Grey Projects/Jason Wee
Jason Wee is an artist and a writer. He founded and runs Grey Projects. He's the author of four poetry books, most recently From A (Undesirable) Diary (2023) and the Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize finalist In Short, Future Now (Sternberg Press). His art is recently seen in The Institutum, the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Angkor Photo Festival, HKW, and the Changwon Sculpture Biennale. He is the 2023 Asymmetry Foundation Scholar in Goldsmiths College London and a 2024 Mercator Artist Fellow in Berlin. Curated projects include: The Measure of Our Dwelling: Singapore as Unhomed (ifa Berlin & Stuttgart, 2015), Stories We Tell To Scare Ourselves (MOCA Taipei, 2019). Edited publications include Shubigi Rao: Useful Fictions (2014) and Lee Wen: Boring Donkey Songs (2017)
This Diary is an imaginative reconstruction of a history of permission and prohibition in the Malayan Peninsula. Through excerpts from a fictive publisher’s diary, Wee trace encounters and negotiations with the censor and the censored, beginning just before the implementation of the laws against ‘undesirable publications.’ The central section carries us into the difficulties of making literature in the present, each diary entry a record of single painful incidents, each a study of our acts of reading both the printed word and the world.
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Inter/Depends is a sequence of in-person activations and printed matter that sees Amanda Heng developing strategies of sustaining care and community with an eye on shaping ourselves around a collective future. Amanda Heng's decades long performance practice has long involved dialogic processes and deliberative formats. For Inter/Depends, she asks "ideas around dependency became more apparent for me during the pandemic, especially with the kind of isolation that we experienced. It felt like a collective experience yet we were so distant. We each have our own baggage, histories, memories, and all that. How have you negotiated the various dependencies in your life?"
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We have been going to the Singapore Art Book Fair for the past eight years, and are one of their longstanding and queer-affirmative presenters/publishers. We have a strong interests in publishing as artistic method, and in publishing as foundational to Southeast Asia art and activist practices. We have supported international exhibitors at our table including Valiz from the Netherlands, and we have also gone to other book fairs and platforms in Seoul, Sydney and Tokyo.
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