recently. His practice explores taste as a cultural and social construct and how our value systems fluctuate as we migrate from one culture to another. Fan Chon Hoo’s residency at HIAP takes place during Feb-May 2022.

With a background in literature and physics, Citra Sasmita is a self-taught painter who turned to the visual arts after working as an illustrator at a local newspaper in Bali. By unravelling some myths and misconceptions that persist in Balinese culture, her work imagines secular mythologies for a post-patriarchal future. She is deeply invested in the social empowerment of women and in questioning gender hierarchies and normative constructs. Her work is regularly exhibited within Indonesia and has been presented internationally at the Kathmandu Triennale, Nepal (2021–2022); and ParaSite Hong Kong (2020). In 2020, she received for the UOB Museum MACAN Children’s Art Space Commission and she is the Gold Award Winner of the UOB Painting of The Year 2017.

Vuth Lyno is an artist, curator, and educator who is interested in space, cultural history, and the production of knowledge through social relations. Drawing on a wide range of materials such as interviews, artefacts, and newly made objects, he creates spatial configurations that weave together personal stories and collective bodies of knowledge. Participatory and experimental in nature, his artistic and curatorial approach is rooted in communal learning and aims to engage a multiplicity of voices in the production of meaning. He is a member of Stiev Selapak, a collective which founded and co-runs Sa Sa Art Projects in Phnom Penh, a long-term initiative committed to the development of the contemporary visual arts landscape in Cambodia. His work has been presented at several group exhibitions and institutions such as the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Thailand (2020) and the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia (2019), amongst others.

SEA AiR – Studio Residencies for Southeast Asian Artists in the EU is an Arts Partnership between NTU Singapore and the European Union.