Visual artist Sim Chi Yin’s 13-year search for her deported leftist grandfather’s story takes the stage
SINGAPORE – Singaporean artist Sim Chi Yin’s search for her late grandfather – one of the 30,000 people deported to China during the Malayan Emergency (1948 to 1960) – has powered her art career, leading to the pinnacle of the art world at Venice Biennale.
After the career high of showing her short video Requiem (2017) at Venice earlier in 2024, the first-time performer is finding theatre a “nerve-racking” proposition.
Her hour-long lecture-performance One Day We’ll Understand, which plays at Singtel Waterfront Theatre from Aug 30 to Sept 1, is part of Esplanade’s The Studios season.
Speaking to The Straits Times over Zoom from New York where she is based with her husband and young son, she says: “I definitely am not (Singapore avant-garde pianist) Margaret Leng Tan.”
Sim is supported in her show by the same powerhouse team behind Tan’s Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep (2020) – director Tamara Saulwick, dramaturg Kok Heng Leun and video artist Nick Roux.
“It’s too late to be self-conscious now,” Sim laughs. She had initially suggested casting an actor. Her team, however, was adamant that she had to be the one on stage – “We’re not meeting a character, we’re meeting you.”
Her project is intimately tied to her family history. It started with a humble black-and-white photograph of her grandfather Shen Huansheng that Sim’s mother had shown her around 2011. Sim, who had quit her job as The Straits Times’ China correspondent in 2010, started digging for more information.
She learnt that Shen was a leftist newspaper editor in Perak, and later, a member of the Chinese Communist Party guerrilla army unit who was executed by the Kuomintang army in 1949. His dark history meant his identity was always shrouded in mystery, clouded by Cold War anxieties and trauma, never to be spoken of in the family.
Sim broke a 62-year silence in the family by following her grandfather’s footsteps in Perak and the family’s ancestral village in China. Her 13 years of research has yielded thousands of hours of footage and photographs, which will be woven into the 46-year-old artist’s performance.
Four workshops in, and Sim’s most received directorial note is to speak slower. She had asked if she should take acting classes, but was told she should be herself and not act. The experience has been a steep learning curve, she says.
She has had to learn to leave out materials that felt important to her but that could not work dramatically, such as a video of her youngest uncle’s uncontrollable crying on a train ride from Meizhou to Guangzhou.
Some of her family members are flying in from Malaysia and New Zealand for the show. She says: “I suspect it will be quite emotional for them, and I am not quite sure yet how that will affect me and my performance, but obviously, I want to make the best performance possible.”
Her four-year-old son is eager to attend the show too. While the topic of war and deportation might be seen as too difficult for a young child, Sim says: “This kid was in my belly when I did all that archival research about this war in the British archives. Part of my spoken-aloud contemplation is also around what I had already exposed him to in utero – and he’s quite a precocious child.”
Moreover, she says inheritance is a big part of what she is thinking about as a mother. “I am thinking about the future and about how we interrupt the colonial archive to work out some kind of inheritance to pass on to future generations. How do we retell these stories that are inconvenient or somewhat disciplined in the mainstream narrative?”
Sim also hopes the audience can see how a seemingly faraway war in colonial history resonates with contemporary politics. “For example, the mass deportation of unwanted populations – that’s still happening in different parts of the world.”
There is also the issue of what histories get remembered and how. She recently submitted her practice-based doctoral thesis to the war studies department at King’s College London, using her work to discuss how “art can perform an intervention into memory of conflict”.
Visiting the British Pavilion at Venice in 2024, she recognised there was a lot of reckoning with colonial histories on display, but one absence reminded her why her work – and those of other artists working on Malaya’s anti-colonial war, as she prefers to call the Malayan Emergency – matters.
Amid all the colonies’ stories, she says, “Malaya’s missing”.
Book It/One Day We’ll Understand
Where: Singtel Waterfront Theatre at Esplanade, 8 Raffles AvenueWhen: Aug 30 and 31, 8pm; Sept 1, 3pmAdmission: From $40
Info: str.sg/DWDh