The fifth volume of What Artists Read will feature artist Xiang Yun Loh. Xiang Yun Loh is an artist and scientific botanical illustrator who lives and works in Singapore. Her work interrogates how people relate to nature. Using her observations made through drawing, painting and photography, she examines the everyday to study how nature is managed and engineered in our cities. Through durational projects that map and document plants in our surroundings, she charts the changing ways we see and define nature.
In 2015, her keen interest in botany encouraged her to volunteer at the Singapore Botanic Gardens’ herbarium. Working closely with Dr. Michele Rodda, an expert on the flowering plant family Apocynaceae, she learned to illustrate scientific publications such as floras, monographs and new species descriptions primarily using dried and alcohol-preserved herbarium specimens. With her passion and determination to develop her skills further, she went on to take a course on scientific botanical illustrations taught by Lucy T. Smith at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. In 2018, she began her professional career as a scientific botanical illustrator, securing a contract with the National Parks Board Singapore/Singapore Botanic Gardens to contribute illustrations to the Flora of Singapore project.
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What Artists Read is an artist-led book sharing programme that hopes to ignite an innate interest to explore books beyond conventional reading material. This programme provides audiences with the opportunity to here from artists on books that inspire and shape their practice and voice. Held in DECK’s own library of photobooks collected and donated from around the world, the sharing session also hopes to create an awareness of DECK’s resource-rich open library and to encourage a deeper engagement with books and photography.
Admission is free and limited to 20 pax per session. The session is an hour-long, and includes a sharing and a question and answer dialogue.
