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Artist-in-Residence (A.i.R)

Next Open Call

August 2026

Current Residency

A.i.R #1 2026

About

DECK’s Artist-in-Residence (A.i.R) is a year-round programme designed to support innovative and experimental photography practices in Singapore and across Asia. Providing a supportive and open environment, the residency offers artists opportunities to refine their craft through activities such as field trips and consultations with industry professionals. Each cycle of the A.i.R. programme culminates in an exhibition showcasing the works developed during the residency, alongside public talks, guided tours, and workshops led by the artist.

Each residency cycle hosts 2 to 3 artists, fostering meaningful exchange, collaboration, and the development of creative networks both locally and beyond.

The Open Call for Artist-in-Residency only opens twice a year.

The duration of Residency will span from 3 to 8 weeks.

Eligibility

 

This opportunity is open to both local and international artists who demonstrate a committed practice and a desire to engage with the community through artistic exploration.

Applicants must meet the following requirements:

  • Age: 21 years and above
  • Experience: Minimum of 3 years of active practice in the arts
  • Discipline: Must be working primarily in photography or image-based arts

 

Programme Provisions & Terms of Exchange

 

Accommodation (for overseas professionals only):

  • A private bedroom of your own with access to shared facilities, including a kitchen and laundry room.

 

Space Provision:

  • Access to either a gallery space for exhibitions or a multipurpose room for public programmes and activities.
  • Usage duration: 1 to 8 weeks, depending on the nature of the project.

 

Project Support:

  • Up to SGD $1,000 in travel funding available.
  • Up to SGD $2,000 for costs related to exhibition production or public programming.
  • A stipend of up to SGD $50/day will be provided to support residency participation.

 

What We Offer:

  • Public announcement of your participation on DECK’s social media platforms and printed collaterals
  • Interview, filming, and documentation support by DECK
  • Provision of an official letter of invitation and a reference letter to support your grant application in your home country

 

What You Offer:

  • Facilitation of a workshop, lecture, or any community engagement programme
  • Donation of one artwork of your choice to support our fundraising efforts and sustain the residency programme
  • Contribution of a small personal keepsake (written piece or small object, max 5cm x 5cm) to be part of our residency archive at Shop–House by DECK

Featuring

Phuong Le

Phuong Le

Artist

A.i.R Cycle #1

Lê Nguyên Phương (or Phuong Nguyen Le in Western naming convention) (b. 2002, Ha Noi) is an emerging Vietnamese photographer, artist, and researcher. His work engages with counter-historical thoughts, drawing on familial, communal, and collective identities within his Vietnamese communities.

In 2023, Phương was the recipient of the Objectifs Documentary Awards (Singapore) and Tall Poppy Press Publishing Prize (Australia), resulted in a debut monograph and solo exhibition for his body of work Sunshine. Phương has exhibited at Studio 3năm and Photo Hanoi Biennale (Vietnam), Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film (Singapore), Jakarta International Photography Festival (Indonesia), Angkor Photo Festival (Cambodia), Photo Elyseé (Switzerland), and Museum of Australian Photography (Australia).
Chen Chuanduan

Chen Chuanduan

Artist

A.i.R Cycle #1

Chen Chuanduan (born 1994) employs imagery and text as his mediums, embarking from the documentary of personal emotions and experiences. His work focuses on the connection between humanity and nature, as well as the silent appeals within modern life. Fascinated by natural science and mysticism, he has a particular affinity for conveying the ineffable through fiction.
Chen Qiheng

Chen Qiheng

Artist

A.i.R Cycle #1

Qiheng Chen earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Chelsea College of Arts, UK, and his Master’s degree in Media Art from the School of Experimental Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, China. He lives and works in Guangzhou and is a research-driven visual artist whose practice spans film, photography, text, and sculpture.

Since 2020, Chen has explored the intersections of plants, identity, gender, and culture through the motif of the orchid. Drawing on personal and familial experiences, his research examines the psychological tensions of individuals within traditional family structures, while engaging with ecological reflections on the “nature/human” binary.

His recent work focuses on the Chinese orchid as a point of entry, revisiting the aesthetics of the junzi (gentleman/君子) and gender dynamics in traditional Chinese culture. He initiated the Orchid Pavilion project (蘭亭無序), aiming to reconstruct the connections between orchids, everyday life, and culture through re-interpretation and community-based learning, and continues to explore possibilities of identity fluidity and symbiosis through the practice of “becoming an orchid.”
Teo Shi Yun

Teo Shi Yun

Artist

A.i.R Cycle #1

Shi Yun Teo (b. 1999, Singapore) is a multidisciplinary artist, recent graduate from Slade School of Fine Arts, UCL. Her work usually takes the form of photography and filmmaking. She creates narrative and abstract works that feature historic documents, archival footages and personal recordings: visualising how spaces frame communal memory, evoking themes of reincarnation, dislocation, and return.

Shi Yun is reclaiming her heritage and culture through documentations and conversations with questions of identity and diaspora in relation to Singapore’s rapid growth. Through family history and local mythology, she investigate fragmented belonging and explore tensions between reality and dream, memory and delusion.

Her video works have shown at selected film festivals and art exhibitions including her first solo show at Feelium Gallery, London UK, 2024, IFFR, Rotterdam, 2025, BlackStar Film Festival, Philadelphia, 2025, National Gallery Singapore, 2025, NOWNESS Asia, Hong Kong, 2024, Erratum Galerie, Berlin, Germany, 2024, Ormside Projects, London, UK, 2024, Photobook Cafe, London, UK, 2024, Slade BA/BFA Degree Show 2023 and archived at Asian Film Archive.
Adar Ng

Adar Ng

Artist

A.i.R Cycle #1

Alvin Ng

Alvin Ng

Artist

A.i.R Cycle #0

Alvin Ng is a Southeast Asian photographic artist and educator based in Singapore.

Working between reality and fantasy, Alvin creates images that draw on celestial lore, mythology, and the quiet magic of everyday life. Through hand-manipulation and re-photography, his practice invites viewers to step into a realm of wonder, where the everyday becomes otherworldly. His work has been exhibited and published internationally, including at the Royal Geographical Society as part of Earth Photo 2025, and recognised by LensCulture Critics’ Awards (Top 10, 2022) and the Foam Talent Call (longlist, 2023).
Camilla Marrese

Camilla Marrese

Artist

A.i.R Cycle #0

Camilla Marrese (b. 1998, Bologna) is a photographer and designer based in Italy.

Camilla’s artistic practice aims for the visual articulation and expression of complex issues, through documentary photography, design and writing. Her book Thinking like an island, realised with Gabriele Chiapparini and published by Overlapse in 2024, was a recipient of the Photo Espana Best Photography Book Award in 2025. She was a finalist for the Luigi Ghirri Prize in 2024 and for Project Groundswell in 2025. Her work was exhibited in Verzasca Foto Festival (CH), Dutch Design Week (NL), Fotografia Europea (IT), Espaço Alto (BR), PhMuseum Lab (IT), Spazio MAD (CH), Kranj Foto Fest (SI), Focus Artphilein (CH), Casa Testori (IT). She has been PhMuseum's Visual Editor since 2023, and works as a graphic and book designer since 2021, collaborating with publishing houses and artists.
Gabriele Chiapparini

Gabriele Chiapparini

Artist

A.i.R Cycle #0

Gabriele Chiapparini (b. 1980, Bologna) is a photographer, director and director of photography based in Italy.

With a background in sociology, he worked for several years in advertising before focusing on artistic practice and photography publishing. He is the founder and host of Small Photobook Cult, a podcast entirely dedicated to photobooks. Working in a duo with Camilla Marrese, he published Thinking like an island (Overlapse) in 2024, which was a recipient of the Photo Espana Best Photography Book Award in 2025. Their work was a finalist in Project Groundswell in 2025, and exhibited in Verzasca Foto Festival (CH), Espaço Alto (BR), PhMuseum Lab (IT), Spazio MAD (CH), Kranj Foto Fest (SI), Focus Artphilein (CH), Casa Testori (IT).
Hiền Hoàng

Hiền Hoàng

Artist

A.i.R Cycle #0

Hiền Hoàng is a Vietnamese German interdisciplinary artist intersecting art, ecology, and material research.

Combining scientific instruments and intimate observation, Hoàng’s practice investigates material transformations as traces of witnessing violence, care, and memory. Her projects have been exhibited internationally at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Les Rencontres d’Arles, CentroCentro Cibeles in Madrid, Epica Fundacion Barcelona, and other major media arts festivals. In 2024 she received the Paul Huf Award, which led to her first institutional solo exhibition at Foam. Recent works include Garden of Entanglement (2024) - translating vibrational data from urban trees into sound, augmented reality, and sculptural forms; Scent from Heaven (2023), which explored the wounding and transformation of agarwood trees through CT and EEG imaging; and Across the Ocean (2023), an installation reworking migrant family archives through distortion and performance.
Ryan Lim Zi Yi

Ryan Lim Zi Yi

Artist

A.i.R Cycle #0

Ryan Lim Zi Yi (b. 1996, Singapore) explores the quiet rhythms of the unspectacular moments through his installations of images, sculpture, and text. Working with ordinary materials and subtle gestures, he reconfigures these traces into narratives and forms that feel both familiar and distant, revealing the unnoticed as tender, uncertain, and worth remembering.
His works have been exhibited internationally, including at Carp Gallery (Taiwan), Plague Space (Russia), and LivingRoom (Netherlands); and in Singapore with Whitestone Gallery, Temporary Unit, DECK, I_S_L_A_N_D_S, Comma Space, Objectifs, DECK. His recent curatorial projects include Robin (2022-2023), a series of exhibitions presented in camping tents pitched in various locations across Singapore. Currently, he runs a curatorial project titled, BACKYARD, a 7 volume subscription-based publication housing artists reports of happenings around Singapore. BACKYARD is an idea for an art space in the form of a folder.
Shi Yangkun

Shi Yangkun

Artist

A.i.R Cycle #0

Shi Yangkun (b.1992, China) is an artist currently based in Shanghai. His practice examines the legacies of socialism and colonialism through engagements with archives, objects, locations, and materials. By activating the past, he interrogates the power structures and visual perspectives embedded within dominant historical narratives, and the ways in which they continue to shape the present.

His works have been exhibited at Forschungscampus Dahlem, Berlin (2025); Goethe-Institut Beijing (2025); A4 Art Museum, Chengdu (2025); Stadtmuseum Berlin (2024); Zhejiang Art Museum (2023); and the Peabody Essex Museum (2022). His works are held in public collections including the Peabody Essex Museum, the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung Foundation, and the Zhejiang Art Museum.
Song-Ming Ang

Song-Ming Ang

Artist

A.i.R Cycle #0

For two decades, Song-Ming Ang has maintained an idiosyncratic creative practice across the disciplines of art, music and writing.

Drawing from the everyday and popular culture, Ang adopts different approaches to create objects and encounters for the audience. Much of his work is made from the perspective of an amateur and finding fresh perspectives to established fields of knowledge. Previous works include Silent Walk (2014), where participants move and listen to the sounds of their immediate environment in a self-organised manner and The Book of Guilty Pleasures (2011) where Ang invited and compiled 100 responses by artists, musicians and writers about their favourite embarrassing music. An’s work has been presented across a multitude of countries such as US, UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Turkey - in reputable festivals, biennials and museums. In 2019, Ang represented Singapore at the 58th Venice Biennale with a solo presentation, Music for Everyone: Various On a Theme.
Minstrel Kuik

Minstrel Kuik

Artist

A.i.R Cycle #0

Minstrel Kuik (b. 1976, Malaysia) loves exploring the tensions between mechanical tools, digital devices and manual labour. With a deep interest in women’s writing (Écriture féminine), Kuik works across a multitude of mediums: from photography, drawing, painting, poetry, textile, to mixed-media assemblage and installation.

Kuik believes that the private space is the major battlefield of ideological, political and economic interests. Hence, she explores art as a historical trajectory where the process of reading, thinking, making, revisiting and counterbalancing is a reflective and transformative experience.

Kuik has exhibited widely in Southeast-Asia and overseas institutions such as National Gallery Singapore; Singapore Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei; Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Australia; Ilham Gallery, Malaysia; FotoFest, Houston; Photoquai, Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Higashikawa Photo Festival, Higashikawa, Japan; and at the Lishui Biennial Photography Festival in China, Melbourne International Festival of Photography, Australia.
MM Yu

MM Yu

Artist

A.i.R 2023

MM Yu works between photography and painting, interested in discovering and valuing the fleeting moment present even in its simplest components. Drawn to street photography and documenting the everyday, her photographs document the ever-changing cultural texture, infrastructure, economy, waste products and the ecology of life in the myriad forms it takes in the city of Manila.
Yu is a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artist Award (2009) Ateneo Art Awards (winner in 2007, shortlisted in 2011/2012). Sovereign Asian Art Prize finalist (2010) and Goethe-Institute-Climate Change workshop grant (2014).
Poklong Anading

Poklong Anading

Artist

A.i.R 2023

Poklong Anading (b. 1975, Manila) works with a wide range of mediums and is acclaimed for his pieces that investigate photography and travel.
Fascinated with the process of creation and permutation, Anading thinks with and through his materials as they undergo their transformations. He frequently uses found objects and discarded materials that lead him to investigate notions of worth and value in sociopolitical and environmental contexts - exploring what it means for art to exist inside and beyond capitalist production. Anading has been included in notable group exhibitions such as: 5th Asian Art Biennial: Artist Making Movement, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2015); Traces of an Adolescent City at Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy (2016), Constellations, Photographs in Dialogue, SFMOMA, California, USA (2021) and Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia at National Gallery Singapore (2022).
Hu Qiren

Hu Qiren

Artist

A.i.R 2019

Hu Qiren is a lecturer in photography and an artist whose practice explores the myriad forms of image making, incorporating a wide range of media, including photography, video, installation and performance.
Tristan Cai

Tristan Cai

Artist

A.i.R 2019

Tristan Cai is an artist who works between Singapore/Washington D.C. His research-based art critically reflects the veracity of our histories and the ways in which we have culturally synthesized knowledge in relation to our visual culture.

Cai has exhibited at Phoenix Art Museum, San Francisco Foundation, Noorderlicht Photography Festival, Kumho Museum of Art and National Museum of Singapore. He earned his M.F.A from San Francisco Art Institute along with the institute’s most coveted fellowship award. He is currently Assistant Professor of Photography at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
Abednego Trianto

Abednego Trianto

Artist

A.i.R 2017

Abednego (b. 1988, Semarang) is known for his interest in the stories surrounding ethical policy during Dutch occupancy and its influence on post-colonial Indonesia. His earlier work titled Sugar Lord Java tells a story of the sugar industry and photographic archives in the island of Jawa, looking at the glorious years of international trades and the figure of Oei Tiong Ham. His following project titled 1883 tells fictitious narratives of the grand eruption of Mount Krakatoa in Sunda strait made by locals and overseas writers. The lineage of interlinked stories has shaped the artist's understanding of the subjects of Indonesia and the nation’s struggle to find its identity.

Abed was awarded the Kwek Leng Joo Prize of Excellence in Still Photography (2010). His photographs have been exhibited internationally including the Chobi Mela Photo Festival, the Singapore International Photography Festival and the Noorderlitch Photo Festival.
Liana Yang

Liana Yang

Artist

A.i.R 2015

Singaporean artist Liana Yang combines photography and installation work to investigate various sociological and psychological relationships. She is drawn to the trivialities and oddities that we encounter in our daily experiences. This includes the enigmatic and unseen aspects of spaces and places, as well as explorations of memory and associations in a contemporary culture.

Her works have been showcased at Nooderlicht International Photofestival, Netherlands, Arles Photography Open Salon, France, Singapore Art Museum@8Q, Artissima 19, Italy and Warsaw Photo Days, Poland. Her three self-published photobooks have also been selected and showcased internationally in Brighton, UK, Helsinki, Finland, Malmo, Sweden and Tokyo, Japan.
She resides and works in Singapore.

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