INDEX
ART TAIPEI 2026
Art Fair, Group Presentation
28 October–02 November 2026
Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall
Taipei, Taiwan
Images Coutesy of Kahying Gan, & Richard Koh Fine Art
Related Artworks
Go On, It’s Your Cheat Day (2025)
I Wish We Were More Alike (2024)
I Could Never Be a Saint Like You (2024)
Art Fair, Group Presentation
28 October–02 November 2026
Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall
Taipei, Taiwan
Images Coutesy of Kahying Gan, & Richard Koh Fine Art
Related Artworks
Go On, It’s Your Cheat Day (2025)
I Wish We Were More Alike (2024)
I Could Never Be a Saint Like You (2024)
Description
Text by Richard Koh Fine Art
Richard Koh Fine Art (RKFA) is thrilled to participate in ART SG 2025, Southeast Asia’s premier contemporary art fair, showcasing a distinguished selection of contemporary artworks. This year’s presentation includes a special selection of young Singaporean artists, as well as artists from Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, and Iceland. These artists bring together an eclectic range of themes including memory, identity, urban spaces, and socio-political commentary.
Excerpt from Artist Statement
“A Certified Organic, Delectably Ripe Banana” is a newly developed series of 12 text works for Art Taipei. Continuing my recent interest in text, the series draws heavily from 《愛》, a Taiwanese Hokkien-language soap opera that I encountered throughout a childhood being partially raised by grandparents.Each work begins with a phrase spoken in the series, selected for an existing affinity I had with it, whether through remembering its use in my own life or recognising something familiar in its tone or cadence. My relationship to Hokkien is one of proximity rather than fluency, a language I inherited in fragments through family, television, memory and sound.
This fragmented relationship also sits within a wider history of language suppression across Singapore and Taiwan. From the mid-twentieth century onwards, Singapore promoted Mandarin over Chinese dialects, alongside a broader push towards English as a unifying language (Speak Mandarin Campaign 1979) (Newman 52). For example, when 《愛》 was broadcast in Singapore, due to restrictions on dialect programming, it was dubbed in Mandarin. Whilst in Taiwan, Mandarin was similarly promoted while Taiwanese and other vernacular languages were restricted in schools and public life (Speak Mandarin / 國語運動 , 1950s) (Hall 149–50). These policies contributed to the decline of dialect use and the fragmentation of linguistic inheritance across time.
Rather than treating this linguistic distance as a deficiency, I embrace and find humor in what remains: remembered words, mispronunciations, sounds and characters whose meanings may only be partially understood. By shifting between phonetics, meaning and written character, I want these fragments to be altered, misheard, and recomposed, reflecting how language can be inherited without ever being fully possessed.
Text by Richard Koh Fine Art
Richard Koh Fine Art (RKFA) is thrilled to participate in ART SG 2025, Southeast Asia’s premier contemporary art fair, showcasing a distinguished selection of contemporary artworks. This year’s presentation includes a special selection of young Singaporean artists, as well as artists from Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, and Iceland. These artists bring together an eclectic range of themes including memory, identity, urban spaces, and socio-political commentary.
Excerpt from Artist Statement
“A Certified Organic, Delectably Ripe Banana” is a newly developed series of 12 text works for Art Taipei. Continuing my recent interest in text, the series draws heavily from 《愛》, a Taiwanese Hokkien-language soap opera that I encountered throughout a childhood being partially raised by grandparents.Each work begins with a phrase spoken in the series, selected for an existing affinity I had with it, whether through remembering its use in my own life or recognising something familiar in its tone or cadence. My relationship to Hokkien is one of proximity rather than fluency, a language I inherited in fragments through family, television, memory and sound.
This fragmented relationship also sits within a wider history of language suppression across Singapore and Taiwan. From the mid-twentieth century onwards, Singapore promoted Mandarin over Chinese dialects, alongside a broader push towards English as a unifying language (Speak Mandarin Campaign 1979) (Newman 52). For example, when 《愛》 was broadcast in Singapore, due to restrictions on dialect programming, it was dubbed in Mandarin. Whilst in Taiwan, Mandarin was similarly promoted while Taiwanese and other vernacular languages were restricted in schools and public life (Speak Mandarin / 國語運動 , 1950s) (Hall 149–50). These policies contributed to the decline of dialect use and the fragmentation of linguistic inheritance across time.
Rather than treating this linguistic distance as a deficiency, I embrace and find humor in what remains: remembered words, mispronunciations, sounds and characters whose meanings may only be partially understood. By shifting between phonetics, meaning and written character, I want these fragments to be altered, misheard, and recomposed, reflecting how language can be inherited without ever being fully possessed.