Join us at the Printed Matter table of the NYABF Block Party for a signing with Sim Chi Yin, featuring Sim’s publication, She Never Rode That Trishaw Again.

She Never Rode That Trishaw Again tells the story of Loo Ngan Yue, a woman widowed by the British war against anti-colonial forces in Malaya — a 12-year conflict that became a template for other counter-insurgency campaigns around the world, including Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Artist and author Sim Chi Yin juxtaposes vacation photographs of Loo — her late paternal grandmother — with oral history excerpts on the family’s trauma. This intimate volume, using vernacular photographs to create a filmic experience, takes us inside the emotional world of a family shattered by geopolitics. It is the first in a trilogy of books Sim is making around the “Malayan Emergency” of 1948 to 1960, and its colonial and post-colonial representations, painting a picture of anguish, loss and, amnesia — an allegory for Southeast Asia’s lingering traumas as a Cold War battleground.

Sim Chi Yin (b.1978, Singapore) is an artist from Singapore whose research-based practice uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. She works across photography, film, installation, performance and book-making.

She will participate in the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and has exhibited at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); the Barbican, London (2023); Harvard Art Museums, Boston, USA (2021); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2021); Nobel Peace Museum, Oslo (2017), Arko Art Centre, Seoul (2016); Zilberman Gallery Berlin (2021); Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2019). She has also participated in the Istanbul Biennale (2022, 2017) and the Guangzhou Image Triennial ( 2021). Her work is in the collections of Harvard Art Museums, The J. Paul Getty Museum, M+ Hong Kong, Singapore Art Museum, and the National Museum Singapore. She was an artist fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2022-3) and is completing a PhD at King’s College London.

Sim is represented by Zilberman Gallery in Berlin and Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong.

The NYABF Block Party will take place on 22nd St, between 10th and 11th Ave, right outside the New York Art Book Fair at 548 W. 22nd St.