Only nearer than half a world apart
Only nearer than half a world apart
Only nearer than half a world apart
Only nearer than half a world apart

Yeo Workshop

Only nearer than half a world apart

About Artwork

Presented as a seamless loop, ‘Only nearer than half a world apart’ is a digital composite of documented and archival images collected from the early 1920s to present day. Contemporary spaces filled with fading remnants of the past situates viewers in an intermediary space, halfway between reality and hallucination.

Referencing imagery from early ‘Entertainment’ worlds in Singapore, Choo traced then sutured records of New World, Great World, and Gay/Happy World, creating a moving time-lapse within a shared space. This memory-image presents individuals, from past to present, as unconscious performers in pensive states. A juxtaposition from the grandiosity and spectacle of fairgrounds, familiar characters are grafted in identifiable moments, existing in splices of time and image, document and monument.

Presented as part of Dancing Without Touching, 7 January – 12 March 2023, Yeo Workshop, Singapore
READ MORE: On the other side of the glass: Sarah Choo Jing’s Dancing Without Touching by Dr. Karin G. Oen

Artist Profile

Sarah Choo Jing​ (b. 1990, Singapore) is known for her interdisciplinary approach to photography, video and installation. Her work depicts identifiable moments and characters within contemporary urban society suggesting a plethora of private and often solitary narratives. The artist is concerned with the gaze of the flaneur, voyeurism and the uncanny.

Choo lives and works in Singapore since completing her MFA at the Slade School of Art in London, in the Summer of 2015. Choo was recently shortlisted as a Finalist for the ​Audemars Piguet Art Commission for Art Basel 2020 and invited to present her practice at Le Brassus, Geneva in Switzerland and is a Finalist in the Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2020. She ​clinched the Gold Award in the 2019 PX3 Prix de la Photographie Competition, the 2017 Perspectives 40 under 40 Award and came in First Place in the 2015 Moscow International Foto Awards. Choo was also awarded the ​ICON De Martell Cordon Bleu Photography Award ​ and ​Kwek Leng Joo Prize of Excellence in Still Photography Award in 2013.

The artist has since exhibited internationally at the Turku Art Museum in Helsinki (2019), National Museum of Singapore (2017), Busan Museum of Art in Korea (2016), ArtParis at The Grand Palais in Paris (2015), the START Art Fair at The Saatchi Gallery in London (2015) and ​Photo London ​ at The Somerset House in London (2015). Her works are collected by both private individuals and public institutions; including the Singapore Art Museum, National Museum of Singapore and The Arts Club Permanent Art Collection in London.

Artist:

Sarah Choo Jing

Medium:

Diasec Print

Size:

51 x 150 cm

Year:

2023