Amanda Heng

Biography

In 1997 Amanda Heng moved into studios that the National Arts Council of Singapore had just converted for artists. On arrival she was given an agreement to sign: performances in the studio were prohibited. Three years earlier, after a scandalous performance by Josef Ng, funding for performance art in the country had been suspended.

Heng signed. Two years later she founded a collective in that same studio.

She was born in Singapore in 1951. She studied late, as an adult: in 1988 she graduated from LASALLE College of the Arts with a diploma in printmaking. In 1990 she studied the history of the women’s liberation movement and feminist art at Central Saint Martins in London, and in 1993 she received a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia. Later she lectured at Nanyang Technological University and the National Institute of Education, and at LASALLE she supervises MA students. In 1988 she was among the founders of the art collective The Artists’ Village.

Her early works of the 1990s are installations about the position of women. “She and Her Dishcover” (1991) is a table, a table cover, a mirror and a dish cover; the title plays on the similarity of “dishcover” and “discover”, and the work touches on the domestic roles assigned to women. In “Tiger Balls, Myths and Chinese Man” (1991), basketballs painted with tiger stripes lie on a traditional Chinese wedding blanket: it is a response to a sexist remark made after Tang Da Wu’s installation “Tiger’s Whip”, which dealt with the practice of men consuming tiger penises as an aphrodisiac. “Missing” (1994) is devoted to the killing of baby girls in cultures that value sons: girls’ dresses hang from fishing line and hooks, and viewers were invited to leave notes on red strings. In the performance “S/HE” (1994) Heng stood before a mirror, drew marks on her face and spoke questions and Confucian sayings, breaking language down into its simplest sounds and strokes. Beside her were baking dough, washing detergent and toy alphabet blocks. The work was repeated in 1995 and 1996, and it changed: texts, memories, Chinese classical music and Western choral singing were added.

In “Another Woman” (1996–97) she worked with her mother, who spoke a dialect and had grown up in a kampong, a village. The photographs and mixed-media pieces tell how “nation-building” took away the former place of such women in society. The work was shown at the First Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in 1999. “Narrating Bodies” (1999–2000) also belongs to the theme of her mother: old photographs were enlarged by laser printing and rephotographed with the artist herself, and the work was presented at the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane.

In “Let’s Chat” (1996) the viewer was seated at a table to drink tea and clean bean sprouts together, as in village life of the past. Beginning at The Substation in Singapore, Heng later took the project to shopping malls, markets and other countries. “Let’s Walk” (1999) is a street action: she and passers-by walked backward with high-heeled shoes in their mouths, finding their way with hand mirrors; it responded to the survival of the beauty industry during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The actions took place in Singapore, Japan, Paris, Poland, Indonesia, Sweden and Spain. In “Yours Truly, My Body” (1999) she scrubbed a slab of pig meat with blood, commenting on the pain women endure for the sake of beauty.

The collective Women in the Arts (WITA), Singapore’s first artist-run women’s collective, appeared in 1999. It organised forums and workshops, and now keeps an archive of women’s art in the country. At the time Singapore had almost no feminist framework in which women’s practice could be discussed. She had to work in a studio where performance was formally forbidden.

In the 2000s her themes widened. In “Home Service” (2003) Heng plays a domestic worker and cleans the homes of Singaporeans. “Water is Politics” (2003) arose during a residency in Sri Lanka: basins of water and money comment on the disputes between Singapore and Malaysia over water supply. “Our Lives in Our Hands” (2007) is devoted to the thousands of foreign labourers who build the city and live in poor conditions. The online project “Singirl” (from 1999), photographs of the bare bottoms of female participants aged eighteen and over, answers the image of the “Singapore Girl” created by an airline; as of May 2026 the site is unavailable. Heng sat on the selection and curatorial committee for the President’s Young Talents exhibition (2009), received the Cultural Medallion in 2010, and in 2011 the Singapore Art Museum held her first solo retrospective, “Amanda Heng: Speak To Me, Walk With Me”. In 2014 she appeared in the television series “A Journey Through Asian Art”. In 2019 she was awarded the Benesse Prize at the Singapore Biennale.