Yale-NUS lecturer Dr Yanyun Chen's and alumnus Chia Yaim Chong’s video collaboration was nominated for the National Youth Film Awards

Hindsight is 20/20. Image provided by Dr Yanyun Chen

What stories do artists tell during a pandemic? A video collaboration between Yale-NUS Lecturer of Humanities (Visual Arts) Dr Yanyun Chen and Yale-NUS alumnus Chia Yaim Chong (Class of 2021) sought to explore just that. Titled Hindsight is 20/20, the short video offered a glimpse of a Singaporean artist’s life under lockdown. Their video was also nominated for this year’s National Youth Film Awards, which celebrates youth who excel across various aspects of filmmaking. This year’s theme focused on celebrating resilience and hope in a post-COVID-19 world.

Since she graduated with a digital animation degree, Dr Chen has been practicing visual arts for the last three decades, with a turn towards the classical fine arts in the last decade. Since then, she has been attempting to find a meeting point between her charcoal drawing and digital animation practice.

As a visual storyteller, it was no surprise that even at the height of Singapore’s circuit breaker last year, Dr Chen found herself wondering what it means to be an artist and what genuine stories she could tell during a time of pandemic.

This was what planted the first seeds of the project, and when Dr Chen was invited by the Asian Art Institutum to develop a short film for Singapore Art Week 2021, she decided to create an animation piece that conveyed the feelings of being trapped in a space, and feeling time and space melt away. When she thought about looking for a musician or sound artist to collaborate with, Dr Chen did not have to look too far.

She reached out to Yaim, after having listened to his (then-yet-to-launch) music album, titled day/dreams, which was created as part of Yaim’s Arts and Humanities capstone project. Finding that the album very much captured “the textures of reflective isolation, the dream-like manner in which time passes during the pandemic, and the sense of helplessness in face of the larger global problems during COVID-19,” Dr Chen was keen to collaborate with him on Hindsight is 20/20.

Promotional material of the video collaboration. Pictured (left) is Chia Yaim Chong (Class of 2021) and Dr Yanyun Chen (right). Image provided by Dr Chen.

When asked about the challenges in the process of creating the soundtrack, Yaim shared, “Honestly I was a little bit nervous because this was my first time composing specifically for film, as well as working with an artist as experienced as Yanyun, who was also someone I looked up to for a long time. I am thankful that the entire process actually went really smoothly, and Yanyun was just a joy to work with.”

Even though Yaim considered himself “relatively ‘young’ in artist years”, he traced his relationship with music back to his secondary school days where he joined a guitar ensemble. Since then, he has joined a band with friends, written and produced music, and done other audio recording and engineering work.

Yaim also credited his time spent at Yale-NUS as having a significant impact on his artistry and approach to making art. He said, “Each of the artists and art educators I met as a result of my time at Yale-NUS truly and profoundly changed the way I understood artmaking. For example, even as a musician, taking drawing classes with Yanyun and learning about the way she understands art and storytelling, was massively eye-opening for me.”

He added, “A big impact Yale-NUS had on me was making me question everything. Meta-narratives, connections across disciplines, history and its continuing impact on how we shape narratives today. I definitely could have become more technically sound if I had attended a music or art school, but I would not trade the way Yale-NUS has helped me understand and question the world for anything else.”

When asked to reflect on how she felt receiving the nomination, Dr Chen shared, “It was an honour and a delight to have our film recognised, and to be alongside these amazing films and storytellers. This was my second nomination for the National Youth Film Awards, and my last, so I felt very happy that my collaboration with Yaim received such acknowledgement.”