About
Chen Shitong (陈时桐) is a visual artist based in Singapore whose practice explores perception, presence and looking. Working across sculpture, printmaking, photography, collage and installation, he investigates how subtle shifts in orientation, proximity and distance shape our experience of space.
Beginning with careful observation, his practice draws from everyday encounters and familiar environments. Through processes of reduction, repetition and transformation, these observations are distilled into images and forms that move between figure, trace and abstraction.
Increasingly, his work is concerned not only with the subject itself, but with the spaces between and around forms, where absence, distance and spatial relationships become active elements of perception.
Rather than offering fixed narratives, Chen approaches art-making as a way of questioning how we look. Through processes of reduction, he creates new possibilities for looking, inviting viewers to slow down and discover meaning through relationships of form, space and absence.
Kin
Looking has become the foundation of my practice. Beginning with careful observation, my work explores how perception is shaped through framing, reduction and spatial relationships.
Across sculpture, printmaking, photography, collage and installation, I investigate how simple forms can suggest presence, tension and connection.
Rather than presenting fixed narratives, the works remain open, allowing meaning to emerge through the relationships between forms, spaces and the act of looking at itself.
Together, these works invite viewers to slow down, look closely and reconsider how we perceive the familiar.
Research methodology and theoretical framework
My research methodology begins with observation. I look closely at everyday encounters, gestures, shadows, and the relationships between people and space.
These observations are developed through making, using sculpture, printmaking, photography, collage and moving image.
Through processes of reduction, cropping, repetition and material experimentation, I allow one work to lead to another. Rather than working towards a fixed outcome, making becomes a way of asking questions and discovering new ways of looking.
The research is informed by phenomenology, particularly ideas around perception, orientation, and embodied experience. Writers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sara Ahmed, and Juhani Pallasmaa have influenced how I think about the relationship between the body, material, and space. These ideas support my understanding of art-making as a way of thinking through experience rather than simply representing it.
Sharon Hardjono
Wong Shih Yaw
Yen Melia
Chong Yanhong
Caddie Aiw
Brenda Lee
