Simple daily acts of speaking, walking and touching are foundational to the artistic practice of Amanda Heng. They signify her commitment to transforming the role of an artist from an image or object maker to that of a facilitator of space, exchange, relationships and experiences. This is undergirded by her main concerns of gendered roles in society, cultural identity politics and globalised patterns of urban transitions. A. Heng came to artmaking in her late 30s in 1986, leaving her unfulfilling job as a tax officer to take up a printmaking course at the Lasalle College of the Arts. She graduated with a diploma two years later and co-founded pioneering art collective The Artists’ Village in the same year. After a stint researching the women’s liberation movement and feminist art at Central St Martins in the UK, she then pursued a BA in Fine Art at the Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia, graduating in 1993. A. Heng realised that a visual art practice, particularly that of performance-based and process-driven work, allowed her to respond meaningfully to what was happening around her and even to change the public’s awareness and habitual reactions towards social situations and outcomes. Her community-based inclinations would lead her to establish the first artist-run women collective in Singapore, Women In The Arts (WITA), in 1999.

A significant part of A. Heng’s work deals with and develops from her experience as a single Chinese woman growing up in a traditional patriarchal household in Singapore. She and Her Dishcover (1991) is an installation that reframes the diminished position of domestic labour undertaken by women as an activity of self-discovery and acknowledgment. The performance S/He (1994) examined the clash of Western and Eastern cultures in the construction of the Singaporean, embodied by her experience of being placed in Chinese-medium schools (whilst her older siblings attended English-language schools) amidst a rapidly Westernising Singapore. She then explored gender inequality through the subject of Asian female infanticide in her installation Missing (1994). The social and linguistic estrangement that her own Teochew-speaking mother faced at the time became the impetus for ensuing projects in 1996–97, entitled Another Woman, a series of photographs showing A. Heng posing next to her mother and in various stages of undress, from positions that reveal emotional distance to deep embraces, delineating complex familial bonds and possible dialogues despite generational differences. Between Women and Narrating Bodies (both 1999–2000) continue this trajectory with the investigation of representational modalities of women’s bodies and the agency of their own voices in navigating their own relationships in their specific cultural contexts.

From 2000, A. Heng was also invested in the national and exoticised image of the internationally iconic Singapore Girl – the batik kebaya-clad flight attendants of Singapore Airlines. The artist dresses up in the uniform, appearing in various locations in Singapore that will never be advertised to the world, but which are of local importance to ecology, heritage and memory. The most indelible incarnation of A. Heng’s long-running Singirl project would be her invitation to female visitors above the age of 18 to take pictures of their own bare bottoms (countering the coy demure image of the Singapore Girl) in a specially set up booth and to contribute them to a website repository, singirl.online, that collates all the images and sequentialises them into a scrolling parade, questioning conventional beauty standards, bodily objectification and perceptions.

The revaluation and validation of the quotidian, the bodily and the communitarian led A. Heng towards an art practice that is recognisably performative but also collaborative and iterative in nature. Her most well-known pieces are Let’s Chat (1996) and Let’s Walk (1999), which have been restaged over the years in different countries and in various permutations, through live performances, workshops and documentation exhibitions. Let’s Chat is a performance work that invited audiences to sit and converse with A. Heng and other participants at a table whilst picking the roots off bean sprouts and drinking tea, with the main aim being the recovery of the neighbourly exchange of stories as in earlier times. Let’s Walk is a performance series that has A. Heng and members of the public walking backwards with a high-heeled shoe held in their mouths and only a handheld mirror to guide them across the streets. The work was a response to the news that female employees were the first to be fired when companies downsized during the 1997 Asian financial crisis and that women were resorting to getting beauty treatments and plastic surgery to keep their jobs, prioritising physical improvements over skills and education.

These performances that leveraged everyday routines and interactions were also strategies to keep the medium going during the state funding ban on performance art and forum theatre in the 1990s. By blurring the lines between art and reality, A. Heng could also democratise access and appreciation for how art can work in life. Walk with Amanda (2000), which was part of an experimental theatre event by The Necessary Stage, is perhaps the best example of such a strategy. Audiences were led from the lobby of the theatre company to a nearby hawker centre, where they found A. Heng laying out pink tablecloths and then serving food to them. At the close, A. Heng invited an audience member to cut through her T-shirt to retrieve a bloodstained packet of cash so that she could reimburse the audience the price of their admission ticket. The audience was then led back to the theatre company with A. Heng rolling out a long strip of red carpet for them all to walk on, returning them as participants rather than as passive viewers.