It’s Got to be Now! – Emerging Bookmakers
Date
March 29 2026 (Sunday)
4PM to 5:15PM
Location
Shop–House by DECK
About
Step into the world of today’s emerging bookmakers! Join Tay Yiling, Angelica Ong, and Lai Yu Tong as they share their journeys as creators, exploring the energy, vision, and curiosity that drive their work. Discover how they experiment with materials, formats, and collaborations to bring tangible, meaningful books to life—even in an increasingly digital world. Facilitated by Alvin Ng, this conversation connects their personal practices to broader trends in contemporary bookmaking and independent publishing, offering a glimpse into the future of the craft.
Featuring
Tay Yiling
Speaker
Yiling, aka. ariatays, is a visual artist and writer.
Working across the mediums of photography, performance and poetry, her practice examines humanness, intimacy, and vulnerability. Drawing upon lived experiences and the confessional, she uses image-making and language to form close-readings into the ways we live.
Yiling is the winner of the 2024 Kwek Leng Joo Prize of Excellence In Photography Award and a finalist of the 9th Singapore International Photography Festival Photobook (Dummy) Open Call. She is also a finalist of AFTERIMAGE Press’s 2025 Manuscript Bootcamp for Poetry, and her written works have been published in online newsletter OFTHENOW.
Working across the mediums of photography, performance and poetry, her practice examines humanness, intimacy, and vulnerability. Drawing upon lived experiences and the confessional, she uses image-making and language to form close-readings into the ways we live.
Yiling is the winner of the 2024 Kwek Leng Joo Prize of Excellence In Photography Award and a finalist of the 9th Singapore International Photography Festival Photobook (Dummy) Open Call. She is also a finalist of AFTERIMAGE Press’s 2025 Manuscript Bootcamp for Poetry, and her written works have been published in online newsletter OFTHENOW.
Angelica Ong
Speaker
Angelica Ong is a Singaporean artist working primarily in photography and artist books. Her practice explores time and its indexes, language, materiality, and slow art: How do we feel and experience time’s passing as something that is both cosmic and intimately human in scale? How can nature—a vast order of cycles, rhythms, and phenomena—guide our perception? And how does the photographic medium enable us to examine our world slowly and closely?
Angelica approaches photography as a semiotic medium. Instead of a single definitive image, she treats photographs as words forming sentences where meaning arises through selection, repetition, and sequence.
Angelica gravitates to the artist book form for its intimacy, bodily scale, and ability to bring image, text, and material into a single encounter. Through fragile and finely crafted works and a self-reflexive attention to materials and processes, she invites audiences to wander, linger, and discover monumentality in minutiae.
Angelica has exhibited work in solo and group shows across Hong Kong, Chicago, Minnesota, Seoul and Singapore. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of Ohio State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and more, and have featured at artist book fairs around the world, including the Hong Kong Photobook Festival (2025), the Singapore Art Book Fair (2025), Tropic Bound (2025), and the Taipei Art Book Fair (2026).
Angelica approaches photography as a semiotic medium. Instead of a single definitive image, she treats photographs as words forming sentences where meaning arises through selection, repetition, and sequence.
Angelica gravitates to the artist book form for its intimacy, bodily scale, and ability to bring image, text, and material into a single encounter. Through fragile and finely crafted works and a self-reflexive attention to materials and processes, she invites audiences to wander, linger, and discover monumentality in minutiae.
Angelica has exhibited work in solo and group shows across Hong Kong, Chicago, Minnesota, Seoul and Singapore. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of Ohio State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and more, and have featured at artist book fairs around the world, including the Hong Kong Photobook Festival (2025), the Singapore Art Book Fair (2025), Tropic Bound (2025), and the Taipei Art Book Fair (2026).
Lai Yu Tong
Speaker
Lai Yu Tong is an artist from Singapore who works across drawing, image-making, sculpture and sound. His practice is interested in creating adequate media to articulate the present, believing in the intrinsic need for humans to make images and tell stories. Recent works of his consider how art can evoke empathy in a world so damaged. Lai has presented his work at group and solo exhibitions in Singapore
and abroad, most recently at april april (US), Twin Gallery Laundry (US), ShanghART Gallery (SG) and Radio28 (MX). His exhibition The World (Postcards) is currently on show at the Esplanade Tunnel (SG) until June 2026. Besides his art, Lai regularly publishes books under Thumb Books, a self-founded press that makes children’s books for both children and adults.
and abroad, most recently at april april (US), Twin Gallery Laundry (US), ShanghART Gallery (SG) and Radio28 (MX). His exhibition The World (Postcards) is currently on show at the Esplanade Tunnel (SG) until June 2026. Besides his art, Lai regularly publishes books under Thumb Books, a self-founded press that makes children’s books for both children and adults.
