Loo Zihan

Biography

Loo Zihan’s first film, “Solos”, was due to be shown at the 20th Singapore International Film Festival in 2007, but it was withdrawn from its premiere screening because of its explicit depiction of gay sex. It premiered in Busan, at the 12th International Film Festival. Loo wrote and directed the film and acted in it.

He was born on 11 November 1983 in Singapore. He received a Master of Fine Arts (Studio) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Master of Arts in Performance Studies from New York University. He later became a doctoral candidate in theater and performance at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught part-time at the School of the Arts, Singapore, the National Institute of Education and Nanyang Technological University.

He speaks openly about his homosexuality and about queer themes in his own films, although in Southeast Asian society the subject remains especially taboo. “Solos” became the first Singaporean film selected for the American Film Institute Festival (AFI Fest) in Los Angeles, and at the 23rd Turin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival it won the Nuovo Sguardi (“New Gazes”) award: the jury gave it to the film that “reflects the evolution of queer cinema”. In 2007 Loo also acted in “Pleasure Factory”, directed by the Thai filmmaker Ekachai Uekrongtham and set in the red-light district of Geylang; the film was shown in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival. Before 2011 he made the short films “Embryo” (2006), “Aemaer” (2010) and “Chancre” (2011), and in 2009 he wrote and directed the film “Threshold”.

In February 2012, at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival, he performed “Cane” for a single evening, re-enacting a piece by the Singaporean artist Josef Ng that was followed by a ten-year ban on state funding for performance art in the country. In December of that year his first solo exhibition, “Archiving Cane”, opened at The Substation: an installation of twelve objects connected with that piece and with his own practice, together with a durational performance. From October to December 2013, as part of the group exhibition “Ghost: The Body at the Turn of the Century”, a parallel event of the Singapore Biennale, he showed “Artists’ General Assembly – The Langenbach Archive”. It is a performance-installation that gathers about 150 items from Dr Ray Langenbach’s materials on the Artists’ General Assembly and related events.

Archival work has become one of Loo’s main methods; to my mind, he is more interested in how a performance is remembered than in the event itself.

In 2015 the National Arts Council of Singapore gave him its Young Artist Award. The same year the Singapore Art Museum commissioned an installation from him for the Presidents’ Young Talents competition. He opened the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2015 with “With/Out”, a performance-installation based on “Completely With/Out Character” (1999), a monologue staged by The Necessary Stage theatre company. The monologue was performed by Paddy Chew, the first person in Singapore to come out publicly as HIV-positive; Chew died a few months after those performances. “With/Out” gave the first public screening of recordings of three evenings of that production. Loo told The Straits Times that, as a queer person, he had always been inspired by Chew’s fortitude and wondered whether he himself would have had the courage to step forward in that way. In 2016 the Singapore International Festival of Arts commissioned “I Am LGB”, a four-hour durational performance created with Langenbach and the LGB Society of Mind; it used materials from Langenbach’s archive. “With/Out” was restaged in 2017 in The Studios season devoted to the playwright Haresh Sharma, at Esplanade, Theatres on the Bay: the actor and former Member of Parliament Janice Koh read the text in time with the video of the 1999 performance. That same year Loo won the Straits Times Life! Theatre Award for Best Multimedia Design for “Manifesto”, a production by The Necessary Stage and Drama Box.