Han Sai Por: The Forest and Its Soul

“I like to experiment so as to discover the material that I’m working with through my hands-on approach. This is a language for me, allowing me to interpret the vision that I have. At STPI, it was about this kind of experimenting and discovering.”

– Han Sai Por

The Forest and Its Soul marks the second residency and solo exhibition of Singaporean artist Han Sai Por (b. 1943) with STPI. Following her first residency in 2013, the Cultural Medallion recipient and Asia’s foremost sculptor returns to the Creative Workshop to create 35 new print and paper works in a span of just three weeks. Using technologies that are new to the artist (such as photo intaglio and laser-cutting), the eventual works exemplifies Han’s enduring spirit of artistic exploration that is not bounded by a singular medium, even at this stage of her decades-long career.

This body of work draws from the artist’s own experiences of walking through dense forests, of which Han has described as being “an emotional landscape”. Additionally, it serves to evoke a sense of boundless energy hidden behind the many layers and depth of the whole forest ecosystem, composed of many elements – the wind blowing, leaves dropping and dancing, rolling waters, micro-life teeming among the mud and detritus on the floor and more.

This catalogue contains an essay, A Forest Comes into Being, by Kwok Kian Chow.