Echoes of Our Time: The Art Practices of Ho Rui An, Wong Ping and Pan Daijing

Exhibitions are temporary sites where artists and artworks share space and elicit dialogues across historical, formal, or conceptual lines. They are places where ideas are expressed, new knowledge is produced, and unexpected experiences unfold. In group shows such as the M+ Sigg Prize 2025 exhibition, the site is constructed to advance the singular ideas of each artist while also searching out commonalities among all participants. The common trait, in this case, is clear: the language of contemporaneity. With each of the shortlisted artists, all born in the 1980s and 1990s, we can confidently say they are each other’s contemporaries. They live in the same period and belong to the present moment. Their works may address different topics, use disparate media and methods, but they emerge from the same time and thus must face together the thorny question of what it means to be an artist today. For some, this question involves diving into the past, and for others, it involves reflecting critically upon the present. The artists I discuss in this essay—Ho Rui An, Wong Ping, and Pan Daijing—belong to this second category. Their works are imbued with a spirit of critique, seeking either to confront or engage with the systems and structures of power in contemporary society. Be it through humour, personal narrative, or simply skirting categorisation, they are adept at using their artistic voice to unmask and critically reflect upon hidden power structures that surround us. These artists have developed practices that resist conventions and respond to systems of power in unique ways: Ho Rui An through research and knowledge building, Wong Ping through personal commentary, and Pan Daijing through renewing the awareness of our bodies and spaces.

In the last several years, Ho Rui An has developed a practice that uses historical research to examine relationships between systems of governance, labour, technology, and global capital. Growing up in Singapore, he has had a front row seat to the city-state’s social and political engineering and leveraging of storytelling as a method of control. This no doubt plays a role in his choice of the lecture performance format, an artistic genre that merges aspects of teaching with live art. Ho’s lectures, read from a prepared script alongside presentation visuals drawn from historical photographs and documents, sit at the juncture of cinema, performance, and archival research. Although performed live, they are presented as video recordings, and the underpinning narrative frequently appears as a core component in his installations. Take for example his breakout work Asia the Unmiraculous (2018–2020), commissioned for the Gwangju Biennial in 2018. Among the multilayered presentation of archival materials, films, objects, and furniture, we find a screen featuring Ho himself, dressed in a black top, TED talk-style with a headset microphone, parsing the glory and the demise of the Asian economic miracle. In another installation in the M+ Collection, The Economy Enters the People (2021–2022), Ho recreates a massive oval-shaped conference table with a central screen and a dozen leather office chairs, each outfitted with its own individual monitors showing Ho’s recorded lecture. In both works, his educational treatises tackle hidden systems of power, map global flows, and in the post-capitalist era, reveal the downfalls of globalisation. By frequently focusing on Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, in his investigations, Ho poses provocative questions about where we come from—collectively, individually—and how the inequalities this region faces align with those happening in other corners of the world. His works illustrate how moments of exploitation and inequity are transnational phenomena, shaped by a global system that connects Europe, America, Asia, and Africa.

With Figures of History and the Grounds of Intelligence, on display in the Sigg Prize exhibition, Ho brings his clever hand at storytelling to weave together a narrative around history and technology. In the recorded seventy-minute lecture, experienced through an audio headset, Ho unpacks the process of AI image modelling, from facial recognition tools to archival images, pointing out various ways in which AI and deep learning models fall short. The work displays his own lecture slides on one flat-screen monitor, while an adjacent screen presents images generated via AI using sentences from his lecture script. While both sets of images ostensibly originate from the same source, Ho’s lecture script, the AI-generated images are clearly illogical and erroneous, owing to the AI system lacking the ‘intelligence’ to understand context or judge from history. On the neighbouring wall sits a newly commissioned timeline by Ho that maps key geopolitical events with advancements in information framework, internet technology, and machine learning. Spanning the 1940s to the present and covering multiple registers from infrastructure developments to global systems and networks across Asia, A History of Intelligence in South East Asia (2025) is far more complex and expansive than Ho's previous Singapore-focused projects. Connecting the dots between major and minor histories, he invites us to make a provocative correlation between intelligence gathering for state or military purposes and the data gathering that occurs to drive artificial intelligence models.

While artists like Ho Rui An find conceptual grounding in the time gap between past and present, encouraging us to think historically in the here and now, Hong Kong-based artist Wong Ping prefers to exist in the hypothetical present. Rooting his concerns in everyday life rather than grand narratives of history and geopolitics, Wong concocts dream-like worlds that appear as quirky, personal reflections on mundane affairs until absurd, violent, and often sexually-charged scenarios unfold. Using bright, cheerful colours and a lo-fi, blocky animation style, his works may come across as primitive and crude but in fact deliver sharp punches of metaphorical meaning, poking fun at Hong Kong’s social inequities and divided political context. For instance, Under the Lion Crotch (2011), a four-minute animated music video for the Hong Kong indie band No One Remains a Virgin, begins with smiling cherub-like figures donning ‘I [heart] HK’ t-shirts whose heads explode. An ejaculating lion penis transforms into a spaceship before impregnating a female deity, eventually flooding the island in blood. Over the dense guitar and reverb soundtrack, one can make out the lyrics in Cantonese ‘our land is brutally torn apart by conglomerates’, a reference to feelings of stress and frustration simmering underneath the city’s surface. Wong’s satirical lens extends to other works: In Who’s the Daddy (2017), swiping ‘left’ or ‘right’ on a dating app mirrors expressing one’s political views, while the mention of blue water in The Modern Way to Shower (2020) refers to the coloured water cannons used during widespread protests.

Veiled references, clever wording, and incisive wit are among Wong’s signature approaches, revealing his true talents as a writer and storyteller. Using a stream of consciousness technique, his first-person narrative takes viewers into his inner world of sensory experiences, memories, and disjointed associations. These non-linear musings embody the perspective of the everyman archetype—an average individual navigating life’s struggles and triumphs. However, there is nothing ‘average’ about Wong’s imagination. In Sorry for the Late Reply (2021), the main character is riding in a department store lift with a saleswoman when he suddenly becomes obsessed with her varicose veins. The obsession grows until their shapes morph into a lightning storm, mysteriously transporting him inside her body. There, he embarks on a surreal journey through her leg veins. When his mind begins to wander, he gets lost and resorts to Google Maps to find his way out.

One of the most prevalent themes in Wong’s work is sex, manifested in the psychosexual tendencies or imaginations of his ‘everyman’ characters. Sex, for Wong, is not about the act itself but rather about desire; it is a way to remind us of our human nature and our animal instincts, away from the social and political identities we regularly perform. Sex is also a stand-in for the feelings of longing and yearning as we seek human connection, personal safety, or validation. Wong’s protagonists are often plagued by their desires, placed in uncomfortable, often voyeuristic positions; they are locked in a constant struggle to find their place or escape their limitations. Themes of sex, erotic tension, and masturbation feature heavily in Debts in the Wind (2025), Wong’s newly commissioned work for the Sigg Prize exhibition. Composed of ten chapters and set within the world of golf, a sport frequently associated with the elite, the twenty-minute video features a central character who lives under the tenth hole of the golf course. Each vignette is weighted with allegorical meaning as Wong narrates various encounters and scenarios that satirise wealth, power, and social mobility. As always, there is bitterness but also humour and lightness as he deftly moves from private thoughts to social critique, treading the shadowy line between the personal and the political.

Seen next to the previous two artists, Pan Daijing’s artistic practice appears to move in a radically different direction. Crafting immersive environments using sound, light, texture, and movement, Pan’s art is site-responsive, architecturally grounded, and deeply invested in creating a spatio-temporal presence. Sound is not heard but felt in her works, and the concept of liveness is crucial, as is the bodily and sensory awareness we bring to perceive and feel the space and the elements placed within it. Her art asks us to engage with the present and to put aside our expectations of knowing or taking away a specific message. Occupying and working in direct response to a space is a form of resistance for Pan as it takes attention from repeatability and commodification, pushing us to focus on being in the moment and experiencing our own selves. Her durational performance piece Echo, Moss and Spill (2021) involved a handful of performers—including the artist—moving slowly atop a red vinyl floor, at times leaning, touching, or brushing against one another and members of the audience. Their seemingly automatic movements were not choreographed but referenced universal gestures of trauma and pain, such as slapping, flicking, and scratching, ordinary and unremarkable actions that become haunting when conducted by grey-clad performers in a brightly lit space, paired with bass-heavy metronome beats.

Pan’s work is about reducing to essentials: The absence of narrativity and the things purposely left unspoken allow meaning to emerge. It is fitting then, that Pan’s 2024 solo exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich was entitled Mute. For this ‘live exhibition’ Pan took over the entire museum space, including unregistered and normally unseen areas, creating a single artwork that unfolded across eighteen rooms. Careful arrangements of moving images, found objects, and sculptural interventions are punctuated with live performance, and a soundtrack envelopes the architectural space. In these works, we are induced to feel and imagine, allowing our sensations to take over reason and transport us away from the rational world. This process forces us to look for truths within, build trust in ourselves, and resist external pressures and systems that dictate what or how we should feel.

Pan’s contribution to the Sigg Prize exhibition, Bent (2025), builds on tensions that run throughout her practice: between absence and presence, abstract and concrete. The installation occupies the inner corner of the gallery space and intertwines architecture, light, ready-made objects, and sound to create an immersive environment. The darkened space, curtained off on two sides and extending full height to the ceiling, conjures the impression of a well or a reservoir, accentuated by the addition of a swimming pool ladder at the windowsill above the gallery. Visitors entering the space immediately feel the pulsing reverb of the soundtrack as they notice visual echoes and riffs moving between light and dark, shiny and matte, curvy and rectilinear, still and moving. Bent extends the distillation and subtraction explored in Pan’s previous works, extracting essential meaning from minimal components. Each element becomes filled with a potency and energetic presence that affects the space and our experience within it.

Power is a pervasive force in our everyday lives. It seeps into the institutional structures that form our society, influencing norms, behaviours, and all manner of relationships. To be a contemporary artist today means navigating these systems, and in some cases, pushing against them. For Ho Rui An, analysis and reasoning play a key role in unpacking the inner workings of power on a governmental or geopolitical level. For Wong Ping and Pan Daijing, however, gut feelings take precedence; their processes rely more on immediacy and intuition. Each artist articulates perspectives or experiences we might not otherwise encounter or consider, and in doing so, they help us to imagine ourselves and our worlds in a new way. In the shared space of the Sigg Prize 2025 exhibition, their works speak to the complexities of our time, inviting us to experience the present not as a fixed point in time, but as a fluid space of possibilities.