Chris Chong Chan Fui
Chris Chong Chan Fui, born in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, is an artist who works with the moving image. His current art practice has expanded to incorporate drawing, photography and installation. Chong has premiered at film festivals such as the Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, Vienna, London, and Toronto. He has exhibited his works at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden (Smithsonian Institute), EYE Film Institute Netherlands, Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, and Singapore Art Museum. His latest series, ENDEMIC (2015) debuted at the Palais de Tokyo, along with the BOTANIC (2013) series at the Musée D’Art Contemporain de Lyon. Chong is an Asian Scholarship Foundation / Ford Foundation fellow, an alumni of Busan’s Asian Film Academy and was most recently awarded the 2016 Smithsonian Artist Resesarch Fellowship in Washington D.C.
Kok Siew-Wai
Kok Siew-Wai started out as a video artist, now an artist-curator and improvised vocalist. She received her B.A. in Media Study at State University of New York, SUNY-Buffalo; and her M.F.A. in Electronic Integrated Arts at Alfred University, USA; where she lived and worked from 1998-2005. She has shown her videos, performed and presented her curatorial screening programmes in Asia, Europe, Canada and USA, participating in festivals such as Choppa Experimental and Improvised Music Festival (Singapore), Singapore International Film Festival, Singapore Night Festival, Arkipel International Experimental Film and Documentary Festival (Indonesia), Asian Meeting Festival (Japan), International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands) and more. Siew-Wai has a deep passion for the experimental and improvisational arts, and the DIY effort of promoting them. She is the co-founder and festival director of KLEX since 2010, and is currently teaching at the Faculty of Creative Multimedia, Multimedia University. (Photo: David Ngui)
Usen Leong
Usen Leong was born in Penang, Malaysia. She teaches and holds workshops on documentary filmmaking while she obtaining her Master of Fine Arts degree at National Taiwan University of Arts. Since 2010, she has been involved in numerous documentary productions, interdisciplinary theatre visual design, column writing. Currently, she works as a full time lecturer at New Era University College Drama and Visuals Department. Her previous works focus mainly on themes of identity, race, diaspora, conflict between development and environment. Usen’s works have received several international nominations. She has been invited as a judge in several theatre and short film competitions in Malaysia. Being a movie, documentary and theatre lover, she writes column at MalaysiaKini (Chinese Version) and Sin Chew Daily to share her thoughts on these art forms.
Fabrizio Gilardino
Fabrizio Gilardino has been working as graphic designer, illustrator, artistic director, record producer and curator since 1980s, collaborating with a variety of festivals, art galleries and artist-run centres, record labels, radio stations and magazines both in Canada and Europe. Born in Italy, he currently divides his time between Montreal and South-East Asia. He co-founded AWAS, a grassroots animation festival in Kuala Lumpur in 2015.