Juliana Yasin

1970 — 2014 | Singapour, Singapour

Information

Juliana Yasin — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Portrait of Juliana Yasin © Digitised by Singapore Art Museum Archive in partnership with National Gallery Singapore Library & Archive, with kind permission from the family of the late Juliana Yasin

Singaporean multidisciplinary artist.

Performance and collaboration are intrinsic to Juliana Yasin’s practice. Her inclination for movement and social consciousness came when studying at the Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore (1989–1990), as a member of the New Age Players and Company. The company staged a show on ecological destruction at the 1990 Singapore Arts Festival Fringe, which was attended by prison inmates. J. Yasin left Singapore for Perth, Australia in 1993 to pursue a diploma in fine art at the Claremont Art School (1994) and subsequently obtained a BA in visual arts from the Curtin University of Technology (1996).
Returning to Singapore, she joined the art collectives The Artists Village (TAV), Plastique Kinetic Worms (PKW) and the Malay artist association A.P.A.D. Her first solo exhibition Collaborations (PKW, 1999) presented images of her face rendered by international fellow artists, beginning with a Xerox copy of herself. Her repeated face is not a narcissistic attempt at self-marketing but a direct form of communication with participants. For the TAV’s Artists Investigating Monuments II event (2004), she collaborated with Jeremy Hiah (1972–) and Kai Lam (1974–) to create the performance Raffles In the ACT. This involved transporting an interactive sculpture of Singapore’s colonial founder Stamford Raffles to major sites. The sculpture recorded conversations from artists and audiences, and the event culminated in an installation at the Singapore Art Museum. The performance was a response to the socio-historical baggage of modern Singapore, and a means of documenting the contemporary aspirations of the public.

As a Chinese-Malay Muslim woman, J. Yasin navigated issues related to ethnic identity, gender and the body. In a collaborative TAV event titled Her Identity (1992), J. Yasin cut out pictures of bodies from fashion and porn magazines, enlarged them and then tried matching them to artist Amanda Heng’s (1951–) live nude body, showing women trying to live up to an impossible beauty ideal. She also questioned the narrow definitions of women in Islam, creating the controversial performance The Veil (2001), where she dressed in black, masked her face and held a placard that said “The Subjugation of Women is a Worn-Out Habit in Saudi Arabia”. Performed in Singapore, Thailand and Germany, it demonstrated how a woman had to visibly show her chastity or her status as marital property.

In 2006, she co-curated the first Jatiwangi Art Festival, and Jatiwangi became her second home. Following a residency there, her 2009 solo exhibition Tali Timba explored kites as a metaphor for movement and freedom, and she invited a kite maker from Bandung to conduct a two-day workshop for local villagers. She saw herself as a kite getting right to the heart of the community and calling upon the inhabitants to join in a dream flight towards art. A year later she created an album with Indonesian musicians, entitled For Peace and Togetherness, which celebrated peace, love and solidarity amongst the people. Her two song albums were posthumously presented as a sound installation at the 2019 Singapore Biennale.

J. Yasin was also the Singapore-based researcher with Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong (2004 to 2006) and taught at the Kolej Bandar Utama in Kuala Lumpur. She died in 2014 after a long battle with cervical cancer.

Adele Tan

A biography produced as part of the programme The Flow of History. Southeast Asian Women Artists, in collaboration with Asia Art Archive