The subject of Yanyun Chen’s latest exhibition is not one typically broached over polite conversation at a dinner party. Yet it was in the unguarded hours of a family gathering—late, loud, and loosened by drink—that the contours of her next body of work came into focus: the collective memory of childhood physical discipline.
Titled Rotan Rattan: Meditations, the exhibition unfolds across woven rattan works, charcoal drawings, photography, and video. Its conceptual anchor is the rattan cane—an object instantly recognisable to many Singaporeans who came of age in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. “This whole story is very much a social memory,” Chen says. “Maybe even a generational one. People who grew up in a certain era—they recognise it immediately. That resonance is the most meaningful part for me.”
Much of Chen’s practice begins in emotional terrain, which led her to seek out a collaborator capable of holding space rather than closing it off. That search led her to a former student and fellow artist, Dave Lim, whose practice centres on photography and documentary filmmaking. As the pair began gathering stories of childhood discipline, Lim proposed a simple rule: no actual canes would be displayed in the exhibition. The emotional weight of the object, he felt, risked stalling any deeper exploration of the subject. “It gets very stuck,” he says. “People just start talking about how they were disciplined, or how they discipline. It felt like trauma dumping.”
That distance proves essential. Removed from its most literal trigger, the exhibition allows a dry humour to surface, even as it addresses a subject often considered taboo. The rattan works are not instruments here, but frames. Inside them, chalkboards bear words and phrases that summon childhood reflexively: Kena. Tahan. Orbigood. “Humour was a big part of why I felt compelled to tell this story,” Chen says, recalling how cousins once swapped memories of dodging punishment through shared laughter.
The material logic of the works is as deliberate as their emotional register. Rattan, Chen explains, is temperamental. It requires heat, but not excess; water, but not saturation; other plants to climb. It cannot be industrially farmed and must grow wild. Her engagement with the material extended over three years, encompassing the study of weaving and travel to West Kalimantan to follow rattan from forest to use. “I wanted to learn what it means to select rattan in the forest—where you go, how you find it, how you pull it from a tree,” she says.
Alongside the woven works is a series of charcoal drawings titled Scoldings, depicting hands caught mid-gesture, each reflecting a different person’s experience of childhood discipline. Charcoal, Chen’s primary medium, lends itself to instability. This time, she worked from video rather than still images. “Usually I work with photo references or the live object. This time, I wanted to work with video, because recalling memory involves movement—and that movement is unfocused. It’s very hard to stop a memory,” she explains. The effect is striking: the drawings appear suspended in motion, as if lifted directly from childhood recollection.
Staged in the Esplanade Tunnel, the exhibition’s public setting is impossible to ignore. Skateboard wheels clatter past; commuters pause, hesitate, move on. “This is a space you can’t run from,” Chen recalls thinking as she planned the show. “It’s a tube. The exits are on the other end. You’re trapped. So what do you do with a captive audience?”
Early walkthroughs revealed responses that were curious rather than confrontational. Visitors lingered over the poems, photographed images of rattan before encountering the material itself, and asked questions that were almost playful: What plant is this? Why rattan? “I hope people have fun with this exhibition,” Chen says. “Even if it’s uncomfortable.”
This is a distinctly Southeast Asian story—one Chen is well versed in telling. Deeply embedded in the local arts scene, she has taught at Yale-NUS College, currently supervises MFA students at NAFA, and is a recipient of the National Arts Council Singapore Young Artist Award. Still, the work of making art within a society shaped by efficiency often demands explanation. “It’s not exclusive to the arts,” she says. “Any cultural worker has to keep explaining why culture exists and why it’s important. That’s very sad.” It is also why Chen values creating spaces that resist such pressures. “I think it’s important to slow things down and let play exist for its own sake.”
Asked what sustains her, Chen gestures towards Lim. “My hopes and dreams,” she laughs. Youth, students, and emerging artists energise her. Watching ideas tested, challenged, and refined remains, for her, the point. “Being present in that process matters deeply,” she says. “Watching people make work; watching them think.”
Teaching abroad, particularly in the United States, sharpened her awareness of a local fluency with constraint. Where her American students struggled to express themselves within limits, Chen observed that Singaporean artists often operate comfortably inside them. “We know how to stay within lines and still say what we want to say, while being aware of context,” she explains. “That ability to be diplomatic, to tell stories that aren’t obvious-it’s a skill set.”
Drawing an easy parallel between the resilience of rattan and the endurance of Singapore’s artists may be tempting. Yet standing amid Chen and Lim’s works, the parallel feels unavoidable. Like the plant itself, art here continues to grow-climbing, adapting, resisting easy control, and, against the odds, taking root.
This article first appeared in the February 2026 issue of GRAZIA Singapore.
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