THE THING BOOKS RESIDENCY

The Thing Books Residency is a 14‑week residency programme dedicated to the exploration of the book as a medium for artistic expression, and delves into a deeper understanding of its materiality.

This pilot edition brings artists and first-time bookmakers Nur Wahidah, Seth Cheong, and Yuen Chee Wai through a series of lectures and workshops. The Residency concludes with a showcase of their publications at SGABF2025.

Organised by Thing Books and presented at the Singapore Art Book Fair.

Lectures & Workshops by:
Based Book Arts
Claudia de la Torre
Darius Ou
gideon-jamie
The Other Workroom
Shrub

Nur Wahidah
Nur Wahidah sings in the alternative-rock band Subsonic Eye. Viewing everything in life through an ecological lens, she has learnt everything she knows from nature. She loves writing songs about nature—songs that tell stories intertwined with nature, and songs that remind her of her love for nature..

Seth Cheong
Seth Cheong is a Singaporean filmmaker. His short films, Lay Over and Late Twenties, have screened at the Singapore International Film Festival in 2022 and 2024 respectively. He is an alumnus of the ASEAN-ROK Film Leaders Incubator 2023 and the SGIFF Southeast Asian Film Lab 2023, where in which his debut feature project, Blue Buildings, was awarded Special Mention.

Yuen Chee Wai
Yuen Chee Wai is a musician, artist, designer and curator based in Singapore. Often inspired by ideas and perspectives glimpsed through the filmic eye and photographic lens, his stylistic oeuvre in improvised music is marked by internalised reflections on memory and loss, invisibility and indeterminacy. His latest research topics span mycology, caves, prehistory and archaeology.

In 2008, he teamed with Otomo Yoshihide (Tokyo), Ryu Hankil (Seoul), and Yan Jun (Beijing) to form the improvised music quartet, FEN (Far East Network). FEN focuses on the continuing multifaceted networks and collaborations between Asian countries. Since its inception in 2014, Yuen is part of Ensembles Asia as Project Director for Asian Music Network, to which he co-curates the Asian Meeting Festival (AMF) with dj sniff in Japan.

He is also a member of The Observatory (Singapore), a band that treads on improvisation, inter-media experimentative performances, installations and noise-adjacent territories, with whom he plays guitar, synth and electronics. With fourteen albums to date, the most recent was a release of a collaboration with Koichi Shimizu titled Demon State (2022). The Observatory has conceived a vanguard of initiatives such as BlackKaji, Source, and the festival Playfreely, which give artists new creative avenues for performing, working and exhibiting together. Through Playfreely, he was also co-curator of Nusasonic, a multi-year project that plunged into a broad spectrum of experimental sound and music cultures in Southeast Asia, enabling dialogue within the region, with Europe, and beyond.

He tours extensively with FEN and The Observatory, performing in Europe, America and Asia regularly, and has presented in MIMI Festival, Lausanne Underground Music and Film Festival, All Ears Festival, Ftarri Festival, Gwangju Biennale, CTM Festival and DIAGE Festival.