Introduction

A photograph of an anti-government demonstration in Seoul, 2016. Protestors in the foreground are pushed up face-to-face against a tightly packed contingent of police in anti-riot gear. In the foreground a protestor is holding up a printed sign in Korean that reads

Godwin Koay is an art worker and artist based in Singapore. This place, understood both as something limited by its historical, political, social, material, cultural contexts, and as something more than what its present offers, is also the main source and target of concern for their work.

The Singaporean nation state is at once city, island, garden, stage, laboratory, expo, model, and fortress. It tears itself away from peninsula and archipelago in exceptionalism while claiming to be at the centre of the entirety of “Southeast Asia”. To live here and be “from here” should not preclude critically examining what here even is, especially when these facets of it are so zealously defended with law and order, tightly wound up with what forms of thought and expression are permissible or regarded as impossible. This also comes with the understanding that currents of repression and reactionary movements are globally connected, just as production and trade are, and as struggles ought to be.

A photograph of a May Day street procession in Hong Kong, 2019. Demonstrators have backs facing the camera, in the foreground is a contingent of migrant domestic workers, many of whom are wearing red t-shirts and carrying bags, holding handwritten protest signs big and small, some even on their heads, in Indonesian. Some signs read

Godwin's artistic inquiry thus uses textual and visual material drawn from various media spaces pertaining to statecraft and extraction, and are presented through digital, pigment, screen, and print processes. Central to the work are speculative visions that propose or anticipate the possibilities of rupture from normative and violent enclosures, sometimes appearing as open-ended provocations or other more discursive and didactic forms of aesthetic intervention.

Over the course of six years from 2014, Godwin has been exposed to a web of contexts and connections via artist residency programmes. These localities – Taipei, Nantes, Kowloon, Gwangju, Amsterdam, Seoul – and adjacent opportunities for exchange have sustained their practice while providing an invaluable means for continued self-education, particularly in informing a search for individual agency and collective belonging. Although faced with the anxious realities of living with precarity and the difficulty of showing work in Singapore, a longer-term goal remains that of weaving a broader emancipatory practice sharing the threads of transnational queer, decolonial, anti-authoritarian, and anti-capitalist fugitive imaginations, exploring paths otherwise to established conventions of the art industry.

From 2018 to 2021, Godwin also co-organised activities and events with members of the soft/WALL/studs collective and space, immersing in and helping to extend the work of maintenance, care, publishing, and joy. While that chapter may have concluded, those experiences have been crucial in shaping desires around art, labour, affect, and community, and the things that are to come.

A photograph of an anti-racism march in Berlin, 2015. Marchers have backs facing the camera, and mostly dressed in winter clothes with puffy jackets and carrying bags, orange flags of the anti-racism organisers can be seen, as well as anrcho-feminist and anti-fascist flags in the distance. In the mid-ground, above the crowd, a sign in the shape of a speech bubble reads