Sim Chi Yin

One Day We’ll Understand  is a new performance work exploring the intersection of Chi Yin’s family history with the Malayan Emergency, and the larger forgotten histories and legacies of empire and their impact on those left behind.

Sim Chi Yin is a photographer currently based between New York, Berlin and Singapore. Working also in film, sound, text and archival material, her works explore issues of history, memory, conflict, migration and their aftermath.

Expanding on her current 12-min performance reading of the same title,  the new One Day We’ll Understand reaches further into Chi Yin’s  large body of evocative photographic and filmic work, as well as into her multi- persona as an image-maker, archivist, historian, writer and granddaughter, to  weave micro histories with broad geopolitical stories to create a 60 minute work combining visual installation, narration and original soundscape.

About the Artist

Sim Chi Yin is an artist from Singapore whose research-based practice uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. She works across photography, film, installation, performance and book-making.

She participated in the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and has exhibited at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); the Barbican, London (2023); Camera Austria, Graz (2024); Harvard Art Museums, USA (2021); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2021); Nobel Peace Museum, Oslo (2017), Datsuijo, Tokyo (2024); Arko Art Centre, Seoul (2016); Zilberman Gallery Berlin (2021); Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2019). She has also participated in the Istanbul Biennale (2022, 2017) and the Guangzhou Image Triennial (2021). Sim was commissioned as the Nobel Peace Prize photographer in 2017. Her work is in the collections of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Harvard Art Museums, M+ Hong Kong, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Singapore Art Museum and the National Museum Singapore. She was an artist fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in New York (2022–2023) and is completing a PhD at King’s College London.