Vanessa liem
22, Artist
Vanessa liem took the gold proze at the 2019 UOB Painting of the Year in the emerging artist category when she was still a student at School of the Arts Singapore, the nation's premier arts school. The annual art competition is the longest-running in Singapore and one of the most recognised in Southeast Asia to uncover young talent. Liem followed up with two solo exhibitions at Cuturi and she is just 22 years old.
Her paintings of figures are distinct in their surrealism, a style she says comes from her love of dystopian and sci-fi movies suchas Ex Machina, about a humanoid robot who triumphs over her creator. Her work beckons the viewer to explore and question conventional portayal of the female body. Its distorted, alien, phantasmagorical forms defy objectification like those traditionally depicted in paintings.
She's ready to evolve, however. "As I grow older, my art has shifted to something more rooted in reality, the human body and the gaze," she says. But the distortion and surrealism? That won't change any time soon, she promises. Reality is relative after all.
