Singaporean artist, photographer and independent filmmaker John Clang’s practice is invested in the commonplace, mundane experiences of our daily life. In his performance series Reading by an Artist (2023–ongoing), he forecasts life events for individual sitters based on their birth timings, as well as diverse systems of knowledge. He primarily relies on geomancy—a form of divination based on zi wei dou shu, an ancient Chinese fortune-telling method that utilises figures, lines or geographic features alongside other diverse systems of knowledge. The artist computes ‘charts’ based on his hour-long ‘readings’ that could be referred to as metaphysical portraits unique to each individual sitter. The performance deliberately collapses the boundaries between art and lived reality while positioning the artist as a visionary or a seer capable of surmising the intersections between causality, necessity and possibility. It probes the ways in which unusually sourced knowledge reconciles with our increasingly manufactured notions of reality.

This event will be conducted in English.