Godwin Koay is an artist and art worker based in Singapore. Their artistic inquiry takes the extant hegemonic political, social, material, and aesthetic paradigms of the Singaporean nation-state as its departure point. The island as city, garden, stage, expo, and fortress, at once model and laboratory, is treated as a site for interrogating globally emergent neo-reactionary currents. This research centres on textual and visual material that inhabit various media spaces pertaining to statecraft and extraction, and are funnelled through digital, pigment, and print processes when presented. Central to the work are speculative visions that propose or anticipate the possibilities of autonomous rupture from normative and violent structures, flowing alongside open-ended provocations of potential and more direct forms of aesthetic intervention.

For the past two years Godwin has been exposed to a varied topology of contexts via artist residency programmes. These localities – Taipei, Nantes, Kowloon, Gwangju, Amsterdam – and adjacent opportunities for exchange have sustained an ongoing study of historical and contemporary popular movements for change, while providing the means for continued self-education, particularly in informing a search for affinity and communality. Amidst the exigencies and anxieties of living with precarity, a longer-term goal remains that of weaving an emancipatory counterhegemonic practice sharing the threads of queer, decolonial, and anti-capitalist fugitive imaginations.