Amanda Heng

One of Singapore’s pioneering contemporary artists, Amanda Heng approaches art as a tool for change, and, to that end, produces collaborative, multidisciplinary performances, public art projects, and installations through which she critically examines such pressing social issues as collective memory, national identity, and gender politics. Other people are central to her work. As such, she was one of the founding members of Singapore’s first artist-run space (Artists’ Village, 1988) and founded the country’s first female artists collective (Women in the Arts Collective, 1999). As she states: “I don’t want to be an isolated figure.” Heng’s Let’s Walk (begun 1999) exemplifies this ethos. For these performances, she and other women held high-heeled shoes in their mouths while walking backwards down streets in cities worldwide—a scathing indictment of the privileging of women’s looks over their professional capacities.