The Thing Books Residency is a 14-week residency programme dedicated to the exploration of the book as a medium for artistic expression, and delves into a deeper understanding of its materiality.

This pilot edition brings artists and first-time bookmakers Nur Wahidah, Seth Cheong, and Yuen Chee Wai through a series of lectures and workshops. The Residency concludes with a showcase of their publications at SGABF2025.

[Images: Chia Wei Ling]

 

Residency Artists
Nur Wahidah sings in the alternative-rock band Subsonic Eye. Viewing everything in life through an ecological lens, she has learnt everything she knows from nature. She loves writing songs about nature—songs that tell stories intertwined with nature, and songs that remind her of her love for nature.

Seth Cheong is a Singaporean filmmaker. His short films, Lay Over and Late Twenties, have screened at the Singapore International Film Festival in 2022 and 2024 respectively. He is an alumnus of the ASEAN-ROK Film Leaders Incubator 2023 and the SGIFF Southeast Asian Film Lab 2023, where in which his debut feature project, Blue Buildings, was awarded Special Mention.

Yuen Chee Wai is a musician, artist, designer and curator based in Singapore. Often inspired by ideas and perspectives glimpsed through the filmic eye and photographic lens, his stylistic oeuvre in improvised music is marked by internalised reflections on memory and loss, invisibility and indeterminacy. His latest research topics span mycology, caves, prehistory and archaeology.

He is also a member of The Observatory (Singapore), a band that treads on improvisation, inter-media experimentative performances, installations and noise-adjacent territories, with whom he plays guitar, synth and electronics. With fourteen albums to date, the most recent was a release of a collaboration with Koichi Shimizu titled Demon State (2022). The Observatory has conceived a vanguard of initiatives such as BlackKaji, Source, and the festival Playfreely, which give artists new creative avenues for performing, working and exhibiting together. Through Playfreely, he was also co-curator of Nusasonic, a multi-year project that plunged into a broad spectrum of experimental sound and music cultures in Southeast Asia, enabling dialogue within the region, with Europe, and beyond.

 

Lectures & Workshops by
Based Book Arts • Claudia de la Torre • Darius Ou • gideon-jamie • The Other Workroom • Shrub