Yen Lin Kong

Yen Lin Kong has spent close to a decade working in the visual arts sector of Singapore, playing diverse of roles from educator, programme manager, curator to policymaker, after starting her career as a sub-editor on the Global Pictures Desk at Thomson Reuters. Currently with the National Arts Council Singapore (NAC)'s visual arts department, she led commissioning projects for public art for milestone events like the Singapore Bicentennial (2019), and spearheaded ‘Rewritten: The World Ahead of Us’ (2020) , the council’s largest display of public artworks, featuring 14 artists. From 2019 to 2020, she also piloted NAC’s inaugural international artist residency partnerships in Yogyakarta and Manila. Prior to that, she programmed photography, film and literary arts at The Arts House, and was an education manager at DECK, a center for contemporary photography in Singapore which organises the biennial Singapore International Photography Festival.

Aside from her professional practice, Yen Lin is an avid photo researcher, focusing on Singapore’s modern photography history from the 1950s to 80s. Having earned her Masters in Asian Art
Histories from Lasalle College of the Arts in 2016, she is particularly keen in examining the wider systemic frameworks governing the history of visual culture in Singapore. Topics of interest include the sociopolitical forces which aided photography’s rise to prominence as an art form, the applications of vernacular photography, as well as the use of photographic imagery as a means of challenging or reinforcing societal and national perceptions. Most recently in 2022, she completed a research fellowship with the National Museum of Singapore, focusing on archival photography within the national collection.