Sim Li Yan Emily
About
Emily is a Singapore-based multidisciplinary artist working across printmaking, drawing, photography and digital art.
Her practice is driven by a love for vibrant colours, playful imagery and the joy of creating imaginative visual experiences. Inspired by whimsical and expressive forms, she creates works that invite viewers into lively, colourful worlds while evoking a sense of wonder and emotional connection.
Inspired by everyday experiences, personal memories and moments of curiosity, Emily explores themes of joy, emotion and human connection. She is interested in how playful and accessible imagery can communicate deeper ideas, inviting viewers to engage with her work in ways that feel both personal and relatable. Through experimentation across different techniques and mediums, she continues to refine her craft while remaining open to new ideas and creative directions.
Her work often uses bright palettes and playful visual language to express feeling and atmosphere, balancing lightness with emotional depth. Alongside this, she is interested in how visual storytelling can shift between imagination and lived experience, creating space for viewers to pause and connect.
Through her evolving practice, Emily hopes to create meaningful visual experiences that inspire joy, curiosity and emotional connection. As she continues to grow artistically, she remains committed to exploring new possibilities while creating work that is vibrant, thoughtful and full of life.
Anthropomarket
Anthropomarket is a satirical series of A5 ink-on-paper drawings that explores overconsumption and customer behaviour through personal experiences in retail work. The work depicts chaotic shopping scenarios, where shoppers are represented as animal-like characters to reflect instinctive and habitual consumption patterns.
Rendered in blue ballpoint ink with selective red highlights, each drawing captures moments of entitlement, impatience and disruption within everyday service encounters. The retail worker appears as a skeletal figure with butterfly wings, symbolising emotional exhaustion and labour imbalance.
Extending into a physical installation of clothing racks and hangers, Anthropomarket reconstructs a retail environment, inviting viewers to navigate the space as both observer and participant. The work uses humour, exaggeration and repetition to reflect on the cyclical nature of consumption and its normalisation in daily life.
Research methodology and theoretical framework
Anthropomarket is informed by a practice-led research approach, where drawing and making function as a method of visual inquiry into consumer culture. The work develops through continuous experimentation in comic-style illustration and installation, allowing ideas to emerge through process and material exploration.
The project is grounded in theories of consumer culture, particularly how retail environments operate as constructed systems that shape behaviour, desire and identity. It examines how everyday shopping spaces are designed as performative environments that influence perception and consumption.
Humour is used as a critical strategy, informed by the benign violation theory, to explore the tension between familiarity and distortion in consumer experiences. This allows the work to critique consumption in a way that is accessible, reflective and visually engaging.
The installation features a red clothing rack, blue hangers, framed drawings and A3 digitally printed works. It extends this inquiry into spatial form, referencing retail display systems while subtly disrupting them.
Zhong Rui
Serene Lee
Sonya M Pillay
Yuni Sara Binte Hussaini
Belvia Yusgiantoro
Tong Winona I
