Chok Si Xuan’s Science Fiction-Inspired Art Blurs The Lines Between Machine And Human
Singaporean contemporary artist Chok Si Xuan creates otherworldly installations that are as technical as they are artful.
From Singapore studios to global stages, these women artists and designers — image-makers, object-shapers, world-builders — are redefining what it means to make. Through lens, line, and material, they are expanding the visual language of our time. Ahead, meet Chok Si Xuan, an installation-based artist exploring a tension at the heart of contemporary society: the push and pull between the machinic and the organic.
For Chok Si Xuan, creating a piece of art doesn’t begin with picking up a paintbrush. Her sources of inspiration are as wide-ranging as they are contradictory — the uncanny visuals of a science-fiction film, the unexpected backstory behind the design of a Japanese bullet train, or even the ridges of a bat’s wing. Chok’s installation-based work is a fascinating blend of cybernetics, sculpture, and art, exploring the overlaps and contradictions between the natural and the man-made. Her sculptures often take alien, surreal forms—but even when they do, it’s in the hope that spectators will look into them and see not just a window into other worlds, but a mirror reflecting our own.
Despite being well-versed in the realm of technology, Chok is an artist by trade. This is perhaps what lends even her most surreal work a distinct note of humanity—her foray into the programming and tech space took a creative path. She began her creative journey as a fashion student at a local university, but was soon drawn to the pure artistic expression offered by the fine arts program. “I took painting as a first step, because I really didn’t have any foundation in art. Then I saw people making installations and sculptures, and that resonated with me.” She was immediately drawn to themes of the machinic and organic, and the contradictions inherent in these classifications. “I’ve always been interested in the idea of what’s natural and not natural. I started off by looking at human inventions that were inspired by nature — it’s called biomorphic design.” Here, she discovered unexpected curiosities of design — some coincidental, like the ridges of an umbrella recalling the joints of a bat’s wings; others deliberate, such as the tip of a Japanese bullet train designed to mimic the aerodynamic curve of a kingfisher’s beak.
Her installations, often built from secondhand electronics foraged with the help of artist friends, are intended to explore the increasingly blurred lines between the machinic and the human. “Particularly within the realm of technology, which my generation has grown up in, I’m curious about how electronics and digital infrastructure have influenced our cognition, bodies, and relationships to one another,” she says. This fascination with technology led Chok to dive deeper into the subject, using YouTube tutorials to teach herself how to code, or pestering shop owners at Sim Lim Square to teach her more about their wares. When even this wasn’t enough, she began a part-time Bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering.
“The Internet is a great resource, but having some structure and being around people who are also in the industry really helps to contextualise why all this knowledge is being assembled in a discipline,” Chok says. This technical background was on full display in her most recent exhibition, titled core_memory, which explored what she calls the materiality of technology. “I have circuits on display, and I also did some game development solutions,” she explains. “These are things that I actually learned in school.”
There is also an alien, otherworldly quality to Chok’s art, and she draws heavily from science fiction works like Arrival and Annihilation. “What excites me about the visuals of these films is this idea of the unknown, and this very alien form of nature that they depict,” she says. In Arrival, a linguist is tasked with devising a way to communicate with aliens when the military fails to do so; Annihilation sees a group of female scientists venture into a landscape overtaken by an unknown virus. In this sense, both films also tackle that very human desire, when faced with absurdity, to understand—to unravel it piece by piece and map it out. It’s an impulse which you can observe in Chok herself. For her, as unearthly as the problems in these films may be, they offer key parallels to our world. “That feeling of uncanniness, to me, reflects the absurdity that we live in,” she says. “We are constantly finding ourselves in such absurd moments with our own inventions.”
Below, Chok Si Xuan tells us more about her journey through art, technology, and everything in between.
How did your journey as an artist begin?
Chok Si Xuan (CSX): I had been doing something artistic since I was a kid—I did ballet, I did drawing—but I had never really thought about doing it professionally. It was only when I went to an open house for a local art school that I thought to myself, wow, this could be a possible career now. And so I went for it. Going to art school gave me the opportunity to really look at what was possible and what kinds of artistic practices were out there, and also to understand and navigate the challenges of being a working artist. The other pivotal point was when I graduated from my Bachelor’s program in fine arts, because it was during Covid. It was a really tough time for everyone, but strangely, a really good time for my practice, because everyone was pivoting to something digital. Even within the arts, I was interested in not just the digital, but the technological, and my artworks had always been curious about machines and what it means to live with technology. Fortunately or unfortunately, that period did platform my practice a bit more, so I was able to do more shows, gain momentum, and meet a lot of great people along the way.
Has your artistic practice changed your personal relationship with technology?
CSX: Yes, I definitely feel like it has made me a more conscious consumer. Across the past five or six years of investigating what technological materials are made out of, I’ve also been thinking about how sustainable these practices are. A lot of energy goes into mining and extracting these resources, and also producing and manufacturing them. It’s actually a really complex web of economies and labours that I think the average person doesn’t see or think about, and part of my work tries to highlight that. So I think in my own life, that also made me think, okay, I’ll try to use these devices for as long as possible and only consume more when I need to. At the same time, on the digital dimension, while I think we all enjoy being online and doomscrolling to varying degrees, I also feel I’m more aware of things like AI-generated content and where it comes from.
Have you ever explored the use of AI in your own work?
CSX: In my work, I haven’t explored it so much. I think it boils down to intention, and I feel like I’ve only seen a few artists who have really succeeded in creating a meaningful or conscious collaboration with these tools. The biggest concern that comes to mind when I think about AI is that it’s us delegating our thoughts, or the thinking and writing process, to a machine. Of course, the idea of delegating parts of the way we live or what makes us human doesn’t only happen with AI, but also in the use of applications. For example, if we want to buy food, we don’t have to actually go down to a store; we could just order it on our phones. Or if we’re seeking connection, we could use a dating app. So there are always some layers of interaction being lost—I just think that AI makes a very big leap, especially in terms of prompt generation.
You frequently conduct educational programs and interactive sessions along with your exhibitions. Why is that important to you?
CSX: The educational part of making is really important for my practice, because I dive into a lot of technical things. With technology, there are a lot of unseen elements—you can’t really observe how electricity flows through a circuit, but you know what it looks like when something happens, right? That’s why I have quite a few talks with my collaborators exploring these technical and material dimensions.
At the same time, there’s a lot of history that I’m trying to engage with as well. Within my most recent exhibition, core_memory, I was thinking about what kinds of inventions led to other inventions. Particularly with computer memory—before hard disk drives, there was a kind of computer memory called core memory, and it’s quite fascinating that we now use core memory as a different term. We now use it to say that we’re making this really big memory, something that’s going to stay with us for a long time. So I’m always trying to have conversations with viewers and visitors about this background: that there was this technology that quite literally used iron cores, and now we’re also thinking about a core that is within us. Those kinds of conversations can only be had in person.
I also have more hands-on, education-based workshops with my friends at [art and technology research lab] Feelers. They designed a workshop that combined weaving with programming. Part of my exhibition was about how the techniques and social practices of weaving led to the first computer, and to the invention of software as well—how the punch cards and dobby bars used in textile weaving actually became zeros and ones in programming. So I think that being present and having conversations with the viewers gives you a great opportunity to help them understand these things.
What do you hope that people take away from core_memory?
CSX: What I hope is for people to have a slightly more intimate sense of technology. We sometimes think of technology as something bigger than us, as though it will save us. Like, technology will invent the cure for something — it’ll solve this problem, or that problem. But actually, technology and its infrastructure are quite vulnerable. It’s something that can break down and fail. For me, that vulnerability is something that I see within ourselves, as humans. So I would want people not to always think about these systems as things that can never fail—instead, to see failure as not a bad thing, and just something that is inevitable.
Which other artists inspire you at the moment?
CSX: I really enjoy [working with] Feelers. Though they don’t make artwork in the traditional form, I think their research is really exciting, and it’s always exciting to have conversations with them and dream with them about all these dimensions of technology beyond optimisation and efficiency. I’m also inspired by people like Genevieve Ang. She’s a ceramicist, and her most recent project was about trying to understand Singapore’s clay and bricklaying history, how Singapore’s clay was extracted from our rivers, and how we’ve sort of lost that connection to the land. Another artist that comes to mind is Victoria Hertel—she’s an artist that I’ve worked with as well, and her works are more interested in the sensorial experience of technology.
What excites you about Singapore’s art scene right now?
CSX: I think that Singapore’s art scene is very young. I get a sense that people are willing to try and approach things with curiosity, and we’re not just siloed within our mediums. A lot of different kinds of practitioners from other domains are trying to enter the art world in their own way and have conversations—that’s also how I’m able to meet people like researchers from universities, or musicians, or architects. I think this curiosity, and maybe the lack of clearly defined boundaries, is what makes it more experimental and more fun.
This article was first seen on Grazia Singapore.
For more on the latest in culture and art reads, click here.
