Khoo Peng Ean

 


Poet-artist of A Penguin Pillowcase: contemporary ink poetry, Peng-Ean was born in Malaysia but now resides in Singapore with her family. She has read and exhibited both locally and internationally including the Boston Public Library, Massachusetts and the Warwick Museum of Art, Rhode Island. Her works explore the terrain between poetry and visual art, environmental issues, and post-colonial questioning of identity, transnationalism and multiple histories.


Multitalented Dynamo and Poet Peng-Ean Khoo has been an invaluable volunteer and friend of AME's expansion during the past year. As a poet-artist, she has read, published and exhibited extensively in the Greater Boston area. She currently resides in Singapore.

Peng-Ean was born in Malaysia, and has lived in Singapore, Sydney, Cambridge UK, London, and Boston, MA. Of Chinese ethnicity and Malaysian nationality, she finds herself constantly caught in the crossroads of her increasingly fused international heritage. The question of post-colonial Asian identity is currently most prevalent in her poetry. She also paints and draws, and thinks all her work somehow gravitates towards a larger more universal search — that of existence — of who we are, where we are and where we are going, as a human race.

Peng-Ean read Economics at Cambridge University, UK and is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. She spent six years at PricewaterhouseCoopers, a public accounting firm, and accumulated invaluable personal development, business, and management skills and knowledge.

Her most challenging maneuver is a juggling trick that involves switching hats between her business and artistic pursuits. She founded and co-founded, respectively: The Gallery Behind The Falls, a new media ezine, and i Am aur, an international art, culture and travel organization.

 

Artgroup: Landing Space

Comments: ARTFIELDS
Breathing art at Gone Fishing
produced by Landing Space in collaboration with Gone Fishing



Art can no longer be contained in museums and galleries. It has to be lived. It has to be woven, infused, constructed, and even blogged into our lives. Every age faces the unanswerable questions of 'what is art' and 'what does it do?' This series of projects hopes not to provide answers to these perpetual questions, but facilitate their asking by new generations.

Contact: Peng-Ean Khoo, at Type pengean followed by @yahoo.com.

31 May 2004, Singapore – Have you ever wondered how an art installation is conceptualised and eventually assumes its final form in a site-specific environment? For the first time in Singapore, a group of artists will bring you behind the scenes, demystify contemporary art and make living, breathing art a complete reality to all.

Can you truly say you have tasted art? When was the last time you drank art? Or woven a fabric of architecture? Would you like to blog artists in return for placemats? How about constructing walls and defacing them to your hearts’ content? If playing with spray paint is not quite your cup of tea, how about manufacturing some grass tea and infusing your existence in poetic space instead?

For one whole year, four contemporary artists - Twardzik Ching Chorleng, Brigid K. Watson, Peng-Ean Khoo and Lee Tet Keong – invite you to join them to explore the age old questions of ‘what is art’ and ‘what does it do?’ through making, breathing, living art. “Through Artfields, we hope to further breakdown the separation between art and life by placing art in a living space where neither dominates the other. Instead there will be a true interplay of art and life; the café’s activity becomes part of the art and vice versa. We hope you will join our vision and quest of living and breathing art into the Singapore public.”

Four projects have been planned for the year beginning with “Wave” in June 2004, a site-specific installation made of string woven by Twardzik Ching Chorleng. In October 2004, American artist Brigid Watson will visit from Boston and together with local artist Peng-Ean Khoo, they will create “blogged:”, an environment constructed entirely of the paper documentation of their three-month online diaries to each other. From January to March 2005, Lee Tet Keong invites “The Player” to play with walls. In “The Fourth Cube”, for the duration of April to June 2005, Peng-Ean Khoo will bring the viewer into a three-dimensional chapbook.

The exhibition series will commence in June 2004. We invite the community to walk-in and participate in the entire process of art-making. You may aid in building structures to alter the café space by weaving, blogging, constructing, and infusing tea. You are also welcome to interact with these structures thereafter. Additionally, all will also be involved in the critical dismantling process which is often overlooked. Workshops are available throughout the year, thereby providing opportunities for real time critique and collective learning.

Artfields opens on 9 July 2004, at 7pm and will be available daily to the general public during café opening hours. Admission is free.

Media interviews can be arranged at 90479602. The media is invited to directly participate in the making, living, critiquing, and dismantling of Artfields.


Event Info
Title ARTFIELDS
Dates and description of projects

June – September 2004: “Wave” by Twardzik Ching Chorleng
Cotton string will be stretched from wall to wall repetitively back and forth, throughout the entire cafe from the front entrance to the back exit, as if it was a fabric weaved into the architecture. This ‘fabric’ will stretch throughout the entire cafe from the front entrance to the back exit. The viewer/patron will get a sense of entering into a dreamscape where the whole architectural structure of the cafe will be transformed into a giant undulating wave.

October – December 2004: “blogged” by Brigid K. Watson and Peng-Ean Khoo
The artists will print out the entire 90+ entries and attach them with sewn thread into the various forms described. Words will literally take over the entire space in the form of carpets, wall paper, window treatments, and table settings. In addition, various individuals of a range of ages and ethnicities will be recorded reading these blogs aloud. These recordings will be played simultaneously during the entire duration of the installation. Visitors will be invited to write blogs of their own and send them to the artists on a laptop computer provided. Anyone who leaves a blog is then invited to take an actual piece of the installation home.

January – March 2005: “The Player” by Lee Tet Keong
Strips of walls of different widths and heights, some stretching from floor to ceiling, will be constructed for this installation. “With the café’s existing wall as the backdrop, I hope to extend its energy to the whole café and build a complete playground for the patrons to relive a second childhood, and for the younger patrons, to live a piece of childhood that was unavailable to me: to make marks on those untouchable HDB flats wall.”

April 2005 – June 2005: “The Fourth Cube” by Peng-Ean Khoo
The central idea is that human activity dotting space is like writing text on paper. Poetic environments marked by a poem with a rain element, effectively becoming ‘rain pages’ will be constructed. Patrons will be invited to manufacture, infuse and drink tea. This is by way of the patron ‘writing’ his/her existence into the ‘rain pages’. Poetry no longer lies flat on paper: it infuses our very existence.

Venue Gone Fishing
Located at 15 Chu Lin Rd, off Jalan Remaja, off Hillview Avenue.
Tel: 6762-9901. Board bus 173 from Bukit Batok Interchange and alight at the 8th stop.

Gallery Hours Open daily (except Mondays and Tuesdays) from 11.30 a.m. to 11.30 p.m. and closed for siesta from 2.30-5.30p.m. on weekdays.

Admission Free

Producers
Landing Space: Art in Alternative Spaces
In October 2002, Landing Space held its debut exhibition introducing Land Art to the Singapore public by transforming a historical abandoned warehouse into a labyrinth of installed forms. In Borrowed Nature (January – June 2004), we ‘returned’ 60 collections from the natural environment to Woodlands Regional Library in a NLB-SAM project entitled “Woodland”. Artfields will be our third and most ambitious project to date involving direct audience participation and international exchange.

Gone Fishing: Field of Dreams
Founded in October 2002 by a husband and wife team, Kenny and Mei Chin, Gone Fishing is the vessel on which they set out to fish for ways to live meaningfully in the sea of life. Gone Fishing is a haven for unrestrained self-expression. Its walls are filled with doodles and words of wisdom through which patrons express their innermost feelings and thoughts freely. It is a place, a field, for dreamers to live their dreams.