Venice Biennale 2026: Singaporean artist Amanda Heng on the practice behind ‘A Pause’

That was already evident in the early photographic series Parts of My Body from 1990, which used direct close-ups of her limbs and joints to insist on the body as a matter of fact: a site of agency rather than display. Later works extended that language outward into social space. Let’s Chat (1996-ongoing), Let’s Walk (1999-ongoing) and Walking the Stool (1999-2000) all use simple, everyday actions to test how people move towards one another, how care is expressed, and how public life is shaped by habit, architecture and unspoken codes.

Across performance, installation, photography and participatory acts, her practice has never been built around sudden turns or grand declarations. It moves instead through recurrence: the body, the everyday, the social encounter, and the question of how identity is formed in relation to family, gender, history and place.

Heng speaks of these gestures with unusual clarity. “Lived experiences are concrete and grounded resources with many stories to tell,” she says. “Every individual has something in them. A body with no story is just a corpse or an empty shell.” It is an arresting formulation, and perhaps the clearest key to her practice. In her work, the everyday is never incidental. It is the material through which memory, values, relationships and social pressures become visible.

That understanding is closely tied to the shape of her own life. Heng came to art later than many artists do, with a clear sense of purpose. She left her job as a tax officer in her late thirties and enrolled at Lasalle College of the Arts in 1986 to study printmaking. “I was pushed to a stage where it was make or break,” recalls the now 75-year-old Singaporean artist. “If I didn’t try, I would regret it for life.” The line clarifies the shape of her practice. She pursued art because it gave her a space large enough to hold the questions that ordinary life had no room for.

She describes Singapore in the 1980s as “suffocating—a place where everything is programmed”. Travel altered her sense of scale; once outside, she says, “everything opens up”. In that period of uncertainty, she backpacked through Europe, returning without a fixed blueprint but with the courage and excitement to pursue a new path. Heng’s art would go on to resist prescribed roles much as she once resisted the script of office life. What she found was not only a discipline, but a method of thinking through who she was.

That question of selfhood quickly widened. Heng’s practice began with questions of identity and the changing terms of Singaporeanness in the years after independence. “The question of who I am, what is Singaporean, what is Chinese,” she says, grew out of the rapid social transformations of that period.

Art became the space in which she could think through ancestry, history, gender and belonging. Few works embody that more movingly than Another Woman, the long-running photographic series made with her mother across 1996, 2014 and 2023. Heng says she turned to her mother while tracing both gender identity and cultural inheritance, wanting to understand “what she inherited and what I was born with”. What followed was nearly three decades of working together, until her mother’s passing in 2023. The work now reads as both inquiry and reconciliation: a record of intergenerational intimacy shaped over time through repeated portraits with her mother.

Her wider contribution to Singapore’s art history is equally significant. Heng co-founded The Artists Village in 1988, helping to shape one of the country’s most important experimental art communities, and later in 1999 initiated Women in the Arts, Singapore’s first women artists’ collective. Both moves were practical and intellectual at once. She  saw that women artists were present yet under-recognised, and that education, solidarity and visibility had to be built, not awaited. “Why can’t women be serious artists? Why can’t we be respected as such like other male artists?” she recalls asking. The force of that question still travels.

It would be easy to position A Pause as the distillation of such a prolific career. More interesting is the way Heng resists that framing. Even now, she speaks of collaboration as process rather than outcome. Her decision to work with Yap grew out of shared experience—including their 2024 presentation of Heng’s works at the Benesse House Museum in Naoshima, Japan, where she was featured as a Benesse Prize artist—and through an openness to what a partnership might make possible. “It’s a collaborative process,” she says. “It’s like a white canvas—you make a mark, and from there decide what your experience and expression become.”

Read more: A guide to Japan’s art islands: Naoshima, Teshima and Inujima

A Pause transforms the Singapore Pavilion at the Arsenale’s Sale d’Armi into a space for collective rest and reflection, extending Heng’s decades-long interest in the body and the everyday into a more contemplative register. Singapore arrives in Venice through embodiment rather than explanation. Heng puts it simply: “We are all human beings.” Cultural difference remains real, but so does shared experience. For an international audience, that may be the work’s quietest strength: to translate local life through presence rather than performance.

After four decades, Heng remains animated by what art can do beneath the surface of what is seen. “I think it’s not just a piece of artwork you see, it’s more something that you don’t see,” she says. “And how you affect your viewers emotionally.” That may also be the measure of her legacy. It lies in the way she has taught audiences to attend more closely: to bodies, to relationships, to the unnoticed structures of everyday life. And to time itself, as lived daily. In Venice, amid the velocity of a world stage, Heng offers something rarer than spectacle. She offers the discipline of a pause.

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