Sim Chi Yin Singapore, b.  1978

Sim Chi Yin (b. 1978) is an artist from Singapore whose research-based practice uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. Working across photography, moving image, archival intervention, performance, and book-making, she constructs multi-layered works that weave research, personal history, and geo-political critique.

Her long-term project One Day We’ll Understand—an inquiry into her family’s experience during the anti-colonial war in what was British Malaya—forms the conceptual spine of several bodies of work. In 2024, Sim premiered a theatre performance developed from this project, which subsequently toured to the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts in Melbourne in early 2025.

Emerging from this wider investigation, The Suitcase Is a Little Bit Rotten extends her engagement with trans-generational memory and colonial image-making. Sim collected glass lantern slides from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depicting landscapes of British Malaya and Southeast Asia. By digitally altering the slides to reference the lineage between her socialist grandfather – a political activist executed for his engagement in the anti-colonial movement during the „Malayan Emergency“ – and her son born in London at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Using the archive as an unstable site and of time travel, she inserts their figures and objects into the glass slides to create a chronotopia, a ‘collapsing or shifting of time and space’.

She was an artist fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2022–23) and holds a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London.

Her work has been exhibited at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2024); Hood Museum of Art (2025); Singapore Art Museum (2025); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); Barbican Centre, London (2023); Camera Austria, Graz (2024); Harvard Art Museums, Boston, USA (2021); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2021); Nobel Peace Museum, Oslo (2017), Datsuijo Tokyo (2024); Arko Art Centre, Seoul (2016); Zilberman Gallery Berlin (2021); and Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2019). She has also participated in the Istanbul Biennale (2022, 2017) and the Guangzhou Image Triennial (2021).

Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Harvard Art Museums, the Hood Museum of Art, M+ Hong Kong, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Singapore Art Museum, and the National Museum Singapore. 

Sim is based in Berlin.