What's In My Portfolio: Adeline Kueh

Photography by Chino Sardea
16 Mar 2020

Senior Lecturer, MA Fine Arts Programme, LASALLE

In many of my works, I gravitate towards the overlooked aspects of life, such as everyday rituals, personal histories, and invisible labor, including craft and emotions. It is a way for me to bring to the fore some of the narratives that address the inequalities or imbalances of power in our society.

For example, my current collaborative work, The Tear Project, has two parts: the first comprises vials of tears that I shed as I write my journal, the second are vials of tears that my collaborators collect as they write in their journals.

This project is about negotiating ideas about collecting tears and reclaiming the agency behind the process which is usually relegated to the realm of women, or as a sign of weakness.

Some questions that I ask include: How can we look at emotions as a form of reconnecting with our being? How do we deal with aspects of morning or grief in light of our daily realities?

Feminism, in its various forms, is significant to me because I consider what is personal to be political. I like to start from a personal positioning that filmmaker Trinh Minh-ha says is a way of “know(ing) the world inwardly” so that the deeper we go into ourselves, the wider we can go into society. I am also very conscious of how my works are situated in historical and larger socio-political contexts.

To list my achievement would imply a kind of completion. There is still so much for me to do, particularly in exploring the gaps—what in contemporary art practice or scholarship is the knowable and unknowable, the rational and irrational, the nuance and actual, the language and the sensory impression.

As an educator for the past 22 years, I have ensured that my students are aware of the ways in which systems of oppressions go hand in hand, so that they can unpack the sexist and racist language we use, and the problematic elements of our cultural traditions.