Boarding Call

Hello, everyone!

The Art & Market (A&M) team is delighted to share with you our sophomore annual issue of ‘Check-In’! As we are writing this note, we are hearing of friends in the Southeast Asian art community going on trips and welcoming overseas guests. After a prolonged period of restricted interactions, we are excited about the collaborations that these meetings in person will spark.

For now, we look back at an exciting year for A&M. We embarked on several new ventures. In December 2021, we launched Art & Market Small Rooms (AMSR), offering group workshops and individual consultations to early-career artists and writers. The project culminated in three pairs of digital and physical small rooms, each showcasing artworks by a Singapore artist and creative responses from three writers.

To start 2022, we partnered with the National Arts Council Singapore to present Singapore Art Week (SAW) Dialogues. The talks were extended with ‘Let’s talk about (what we) SAW’, a two-part forum in response to SAW. Organised with the MA Arts and Cultural Leadership programme at LASALLE College of the Arts, it was a platform for key opinion leaders, tertiary students and recent graduates to speak their minds about the multi-day event.

We also kicked off two podcasts: ‘Ian’s Research Club’, an extension of long-form interviews by Ian Tee, and ‘From A to Zig-Zag’ hosted by Nadya Wang, which features creative practices in the region. In all our endeavours, we have been heartened by the enthusiasm of established and emerging practitioners from the regional art community to share their journeys with us.

As before, ‘Check-In’ is our way of celebrating and documenting the individual and collective efforts in the community to come together and to constantly strive to do better. The issue covers a broad range of topics including translation, financial literacy, artist-run spaces, art therapy and social media. The writers in our long-running ‘My Own Words’ series share their cross-disciplinary perspectives on how art intersects with activism, food, and science. And in ‘Ongoing Conversations’, we speak to art practitioners in various roles about their practices, focusing on the initiatives they have taken and the challenges they have overcome.

Throughout the issue, we catch up with our ‘Fresh Faces’ artists to find out about their works in progress. And to round up, we ask four curators to give personal reflections about their work, as well as recommendations for places to visit in their respective localities.

We hope you will enjoy the reads in this issue. Thank you to everyone whose efforts make Check-In 2022 possible, from our contributors and interviewees to our patrons and readers. We look forward to bringing you more content online through our main platform artandmarket.net, and in real life! Do write to us at info@artandmarket with feedback and ideas. We would love to hear from you, and keep the conversations going.

Nadya, Ian and Vivyan