Han Sai Por

Biography

In 2002 the work “20 Tonnes” was shown in the atrium of the building of the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts in Singapore: six ridged blocks with a smaller one at either end, all hewn from a single granite rock. The row was later placed in front of the National Museum. Han Sai Por herself described the piece as an explanation of how nature reacts to impact, gravity and energy.

She was born on 19 July 1943 in Singapore, during the Japanese occupation. The family was poor: six children, and a home in Changi made of cardboard boxes and coconut leaves. She remembers her childhood as happy; on the beach she made figures of animals out of sand. At ten she was given a book of Michelangelo’s sculptures by her mother.

Han attended Yock Eng High School, then, in 1965–1968, the Teachers’ Training College in Singapore. While already working as a teacher, in 1975–1977 she took part-time courses at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA). Having saved some money, she went to the United Kingdom: in 1979–1980 she studied at East Ham College of Art, and in 1980–1983 at Wolverhampton College of Art, where she received a B.A. in fine art. To support herself she worked as a cook, a hotel maid, a waitress and a street artist.

In 1983 she returned to Singapore and became one of the two pioneer teachers of the new Arts Elective Programme at Nanyang Girls’ High School. From 1987 she taught part-time at NAFA and at the LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts (until 1993), and in 1994–1996 at the National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technological University. Later she studied landscape architecture at Lincoln University in New Zealand; by some accounts this was in 2004–2008. She became a full-time sculptor in 1997.

Her first solo exhibition, “Four Dimensions”, was held at the National Museum Art Gallery in February 1993: ten geometrical structures which, in her words, were based on mathematical logic. The art historian and critic Sabapathy was reserved about them, writing that they were more about technique and fabrication than about fresh insights into space. Her reputation rests on other works, in stone and with organic forms: “Growth” (1985, five pear-shaped forms in white marble), “Spirit of Nature” (1988, three forms in black granite) and “Object C” (1992, a pale grey granite piece resembling a canoe). “Seeds” (2006) consists of two huge kernels carved from sandstone excavated from Fort Canning Hill during the redevelopment of the museum. She often buys her stone herself from quarries in China, Italy, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore, and prefers granite and marble. Her sculptures stand in Osaka, on Shōdoshima island, in Kuala Lumpur, in Sarawak and at the Singapore Embassy in Washington, D.C.; in Singapore itself her commissioned works can be seen at the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, in Terminal 3 of Changi Airport, in the Suntec City mall and elsewhere. In 1989–1990 she took part in “The Time Show”, a twenty-four-hour event organised by the artists’ group The Artists Village.

In 1990 she received a scholarship to the Portland Sculpture Park in England, where, together with the installation artist Chandrasekaran, she helped turn an old limestone quarry into a sculpture park. In 1995 she was awarded the Cultural Medallion for Art, Singapore’s national award for the arts. In 2001 she founded the Sculpture Society (Singapore), and she is now its Honorary President. In 2005 she won the sculpture and painting section at the 11th Triennale-India, organised by the Lalit Kala Akademi, India’s national academy of art, and the following year she received the Outstanding City Sculpture Award in China. In 2014 she was inducted into the Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame.

In 2009 she was the first artist in residence at the Sculpture Pavilion in Fort Canning Park, where she made works from the trunks of tembusu trees. She later turned to the theme of deforestation: the exhibition “The Black Forest” (2011, repeated in 2013 at the NAFA Gallery) showed charred logs lying on charcoal. In 2015, for the Esplanade, she used stainless steel mesh for the first time, in “Harvest”, with birds, fish and plants. In recent years Han has painted a good deal in acrylic; in 2019 she showed ten sculptures and twelve paintings in the exhibition “Dance With the Wind”. I think her move to painting is best explained in her own words: stone means noise, dust and sweat, while with a painting you can sit with a fan.

In 2026 her 75-metre work “A Journey Between”, in curved stainless steel, was installed in the concourse of Cantonment MRT station.