Excerpt from ‘Hope you are keeping well!’
Recipient of 2024 Objectifs Curator Open Call
By Lenette Lua
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Arabelle Zhuang installing her work ‘Skinfolk, Kinfolk’, 2022-2025. Image courtesy of Objectifs.
In Singapore’s relentless pursuit of economic growth and “world-class” recognition, productivity is touted as a pathway to a better life, while competitiveness fuels its success story. In the conversations with fellow artists in Singapore, we often end up asking each other: What’s your next project? This pervasive pressure to produce, remain visible, and progress, haunts us like a shadow. How might we reimagine progress as something beyond linear milestones and a predestined endpoint? As cultural producers, caring for ourselves and journeying collectively requires a sustainable ethos—one that resists commodification of self-care and transcends its reduction to corporate and economic strategies. Rather than a reaction to the pandemic, our discussions about care demand a more profound reorientation.
Hu Rui, ‘Matrix Model and Uberbau’, 2019-2023, 2025, installation view in ‘Hope you are keeping well!’ at Objectifs - Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore. Image courtesy of Objectifs.
‘Hope you are keeping well!’ reflects on the impact of Singapore’s national productivity agenda on artistic labour, with a particular focus on the Smart Nation initiative (2014 - ongoing) and the 1980s Productivity Movement. The project approaches curatorial work of care as a means of revealing and understanding the invisible labours of artistic production. Rather than responding to a curatorial brief, the participating artists—Genevieve Leong, Huijun Lu, Hu Rui, and Arabelle Zhuang—were encouraged to revisit past works or unrealised proposals, and to consider how this project might nourish their practices. This open approach fostered conversations on the conditions in which art is created, circulated, and interpreted, particularly in Singapore’s context.
Huijun Lu installing her work ‘Kludge’. Image courtesy of Objectifs.
While the fixation of self may seem individualistic, Audre Lorde’s theory of care and philosophy of difference offer an insightful framework, positioning self-care as both “self-preservation” and “an act of political warfare.”¹ To care is to embed our experiences within specific times, places and communities. It allows us to examine the underlying values and structures that govern our society, and to gain strength in acting. In this era of overproduction, where care is essential to sustain and thrive, we must reconnect with the motivations behind our actions and the intentions shaping our words in every expedition and deviation. It is to recognise—and even harness—our differences as sources of creativity and agents of change.²
Huijun Lu, ‘Kludge’, 2025, installation view in ‘Hope you are keeping well!’ at Objectifs - Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore. Image courtesy of Objectifs.
In my discussions with the invited artists, they shared varied approaches to sustaining their practices, making time and space to create art between their full-time work and family commitments. Our conversations extended into illuminating issues, spanning consumerism, environmental degradation, slippage of language as well as AI bias. While the focuses of the featured artists differ, the discussions unravel a web of interconnected concerns. ‘Hope you are keeping well!’ positions these differences and ambiguities as rich bodies of knowledge, and seeks to offer a generative space to deepen these discussions. Comprising an exhibition and a series of informal gatherings, the project reimagines Objectifs’ Chapel Gallery as a shared, psychological studio for participating artists. Each proposition of care engages with distinct dimensions of our realities: Rui’s new iteration of ‘Matrix Model and Uberbau’ (2019-2023, 2025) and Huijun’s assemblage ‘Kludge’ (2025) probe the ethical and environmental implications of emergent technologies. Meanwhile, Genevieve’s ‘Portable Studio’ (2025) and ‘Material Library’ (2025), alongside Arabelle’s video installation ‘Skinfolk, Kinfolk’ (2022-2024), reflect on care as a multidimensional ethos, embracing the material and relational intricacies of artistic processes.
Genevieve Leong, ‘Portable Studio’, 2025, installation view in ‘Hope you are keeping well!’ at Objectifs - Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore. Image courtesy of Objectifs.
Collectively, their choices of materials and presentations reveal the precarities of sustaining artistic practices in Singapore, where rising living costs, escalating rents, and limited space constrain artistic possibilities. These struggles foreground the intersection of materiality and survival, exposing how external pressures shape the scales, forms, and trajectories of local artistic production, and how the material conditions of life inevitably permeate the processes of making.
Lenette Lua and Genevieve Leong. Image courtesy of Objectifs.
Through programmes such as artist talks and open studios, these informal gatherings examine the wider structures of artistic production. In the field of curatorial study, there is a growing call to approach curating as a practice of care beyond the guardian of objects and acknowledge it as “a practice between art, life, activism and politics”.³ Yet, most of such discussions remain predominantly in English, raising the question: what can non-English languages, with their distinct cultures and philosophies, contribute to this dialogue? When discussions about care risk becoming overly theoretical or detached, how can we embody care as an ethos and integrate it into practice?
Arabelle Zhuang, ‘Skinfolk, Kinfolk’, 2022-2025, installation view in ‘Hope you are keeping well!’ at Objectifs - Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore. Image courtesy of Objectifs.
Artist Ezzam Rahman is invited as an interlocutor, unpacking the ethos of care through the lens of his mother tongue, Malay. In an initial conversation, Ezzam shared that the English word “care” translates to perhatian in Malay, where hati means heart. Similarly, in Mandarin, care is translated as guan xin (关心), with xin (心) also meaning heart. To care, then, is to hold something or someone at the centre of one’s heart. It is a gesture to uncover our true needs, empowering us to navigate the relentless demands of constant output with clarity and resilience.
Through these discussions and informal gatherings, ‘Hope you are keeping well!’ seeks to create a space to explore how care is exercised, expressed, translated, and embodied across languages, cultures, and artistic forms. It invites us to imagine how we might journey together sustainably, thriving within—and beyond—Singapore’s relentless pursuit of excellence.
2Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider (1984; repr., Berkeley, United States of America: Crossing Press, 2007), 110–113.
3 Elke Krasny, Sophie Lingg, and Lena Fritsch, “An Introduction,” in Radicalizing Care: Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating, ed. Elke Krasny et al. (London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: Sternberg Press, 2021), 10–25.
This is an excerpt from Lenette Lua’s curatorial essay for ‘Hope you are keeping well!’. The exhibition is on view from 14 January to 9 March 2025, at Objectifs - Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore. As part of this edition of Objectif’s Curator Open Call programme, Lenette was mentored by artist and writer Jason Wee.
To read other writings from the Excerpts series, click here.
About the Writer
Lenette Lua is a practice-led researcher and curator whose interests delve into reconciling the contested intersections of political, economic, and socio-cultural spheres through her curatorial work. While at the Royal College of Art in London, she initiated the long-term curatorial project ‘Fungi Initiative,’ exploring institutional collaborations via participatory artist-led workshops. She was the recipient of the Objectifs Curator Open Call 2024 Award.
