SINGAPORE — The countdown begins for the biggest visual art bonanza to kick off the year: The Singapore Art Week.

The nine-day event, organised by the National Arts Council, Singapore Tourism Board and the Economic Development Board, gets under way on Saturday and will feature more than 100 events that culminate in the three-day Art Stage Singapore fair, which opens on Jan 22. Art lovers will be spoilt for choice, not only when it comes to internationally renowned artists such as Fernando Botero and Gilbert & George, but homegrown artists as well. Familiar and established names are set to flex their muscles, among them Suzann Victor, Jimmy Ong, Vertical Submarine, David Chan, Ruben Pang, Dawn Ng, Darren Soh and Nguan. In fact, with so many set to come out of the woodwork, we’ve decided to take a different route and shine the spotlight on a handful of under-the-radar talents well worth casting an eye on.

(Singapore Art Week runs from Jan 17 to 25 at various venues, while Art Stage Singapore runs from Jan 22 to 25. For more information, visit http://artweek.sg/ and http://www.artstagesingapore.com/.)

1. WONG LIP CHIN

It has taken a while, but Wong Lip Chin’s knives are finally out. We’re talking about his second solo show, Thousand Knives, which has been seven years in the making.

“I really wanted to do it for the longest time, but nobody wanted to back my ideas. I even thought of doing it on my own, through crowdfunding,” admitted the 28-year-old. Eventually, Michael Janssen Gallery stepped in to help realise what seems like a pretty complicated exhibition.

Described as a “multi-sensory show” that looks at “human-to-human communication”, it comprises two big waterwheel-like contraptions that house six paintings and six reliefs of his alter ego Lilou, which audiences will be able to operate. The floor will have a reflective surface and he’ll be employing ultraviolet light and piped-in music. There are videos, as well as a sculpture of his Lilou figure that will be up at Art Stage Singapore. (His works will also be at the gallery’s booth at the art fair.)

He has taken part in group shows, but Thousand Knives will be a statement of intent for Wong, who had both good and bad memories about his first solo show in 2009, Now You See, at Marina Mandarin Hotel. “I broke down crying and feeling depressed thinking I could have done it better,” he said. “But I sold works and it did make me think bigger.”

And broader, too. Inspired by a diverse range of artists, from Gordon Matta-Clark, Odani Motohiko and Rirkrit Tiravanija, the LASALLE College of the Arts graduate has an inclusive approach to art-making. He does paintings, drawings and sculptures. But he also delves in performances and has been labelled a “street artist” by a magazine. He even considers his Maxwell Food Centre hawker stall an art space of sorts (he started off making ramen, but now he has someone else holding the fort and they’re experimenting with how to inject ice cream inside goreng pisang. “We have some prototypes,” he quipped.)

“There has always been the contrast between the traditional and the conceptual and I always think, why can’t we have both — like two hands clapping?”

Catch Thousand Knives, Jan 16 to March 1, at Michael Janssen Singapore, Gillman Barracks (9 Lock Road, #02-21). Free admission.

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2. ANG SONG NIAN

What better way to mark your first solo exhibition than with a huge inflatable bonsai tree? The 4m-high, 7m-wide balloon sculpture will be part of the 32-year-old photographer’s show with 2902 Gallery titled A Tree With Too Many Branches, which will also comprise 800 potted iron trees, a series of new photographs of miniature trees and an image of his father’s little garden. “Many years ago, he brought home a young iron tree. That was my first encounter with a potted plant and I was amused by its name. My father went on to design the little garden in our Bukit Panjang flat’s balcony, which he fondly refers to as ‘the forest’,” said Ang, who considers the show a progression of his practice.

This show has links to other series of his dealing with plants, though he is also known for his photographs of the exteriors of Housing and Development Board flats and meticulously arranged found objects. From constructing and arranging subjects to shoot, he eventually realised these could serve as installations as well. “My background is in photography, but I wouldn’t want to limit myself to photographic output,” he said, adding that he is simply “attracted to objects”. “I always find myself constantly drawn to details on a lot of things. Going to the supermarket is like a visual feast for me. I’d spend a couple of hours looking around and observing how things relate to one another,” shared Ang, who declared that even though he would contribute to group shows, it took a while to decide to do a solo show, because he doesn’t like to hurry things. “It reflects the way (I work) and the pace I work at. I’m a person who needs to process things a little bit slowly and it’s also why I decided to shoot using a large-format camera, which slows the process down.”

He’s in no hurry to do another solo show, but does have a couple of things on his plate for SG50, including a collaboration with an anthropologist for a publication on people and objects linked with memories, as well as a group show he’s helping put together on Chinese dialects.

Meanwhile, it would seem like Ang’s father isn’t only partially responsible for his first solo show, but his career as an artist. The younger brother of fellow artist Ang Song-Ming said: “We’ve realised a lot of influence comes from our father. He’s the closet artist in the house. If he had had the chance when he was younger, he could have been a very good artist.” ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY KHOO BEE KHIM.

Catch A Tree With Too Many Branches, Jan 24 to March 15, at DECK (116 Prinsep Street). Free admission.

3. ROFI

In 2005, Rofizano Zaino decided he wanted to take painting seriously. A graphic designer by training, the self-trained visual artist began taking part in small group shows, including annual ones by Malay arts group Angkatan Pelukis Aneka Daya (APAD). “I had reached a point in my career where I wanted a challenge and I wanted to do something creative without using the computer so much and answering to someone else’s brief,” said the 44-year-old. He took it a step further in 2011 with his first solo show at The Substation, and the following year, another solo at Chan Hampe Galleries. Still, Rofi admitted: “Sometimes I do feel like I’m an outsider in the art world. If you went to LASALLE or NAFA, your lecturers are practising artists. I didn’t have that.”

What he did have was a recognisable style. “Subject-wise, I’m known as an artist who does a lot of faces. Faces are my favourite subject matter. I use faces to frame the messages in my work. So when I paint a face, it’s not about creating the likeness of a person like one would do in a portrait; I’m using the face as a kind of ‘vessel’ to carry the idea I want to convey. Having a message in my work is always important to me. I think my background in branding developed a sense of delivering an idea through symbolism. I used to create logos that represented ideas. Now I do it with another form of identity, the face,” he said.

For Singapore Art Week, he’s curating the APAD group show Once Upon A Hill at Galeri Utama at Fort Canning. Seven artists will look to the site’s history in their works and Rofi himself will be presenting three pieces: An installation using salvaged wood from Fort Canning Hill, his first attempt at a sculpture and an imagined portrait of Sang Nila Utama using the map of Fort Canning Hill as the outline silhouette.

Catch Once Upon A Hill, Jan 17 to 25, 11am to 7pm at Galeri Utama@The Foothills, Fort Canning Park. Free admission.

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4. MINTIO

An artist whose practice is based on photography, Samantha Tio (aka Mintio) is included in the impressive line-up for the Prudential Singapore Eye’s exhibition of contemporary Singaporean artists. She’ll be showing works from her earlier series Concrete Euphoria and Conveyance (including one on Marina Bay Sands during its early construction stages).

But her large-format photography works, which often have that sci-fi hyper-real cityscape feel, is only one-half of her practice. She also often collaborates with her husband, Indonesian artist Budi Agung Kuswara (aka Kabul), on works that deal with cultures and peoples, such as the ongoing NUS Baba House show Kebon Indah, where the couple collaborated with batik makers from a village in central Java. “It’s a relational piece exploring identity and relationships with batik makers and was created during a previous residency in Yogyakarta,” she said. (On the side, there will be workshops explaining their technique of combining photography printing with batik.)

Mintio now spends her time shuffling between Singapore and Bali, where her husband’s from. And it has been an interesting experience, which she’ll be sharing at a talk she’ll be participating in for Latent Spaces at Art Stage Singapore. “They have lined up a series of talks with artists on the conditions of art production. This topic’s very significant to me as I have been in several transitions — being married to another full-time artist, becoming a mother, moving out of Singapore and building a new home/studio. The situations in which I make my work is very different from two years ago,” she said, adding that she’s looking forward to shifting back into “collaboration” mode this year after spending last year working on a few public commissions, including artwork for the Thomson MRT Line’s Orchard Boulevard station.

Catch Prudential Singapore Eye, Jan 17 to 28, 10am to 7pm at ArtScience Museum (admission charges apply), and Kebon Indah, until Jan 31 at NUS Baba House (157 Neil Road; free admission).

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5. HILMI JOHANDI

Fresh from two multimedia solo shows last year — Dusk To Dawn at OCBC Centre and Framing Camellia at ION Art Gallery as part of the Affordable Art Fair’s Young Talent Programme — this 28-year-old painter will be one of the five Singapore artists taking part in Art Stage Singapore’s South-east Asia Platform exhibition Eagles Fly, Sheep Flock (and he also gets a shout-out in the publication that will accompany the Prudential Singapore Eye exhibition).

His triptych Framing Camellia will get another showing there, minus the videos, and will be accompanied by a new painting titled The Vernissage. Both works by the LASALLE College of the Arts graduate are representative of his playful take on painting and the appropriation of archival images.

For instance, the former follows an imaginary character named Camellia during the ’50s and ’60s, with Hilmi tapping into images from a variety of sources, from an old travel documentary to vintage P Ramlee films to Chua Mia Tee’s iconic painting National Language Class. The Vernissage also draws from found materials and screenshots of archive videos, “with some hints of images that might make viewers question if it was in Singapore”.

Here, he plays with the very idea of the vernissage, which refers to the private viewing of works by guests before the show is open to the public and artworks are still in the midst of being touched up (the term is French for “varnishing”, Hilmi pointed out). His views on social issues (gender roles in Framing Camellia and class divisions in The Vernissage) lie side by side with his conceptual take on painting.

“I like the idea of a borrowed image being reinterpreted and given a new function and made very allegorical. They also have the advantage of (already) having that setting, which can be difficult for me to re-enact,” said Hilmi, who has a couple of shows lined up this year as well courtesy of Galerie Steph.

Catch the Eagles Fly, Sheep Flock show at Art Stage Singapore, Jan 22 to 25, at Marina Bay Sands Expo & Convention Centre. Tickets from SISTIC.

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6. WEIXIN CHONG

She’s a printmaker, but not quite in the way you think. “I went into prints because I’m quite interested in the aesthetics of printing, of surfaces, layers and textures, and use printmaking over quite a few different materials and try to make installations with these,” said the 27-year-old graduate of LASALLE College of the Arts and, quite recently, London’s Royal College Of Art.

Chong will be one of five Singapore artists included in Art Stage Singapore’s South-east Asia Platform exhibition titled Eagles Fly, Sheep Flock, curated by Khim Ong.

She’ll be presenting two series of works. Copse comprises distorted images taken during a previous trip to the Bukit Brown cemetery and printed on translucent fabric to evoke a “ghostly representation of the forest”. Meanwhile, the Exponential Taxonomies series juxtaposes and blends images of real plants with copies of illustrations of plants that were commissioned by William Farquhar in Singapore. “I’m currently interested in this dichotomy of the digital and the organic, and I’m looking at natural history and representation,” she shared.

The focus on lush flora is different from her other works, which include a series of wax sculptures of animals that allude to miniature Japanese carvings; text and code-embossed print work on tissue paper; and textile prints featuring close-up images of marble textures. The last is a project she has been working on more closely — in April or May, she’ll be going on a research trip to the Italian city of Carrara, home to the famous quarry where marble used for Michelangelo’s David as well as ancient Roman buildings were mined.

Catch Eagles Fly, Sheep Flock at Art Stage Singapore, Jan 22 to 25, at Marina Bay Sands Expo & Convention Centre. Tickets from SISTIC.