Tuesday, September 5, 2017

FSc exhibition



Once upon a time, Foo Swee Chin (FSc) was one of our most elusive comic artists in Singapore. Despite contributing cartoons to Liahe Zaobao since the 1990s and drawing her own comic titles for Nekopress and Slave Labor Graphics (predating Sonny Liew as the first comic artist from Singapore to be published in America), she remained relatively unknown in her home country. She is more famous overseas, especially in Japan where she has been documenting her attempts to break into the competitive manga market there. She has boothed several times at Comiket but it's still tough.

So why has FSc been languishing in obscurity? Part of the reason is her own quiet character and quirky personality. She doesn't like crowds, which I can understand - Singapore is getting too crowded! She is slightly introverted and not one to self-promote herself. A few of us comic / manga scholars have been trying to get her introduced to a wider audience. We featured her in the Women's Manga Beyond Japan conferences in Singapore (2011) and Vietnam (2012) and she has been invited to present about her work at various manga conferences in Japan, Australia and elsewhere.

Things are better in recent years as she has come out of her shell more - she made appearances at local events like Panelgraph in 2015 and was featured at last year's Singapore Writers Fest which presented her with lots of love from her old fans from the 1990s. They have been trying to track her down. She is that elusive.

She was also an invited guest of the Comic Art Festival Kuala Lumpur in 2016. She is also featured at STGCC this coming weekend and will also be speaking on panels at the upcoming Comics and Translation symposium at The Arts House, 23-24 Sept.

http://www.selectcentre.org/translatesg/TSG17_ComicsandTranslation.html

Now thanks to Eddie Cee and Artblovk, she will be holding her first solo exhibition in Singapore.

Details:

ANSUZ: FSc launch night
15 Sept 2017
7pm-9pm
at Artblovk
195 Pearls hill terrace #03-05
Singapore 168976

The exhibition will run from 15 Sept to 15 Oct - free admission!

https://www.facebook.com/Artblovk/

In the meantime, you can try to look for her Clairvoyance e-comic online and hunt down the sketchbook, EP (Extended Psychoneurosis) published by Funics in 2015. She has a new book out in Japanese by Kadokawa, Nihon Lah, which was originally serialized online on Kadokawa's Comicwalker. The book has also been translated into Chinese and sold in Taiwan.

See you at the opening on 15 Sept.

Some links:

https://kyotoreview.org/reviews/review-fsc-2012-clairvoyance/

http://fscwasteland.weebly.com

http://foosweechin.tumblr.com

https://www.facebook.com/FSc-Foo-Swee-Chin-52347249822/

http://www.oicsingapore.com/wordpress/2013/07/21/oic-interview-with-foo-swee-chin-a-k-a-fsc/

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