Chong Yan Chuah

Chong Yan Chuah

Chong Yan Chuah 蔡崇彦
Chong Yan Chuah at his art studio. 2023
Born	(1992-05-29) May 29, 1992 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Occupation	Artist
Nationality	Malaysian
Education	Newcastle University
Alma mater	Architectural Association School of Architecture
Website
chongyanchuah.com

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Chong Yan Chuah (蔡崇彦, Chuah Chong Yan, B. 1992) is an architectural designer and artist currently working in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His body of work touches various mediums ranging from digital and game art, drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation – often dialoguing with one another through a mis-en-scène. Coming from an architectural background, his main interest lies at the intersection between the physical environment in which we live and the fictional worlds that he creates, challenging the perception of space, reality, and experience. Inspired by the idea of an escape, each world serves as an extension of the real life or an allegory of his emotional state – rather than a creation of a new reality. The otherworldly feels, characters, and elements found in his digital works are results of his playful approach towards art-making – seeking to experiment around the concept of artist as explorer; one who discovers and reveals the unknown.

Early life and education

Chong Yan was born in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. In 2014, he graduated with a BA (Hons) Architecture [ RIBA/ARB Part I ] from Newcastle University. Newcastle, Tyne and Wear, UK. Receiving the RIBA President’s Medals nomination from Newcastle University. Being awarded an AA Scholarship, in 2017 he subsequently graduated with a AA Dipl. [ RIBA/ARB Part II ] from the Architectural Association School of Architecture. London, UK. He worked for Make Architects in London. Together with Bethany Edgoose and Nathan Su, he co-founded and directed (Past) for Inferstudio. In 2020, he founded Somnii, an art direction, digital imagination, and research studio.

Exhibition

He has participated in groups and solo exhibitions at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Royal Institute of British Architects, NTU Singapore, Ilham Gallery Malaysia, and National Museum of Singapore.

Worldbuilding

What came first in the world-building process rather than its scientific and visual attributes was the language. More than a tool of communication, it is what shapes the identity of a place. Fascinated by the concept of an asemic language system, a wordless, open-semantic form of writing, the artist then developed his own. Each combination of lines and forms bears no logic, yet unfolds open-ended meanings. This is parallel to the act of world-building, where facts serve merely as hints of what a place could be. In a game world, there is no death, no final stage, no linear time. Instead, there are centers. Each world in this game of exploration is built around a central anchor object or a series of objects arrayed in a field: a sun-like orb, a columbarium made of bodies, gridded megaliths piercing the sky. The worlds we see are made from the inside out; in other words, these worlds are built, asset-by-asset, brick-by-brick.

Trained as an architect, much of Chong Yan’s work imagines architecture in the digital realm, asking what role an architect could play in a fully digital future. Ever the provocateur, he is a futurist who thinks in hypotheticals. With the grandeur of a twentieth-century urban planner, he seeks to envision possibilities of the human in the era of the metaverse. “What if you could design not just an environment,” he says, “but design a Meta-God”? Chong Yan sees the role of the architect as a “techno-paganist” or a “digital shaman” who understands the blueprint of the world, where an architect’s understanding of structure is abstracted from the scale of a building to the scale of a world.

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  Chong Yan's World Map. {Aequus}

Worlds and Works

AEQUUS. Atl-Aequus & the Five Phases

Atl-Aequus & The Five Phases is the fourth world designed by Chong Yan Chuah. Bringing players through a life journey in the form of a video game. Atl, in short, for atlas, when looking at the world through a vast collection of maps. Aequus, a Latin-adjacent term speaking about equality, speaks about opportunities for all in today’s world. Trained as an architect, his reimagination of the digital realm is influenced by Buddhist-Taoist traditions he grew up with in Malaysia. Players are guided through a void with five glowing portals to choose from; the five entrances were created based on the Chinese elemental theories. The philosophical theory based on the order of mutual generation allows for more questions than answers. It helps to describe interactions and relationships between multiple phenomena. A futurist like Chong Yan himself seeks to envision possibilities of humans in the era of the metaverse, raising questions of “what if you could design not just an environment but design a meta God?” he asked. What if the role of an architect is to become an artist of the future? An artist who designs digital Gods to govern their own worlds. But for now, Chong Yan is the creator of Atl-Aequus & The Five Phases. The video game is designed to have consequential paths just like the life decisions one faces through the different stages in life, ending either in the celestial skies of heaven where lights are aplenty or stuck in the dark ruins of hell.

• AEQUUS. Architect of Meta-Gods
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• AEQUUS. Architect of Meta-Gods
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  META-GODS. {Water 水}
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  META-GODS. {Earth 土}
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  META-GODS. {Wood 木}

FAC3D. What if we kissed at the intersection between Art, Writing, and Technology?

FAC3D is a collaborative exploration encompassing the idea of the digital self; one that connects machine learning, digital art, and the written word. The project consists mainly of an interactive exhibition at The Back Room, featuring a fragment of the artist’s latest body of work, accompanied by a printed publication, offering various nuances surrounding the complex relationship between human identity and the virtual realm. This catalogue includes writings and Q&As, contributed by both human and machine writers: Aahan Prakash, Bethany Edgoose, Ellen Lee, jo l, LALUNE, Mikhail Hilmi, Ong Kar Jin, Sebastian Tiew, Lim Sheau Yun, Skylar Ang, and UBERMORGEN (Prof. Hans Bernhard & Prof. Lizvlx).

Intrigued by the idea of a hyper-connected world, whereby the line between physical and virtual realities is blurred, he is rather interested in setting up a situation which allows a conversation between a “real” person and a digital identity. This exhibition therefore highlights one of the three digital identities created—Skylar Ang—and invites viewers to interact with her. Skylar is one of the three avatars featured at FAC3D, all of which were trained using Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), a learning-based technology that enables auto-generation of text. Each identity was fed with a set of literary works that matches their personalities, so as to influence the way they express themselves through words. Leaning on the idea that environment forms identity, prior to the making of the three digital identities, he devoted himself to the creation of the world that they are part of—featured in this exhibition as a one-channel video projection. This fictional universe conveys a somewhat eerie feeling; 3D human-like figures are distorted, juxtaposed, and placed in an uncanny manner across the space. This piece is, in one way or another, the artist’s portrayal of the unsettling sentiments that he felt from existing under multiple identities—once again challenging his perception towards the coexistence between a physical and a digital self.

• FAC3D. Exhibition
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• FAC3D. Publication
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  FAC3D. Artist Edition
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  FAC3D. Limited Edition
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  FAC3D. Limited Edition

27 Years of Lazarian Delights. Exploration on a newly discovered system of planets

27 Years of Lazarian Delights is the result of fantastical worldbuilding; artifacts from another solar system collected by an ambitious explorer who pursues a hedonistic thirst for novelty in a metaphorical journey of discovery, scientific observation, and ethnography. “27 Years of Lazarian Delights” is a brief journey into an obsessive mind. From acid lakes to fiery planes, from suicide ceremonies to a cipher for a script, this explorer records it all with the precise eye of a scientist unwrapping the logic of a new system. In doing so, he takes the language of scientific knowledge and bends it to a world of fiction and speculation, reapplying these tools to fanciful and radical ends. The world the explorer captures is fantastical, but in its essence it is a project in seeing, pushing us Earthlings to reimagine life with eyes anew.”

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  M-05 Figure 8 OrbitalSystem
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  M-04 The Atlas of the Universe

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  M-00 World Map. Journey
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  M-02 Somnia XYZ.G

Exhibition

• 2022 / [ GENDER BENDER TIME TRAVELLER ] ILHAM Art Show 2022, Kurfürstenstraße 151, 10785 Berlin, Germany
• 2022 / [ AEQUUS ] ILHAM Art Show 2022, Ilham Gallery. Malaysia.
• 2022 / [ OUR “BUTTERFLY DREAMS” ] INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE?. NTU ADM Gallery. Singapore.
• 2022 / [ FRAGMENTS OF SOMNIA XYZ-G ] NOT FOR SALE. Singapore Art Week 2022. Singapore.
• 2021 / [ The Poisoned Beast of Dead Looms ] NEW WEAVE. Maybank Foundation. Artisan Gallery. Brisbane, Australia.
• 2021 / [ Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize ] Finalists. Virtual exhibition microsite.
• 2021 / [ FAC3D. What if we kissed at the intersection between Art, Writing, and Technology? ] The Back Room. The Zhongshan Building. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
• 2021 / [ 27 Years of Lazarian Delights ] The Back Room. The Zhongshan Building. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
• 2021 / [ The Poisoned Beast of Dead Looms ] NEW WEAVE. Maybank Foundation. Chan + Hori Contemporary / The Unusual Network. National Museum of Singapore.
• 2021 / [ 27 Years of Lazarian Delights ] Alangkah Asm Artscience Virtual Exhibition. Maybank Foundation.
• 2021 / [ The Poisoned Beast of Dead Looms ] NEW WEAVE. Maybank Foundation. Chan + Hori Contemporary / The Unusual Network. Artisan Gallery, Brisbane, Australia.
• 2021 / [ FAC3D. What if we kissed at the intersection between Art, Writing, and Technology? ] The Back Room. The Zhongshan Building. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
• 2021 / [ The Poisoned Beast of Dead Looms ] NEW WEAVE. Maybank Foundation. Chan + Hori Contemporary / The Unusual Network. National Museum of Singapore
• 2020 / [ The Foot Beneath the Flower: Camp. Kitsch. Art. Southeast Asia ] ADM Gallery, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
• 2020 / [ Bodycathexis ] Wonderwall. The Backroom. The Zhongshan Building. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
• 2020 / [ Kyphosis ] The Backroom. The Zhongshan Building. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
• 2020 / [ Fragments of Lazarian Delights ] ZARCH gallery space. Singapore. SAW.
• 2020 / [ 27 Years of Lazarian Delights ] The Backroom. The Zhongshan Building. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
• 2019 / [ Fragments of Lazarian Delights ] Bizarre Xmas Festival. Eko Cheras Mall. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
• 2019 / [ Fragments of Lazarian Delights ] Urbanscape. Immersio. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
• 2019 / [ Fragments of Lazarian Delights ] Parallel Screens. Hermes Artes Visuais. Sao Paulo, Brasil.
• 2019 / [ Fragments of Lazarian Delights ] Parallel Screens. Nova. Berkaer Str.11. Weimar, Germany.
• 2019 / [ Fragments of Lazarian Delights ] Parallel Screens.1805 Gallery. San Diego, California. USA.
• 2019 / [ Fragments of Lazarian Delights ] Parallel Screens. Porto Vista Hotel. San Diego, California. USA.
• 2019 / [ The Under Belly of Mr. Kupa ] 251st RA Summer Exhibition. Royal Academy of Arts. London, UK.
• 2019 / [ Lion Head ] Noise Giffest 2019. Blk 7 Lock Road. Gillman Barracks. Singapore.
• 2018 / [ Luyong-Poli ] 250th RA Summer Exhibition. Royal Academy of Arts. London, UK.

External links

Official Website

Chong Yan Chuah on Instagram

Chong Yan Chuah: FAC3D

Chong Yan Chuah: Atl-Aequus

Chong Yan Chuah: 27 Years of Lazarian Delights

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