Lip Chiong
I think there are certain spaces that reside in the collective subconscious of a people. These could be our everyday familiar environments that had over time coagulated into a hazy but lingering point of view of the kind of space and condition. For example, I think such an image of the HDB public housing corridor exists in the psyche of many Singaporeans.
I wanted to depict this image. At the same time, imagine deviations from the status quo as a kind of creative transgression and escapism. I wonder how our environments and what we readily accept without question shape our sense of identity and what we are capable to think about, and by these we refresh our state of being.
In using generative AI to construct these carefully staged but impossible scenes, I encountered the clichés and stereotypes of definitions perpetuated by mass media, regurgitated by AI trained on our data, a mirror of who we are in some sense. I am also intrigued by the unpredictable interpretations of AI in relation to my personal subjective understanding of a prompt’s meaning, and how to make creative sense of these mismatches.
The presented image invites the active participation of the wandering gaze of a viewer.
Lip Chiong
I think there are certain spaces that reside in the collective subconscious of a people. These could be our everyday familiar environments that had over time coagulated into a hazy but lingering point of view of the kind of space and condition. For example, I think such an image of the HDB public housing corridor exists in the psyche of many Singaporeans.
I wanted to depict this image. At the same time, imagine deviations from the status quo as a kind of creative transgression and escapism. I wonder how our environments and what we readily accept without question shape our sense of identity and what we are capable to think about, and by these we refresh our state of being.
In using generative AI to construct these carefully staged but impossible scenes, I encountered the clichés and stereotypes of definitions perpetuated by mass media, regurgitated by AI trained on our data, a mirror of who we are in some sense. I am also intrigued by the unpredictable interpretations of AI in relation to my personal subjective understanding of a prompt’s meaning, and how to make creative sense of these mismatches.
The presented image invites the active participation of the wandering gaze of a viewer.
Who Lives Here?
.avif)
Daydreamers...
.avif)
Dramaturg's Notes
With the films Who Lives Here? and Daydreamers…, Singapore-based architect-artist Lip Chiong invites the audience to be a flâneur in the very familiar public Housing & Development Board (HDB) corridor spaces. To Lip, these spaces are quintessentially local and represent no-man’s land, where the urban-rural and personal-communal can blur. Much like many houses in Japan that Lip has seen during his visits , where care by the inhabitant extends lovingly to its exterior, Lip reimagines the corridors as a canvas for personal touches and communal connections. Each film presents an “as is” and “what if” reality respectively that allows the audience to become keen observers and flâneurs who experience drifting through these urban landscapes.
Positing that a space likened to the porch at a home’s entrance that can serve as a space for communal conversation and contemplation is missing, and resonating with Peter Buchanan’s idea that the architectural spaces in the neighbourhood can be a place for self expression and connection with others, both films shed new light on the HDB corridor.
Buchanan writes: “Architecture is more than a mere record or reflection of who we are. Instead, the fundamental purpose of architecture is as a means for creating our cultures and ourselves.” Lip has been building on this since his 2015 discussion on "Housing as Incubator for New Ideas, Identities and Lifestyles - Interiors Inversed as Exterior Addresses". This ideation finds visual expression in the two films. Lip highlights what’s left in real life following the HDB 1.2-meter gap rule in Who Lives Here?, to metaphorically represent a rite of passage and a zone of self-expression and shared community life for its inhabitants in Daydreamers... Through these films, there is a renewed sense of individual agency, which to him, is missing from Singapore's notion of public housing.
To allow the flâneur to engage with the city corridor as a living work of art, Lip kept to the careful layering (literally and figuratively) of the different elements in Daydreamers... Each fictional inhabitant - be it the writer, painter or skygazer - foregrounds aspects of deviance and agency in creating their spaces. A systematic 5-zone approach - with manual collaging and redrawing - allowed for an interplay between artist-architect and Artificial Intelligence (AI), whilst acknowledging the prevalence of widely accepted clichéd notions (of people and things) informed by internet and social media derived datasets. This was especially needed to avoid stereotypical images being generated by AI. Hence thoughtful layering of text and image prompts/inputs, adjustments, and refinements can foster a new form of artistic expression, where the boundaries between artist and tool, creator and collaborator, become intertwined. Like the flâneur, here the artist too engages in both a personal and social act.
About Artist(s)
Lip Chiong
Lip Chiong is a Singaporean architect-turned-artist who makes immersive videos of imaginary environments using a mix of film, digital media and generative AI. Born in 1975, Lip worked as an architect in London UK since 2003 and later in Shanghai China as founder of his design studio until 2020 when he started working as a full-time artist based in Singapore. In 2023, Lip exhibited 3 feature video artworks made with generative AI tools at the Singapore Pavilion at Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Lip uses generative AI to construct carefully staged but impossible scenes set in familiar viewpoints that represent a collective sense of Singaporean identity. His recent work attempts to challenge our imagination of the status quo whilst revealing compromises and contradictions between the individual and their social contract. At the same time, the work brings into question the clichés and stereotypical concepts that are prevalent in our collective sensibility, likely to be heavily shaped by content we consume from the internet and social media, which in turn has become the datasets used to train the generative AI models now used to produce further content and artworks.
Lip is also exploring a new video aesthetic that cannot be produced prior to the invention of generative AI tools, a metamorphic quality where the depicted subject digitally morphs itself from frame to frame, rather than changing via motion, lighting and other physical transformations filmed in the real world. He is interested in the compositional beauty found in the resulting image of his imaginary emotive landscape videos, often incorporating shifting multiple perspectives and scales within a single picture plane not of a western nor eastern spatial sensibility, paired with atmospheric sound. He is working on a series of immersive audio-video wall and floor projections of AI generated imaginary landscapes.
.avif)
%20(1).avif)
.avif)
.avif)
_cropped.avif)
