Singapore’s National Arts Council (NAC) has announced that curator June Yap and project manager Neo Kim Seng will no longer represent the Singapore Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, ArtAsiaPacific reports. The pair are said to have withdrawn from the project, which will comprise an installation by Zai Kuning, citing ‘differences in the operational approaches’. Yap had been appointed as the curator for the Singapore Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale (featuring a multichannel video installation by Ho Tzu Nyen, The Cloud of Unknowing), and was recruited last year to work with Zai on this year’s edition.
Whilst June Yap and Neo Kim Seng’s departure from the project was based on a ‘mutually agreed decision amongst the members of the project team’, NAC director Low Eng Teong has assured that with five months to go, ‘everything else, including the planned opening of the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, is on schedule.’
3 January 2017