David Chan

David Chan is a practising artist and arts educator whose work examines human behaviour, national identity, historical memory, science, and technological change. Across painting, sculpture, installation, printmaking, and fabricated objects, he returns to familiar images and cultural narratives, then introduces a shift that asks viewers to reconsider what they think they know.

Chan came to art from a family in which professional security was valued over creative work. Raised among accountants, lawyers, and auditors, he initially found it difficult to justify choosing art as a career. His father was not supportive at first, but that changed after Chan had spent several years living independently and supporting himself through art, teaching, and related work.

Before entering formal art education, Chan’s creative outlet was “tinkering.” He made toys, traps, and vehicles as a child, developing a habit of constructing, testing, and altering things. After completing his A-levels in pure science and commerce, he chose to move away from the conventional academic route and enrolled at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. There, he completed a Diploma and BA in Fine Arts, later earning a master’s degree at the National Institute of Education in 2018.

His education gave him access to the field, but Chan describes the difficulties of that period as equally formative. Entering relatively late, he struggled technically in his second year and had to find efficient ways to learn painting, sculpture, and printmaking. That experience made him more willing to question inherited methods and to let an idea determine its own material form.

Chan has made more than 250 works across numerous bodies of work. The subjects have ranged from genetic engineering and ethical control to political trust, nostalgia, changing spaces, and the biases embedded in artefacts and images. His recent research focuses particularly on Singapore’s history and on the question of what remains culturally meaningful as traditions pass between generations.

One painting of Singapore’s former National Library addresses memory through the logic of a degraded image. Chan placed a grid across the building, suggesting that nostalgia can become less precise the more closely one tries to recover it. “Eventually, photographs and imagination begin to replace the actual experience of being there,” he explains. The work reflects his interest in how places, objects, and national stories can seem stable while being shaped by selective memory and incomplete historical knowledge.

The instability of place is also personal. Chan worked at the Artists’ Village in Sentosa from 2003 until the studio was demolished six years later, followed by a succession of studios over the next fourteen years. Those moves changed his working conditions and sharpened his attention to lost places, relocation, and adaptation. He now works from a rented factory space in an industrial area, alongside a full-time teaching role at Nanyang Technological University.

Teaching and studio practice operate in dialogue. His work as an educator involves curriculum planning, demonstrations, feedback, and research, while his studio practice is slower and more solitary. Making work strengthens his teaching, he says, while teaching requires him to articulate and reassess his own methods. His working maxim is straightforward: “Fate favours the working.”

A twenty-three-metre outdoor sculpture for the 2016 Singapore Biennale was a particularly instructive project. It required Chan to consider not only image and concept but also structure, scale, and public conditions. The experience reinforced the importance of breaking large tasks into manageable stages and learning from specialists when a project demands knowledge outside the studio.

Chan is currently developing Generation Lost, an extension of his National Identity 4.0 series. It considers children born in the 2010s, digital natives who are asked to inherit traditions that may feel culturally or emotionally distant. Alongside this work, he continues to study historical artefacts and images shaped by the assumptions of their time. Both strands will contribute to Future Artefacts, his planned 2027 solo exhibition.