Angline Yam was recently featured at the Visual Arts exhibition for Singapore Encore in Brussels on Wednesday, 25th November 2009 at the Musical Instruments Museum. This event was organised in partnership with the Singapore International Foundation and the Singapore Embassy in Belgium. In attendances were about 150 dignitaries from the diplomatic, business and cultural sectors of Belgian society.Angline presented 2 works for the exhibtion one of which was, Typography Bilingual (Silk screen on paper). This was an experimental typography art work that came from a reflection and search of personal identity in London. Using a random paragraph extracted from a glossy English magazine bought at a newsstand in London. Simulating Chinese characters out of latin/ roman characters, distorting individual characters as and when necessary.
The colour co-ordination are inherently Chinese - Red, Black,Gold and Cream but the words are obviously of the Latin / Roman characters while being distorted to find the Chinese character within.
This work represents the very essence of Angeline’s own questioning of her personal identity as a Singaporean.
Her second piece was Invisible city - London's bookmarks (Hardcover booklet). Based on the book 'Invisible cities' - a novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino, his book explores imagination and descriptions of cities by the explorer, Marco Polo.
Angeline decided to choose London as her "Invisible city" and went to different libraries around London... flipping through books in different category, collecting all the "bookmarks" that people left behind. What then happens is one will try to imagine who are those who had read the book based only on the information of the "bookmarks" they have left behind and the little information of what the book is about.
The bookmarks she had gathered together becomes a collection of Londoner's way of living. It is her personal approach of imaging what London is, who lives there, how the city is formed and how it functions.
Each individual bookmark unravels a mysterious part of the person who left it behind and it is this mystery that forms the "shape" of her invisible city - London.
