Amanda Heng. We Are the World - These Are Our Stories

About

Heng worked with the STPI Creative Workshop and twelve individuals of diverse backgrounds and communities to produce this truly collaborative piece that encompasses performance as well as visual elements. During her first residency at STPI, Heng conducted her seminal performance piece Let’s Chat with the collaborators, engaging them in a conversation over plucking the tips off beansprouts (an act that resounds with locals as a domestic communal task). Using treasured object or heirloom chosen by each individual as a starting point for an exploratory process of sharing (or “performances” as Heng calls them), Heng took a back seat and listened in order to build the mutual trust necessary for her participants to lower their personal barriers and perform their storytelling with the utmost honesty and vulnerability possible. Each individual then had the creative freedom, under Heng’s guidance and direction, to explore and reconstruct his or her memories using printing and papermaking.

Continuing her enquiry into how individual identity is developed in relation to others, especially in an increasingly globalized world, Heng then went on to broaden the work from the familial and the private to the political and socioeconomic, as she curated and wove into each print the international headlines that occurred in the same time frame as the personal events recounted by the participants. With this simple act, Heng highlights the contrast between the emotional attachment the participants have towards their personal history and their detachment from public history, reiterating that our experience of the world is inherently bound to our relationships.