From Singapore studios to global stages, these women artists and designers—image-makers, object-shapers, world-builders—are redefining what it means to make. Through lens, line, and material, they are expanding the visual language of our time. Ahead, meet Lavender Chang, the photographer and filmmaker whose images explore the temporal nature of everyday encounters.
Many an artist has tried to capture time in a literal form. Yet Lavender Chang seems to do so with particular deftness. The Taiwanese-born, Singapore-based photographer and filmmaker has a body of work that’s almost ephemeral in quality, resembling the translucent strokes of watercolour paintings more than they do still-images. Time stretches, light accumulates, and subject matters feel effervescent under her lens. For something so texturally rich, Chang’s works do not lie in capturing grandiose moments. Instead, she’s interested in what slips between them, and the presence left behind from those encounters. It’s not time stood still, but moving continuously, wafting in and around the frame.
Chang’s approach to photography is deceptively simple. She establishes what she calls “parameters”—including the place and time—then relinquishes control to chance. It may be a journey to a nearby bus stop or a visit to the park on a lazy Sunday afternoon where Chang readies her camera. Then, she waits, maybe for hours, maybe for days, documenting collective experiences as they occur. “I like to slow things down,” she explains. “I believe that only when we allow the artwork to breathe on its own can it go beyond our imagination.”
It’s a proven winning formula for Chang, evident in her list of achievements. After graduating from Nanyang Technological University in 2011 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography, she quickly emerged as one of Singapore’s most compelling contemporary image-makers. Over the years, she has earned accolades including the Noise Singapore Prize, the Crowbar Awards Gold, and the France + Singapore Photographic Arts Award. Many of her works have also found a permanent home in institutions like the National Museum of Singapore and the Peranakan Museum.
More recently, Chang brought her fascination with human connection to filmmaking. Her cinematography for artist and filmmaker John Clang in Their Remaining Journey and A Love Unknown were screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2018 and the Singapore International Festival of Arts in 2021. Her debut film, Absent Smile, was also selected to premiere at the 2022 Singapore International Film Festival.
This year, Chang presents her photography work, Dissolving Into The Same Breath, at the National Gallery Singapore. In this series, familiar preoccupations of Chang’s are explored—a form of time made visible, executed masterfully by her manipulation of photography techniques. “I’m capturing not just presence, but duration,” she says of the series. “That moment when two lovers become one, sharing intimacy and desire.”
It is this innate understanding of time as something fleeting that makes Chang’s work so transfixing. She handles the camera with an instinctive patience, a sensitivity to moments as they pass and disappear.
“Today, life moves very quickly, especially with technology,” she says. “But I often ask myself, ‘If these 15 seconds were the last 15 seconds of my life, did I just waste them?’ Sometimes I stop to look at the sky or something on the street, and realise how beautiful it is. Nobody else may care, but I hope more people will. That’s why I create my work, to remind people to notice these moments in their own lives.”
Ahead, Chang reflects on uncertainty as a creative method, the intrigue of mortality, and more.
GRAZIA Singapore (GS): Your photography and filmmaking often resists the idea of capturing a single “decisive moment.” How do you think about time as a material across your body of work?
Lavender Chang (LC): I always try to compress the indeterminacy of time into an image, to give time a physical form, and photography is the medium that allows me to create faithful evidence of how it exists, because it’s not normally visible to our eyes.
The process of my creation is very full of uncertainty. I can give an outline, but I don’t want to fully control it. When it comes to setting parameters, it really depends on the idea. In The Temporary We, I chose to go to a particular set of activities, and that’s my parameter. But I cannot control how long the music plays or how long a speech lasts. The traffic, the weather, or the duration of the shot—these are beyond my control, and that’s what makes each image unique. Even if I repeat the same process, the result will never be the same. But that’s life, full of unpredictability.
GS: Many of your works suggest a human presence without directly depicting the subject. What draws you to this indirect form of portraiture?
LC: When viewers look at my work, they may not always see a human figure. But to me, it’s not necessary to show the physical form in order to suggest human existence. There are many elements that can point to it, and we don’t always need to see something to be reminded of it. Everything in our surroundings is already proof of human presence.
I would say that my work focuses on the shifting and shaping of human civilisation and culture. I observe how people experience time, memory, and their surroundings, and I want to bring those collective moments together into a single image. I especially enjoy this when speaking to viewers at my art exhibitions. Everyone has different life experiences, so there’s no way I can live your life. But when you see my work and relate to it or share your thoughts, I feel like I can understand a part of you. In that sense, the artwork doesn’t end when I present it, it actually begins there.
GS: You’ve experimented with everything from traditional cameras to self-built devices, including pinhole constructions. How do you know a specific medium is right for an idea?
LC: The choice of camera always comes from the idea. As an artist, I don’t aim to present what already exists. I prefer to absorb and transform it through my own language. Through this process, the viewer is invited to see and experience something that can only emerge through the work itself. Once I go through this thinking process, the right medium reveals itself. You just know it’s right when the idea settles and I’m able to execute it.
For example, in my bean sprout series, The Movingly Minute Scale Of a Restricted Life, I was drawn to how bean sprouts resemble humans—my family, to be specific. This work was inspired by the idea of 家家有本难念的经, where every family has its own struggles that are difficult for outsiders to understand or resolve.
To express this, I used a cereal box to represent a house and placed a bean sprout inside of it as a “family member.” I then transformed the box into a pinhole camera by poking small holes into it. These boxes were placed in different homes, facing windows, so each “family member” would be looking out at the world from their own position.
When I collected them later, each image was slightly different because of their placement. This reflects how, even within the same environment, people perceive and experience things differently. The process moves from observing from the outside to being embedded within the structure itself, and that’s visible through how I choose to photograph them.
GS: How do you manage to capture energy so effectively in Dissolving Into The Same Breath?
LC: For this series, I used an analogue film camera, and the beauty of analogue is that even if the image doesn’t resolve into a clear form, the imprint remains on the negative. Although the images appear bright and colourful, they are actually taken in darkness. Through long exposure, the camera gathers light, colour, movement, and energy, compressing time into a single frame. It reveals something that the naked eye cannot fully grasp, even if it’s happening in front of us. The process allows that energy, form, and light to become visible.
There is also a painterly quality in these images. Because of the long duration, subtle movements become rich and layered. Light is never still, and the moonlight, car lights, street lights outside all move. Even if the subject is still, light continues to shift, and that transforms everything.
GS: In The Temporary We, your attention turns to the space of shared encounters. How do you begin to frame or compose a work when your subject is not an individual but a collective?
LC: I don’t think about composing the image in a fixed way. It’s more about being present, feeling the space and the people, and allowing things to fall into place naturally. What’s important is sensing the energy of the moment. When something moves you emotionally, you know something is right. In that moment, regardless of who we are, we are connected.
In this series, it’s not necessary to identify individuals. The idea is that we are here together, doing something together, rather than focusing on who each person is. We may have come from different directions and different lives, but we chose to be there at the same time. But once we leave the space, we may never recognise each other again. That’s why it’s called The Temporary We. Only in that moment, in that place, do we become “we”. After that, we return to being individuals, and perhaps we’ll never encounter each other again.
GS: Many of your photography series deal with the unexpected or the uncertain, and because you cannot control the final image, what things do you consider when in the post-image editing process?
LC: I don’t really do editing for my series. By the time the image is captured, it is already beyond what I can imagine. I really value the organic side of the work, and I feel that any kind of so-called perfecting would actually ruin the image. The work is formed through the entire process, including the duration, the movement, and the accumulation of light, so what is captured is already complete. I prefer to leave it as it is, rather than interfere with something that has already come together on its own.
GS: Across series like Floating Rays of a Wanderer and your body of film work, there’s a recurring focus on the mundane and the unseen. What draws you to these quiet, overlooked moments?
LC: I’m drawn to them because I want to see and reframe them in my own way. By slowing down and magnifying these moments, I allow myself to reconsider what I thought I already understood. The images continue to reveal themselves to me even after they’re made.
In my film work with John Clang, we also focus on these kinds of moments, but through real people. For example, Their Remaining Journey and A Love Unknown are what we call “docufictions”, a mix of fiction and documentary. The people in the film were not actors, they were real individuals sharing their experiences.
Before collaborating with John Clang, I had never worked with film. He chose to work with me not because I was technically trained, but because he wanted someone who could see from an artist’s point of view. When I was filming, I approached it the same way I do photography: through feeling. I focused on whether I could capture the emotion, the connection, and the presence of the person, rather than whether it was technically “correct”. That gave me a certain freedom in the process, because I wasn’t constrained by rules.
In Absent Smile, we focused on John’s parents. His mother has already passed away, so when we watch the film now, she feels so alive and vivid, like she’s right there in front of you. You can almost hear her laugh, and you start to notice all these small details. It becomes something very emotional, because it holds onto a moment that no longer exists in real life.
That idea of disappearance is also why time becomes such an important element in my work. I think of film and photography as ways to preserve things that will eventually disappear. In everyday life, things change very quickly, and we forget what used to be there. For example, in your neighbourhood, there might be a shop that keeps changing. You know it’s different each time, but you can’t remember what it used to be before. That loss of memory is something I think about a lot.
I think film and photography are closely related, and to me, film is essentially a moving image. In images, you notice details and layers that you might miss otherwise, and each time you revisit it, you see something new. I don’t want to lose touch with that act of observing. I hope that I can continue to see beyond my small screen.
A version of this story originally appeared in the May 2026 issue of GRAZIA Singapore.
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