Lip Chiong is a Singaporean architect-turned-artist. Born in 1975, he trained and practised as an architect in London and Shanghai before shifting to a full-time art practice in 2020.
His earlier work examined familiar environments and social space through photography, video, and participatory installation. Projects include video installations at the Singapore Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2023) and the interactive immersive exhibition Constructing Selves at NAFA Singapore (2025).
Since 2022 he has also worked with generative tools under the name PoetAIArtist. These slow-moving videos of forests, waterfalls and auroral landscapes are made as environments for sustained looking and open-eyed rest. They are paired with human-composed music and treated as an ongoing public archive rather than finished statements.
In late 2025 he returned to working by hand in watercolour, acrylic, drawing and pastel. The decision came from a clear recognition: when the image is generated by machine, the surprise and the flow belong to the system. He wanted those things to happen inside the artist again, through the resistance of materials and the private satisfaction of watching something appear that only he had witnessed first. The current paintings look at the people and animals closest to him.
The two practices continue side by side. One is rooted in the hand and direct observation. The other explores non-narrative, slowly transforming digital space. Both are attempts to make places where attention can rest and change.
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"I trained and worked as an architect for two decades in London, Shanghai and Singapore. In 2020 I left full-time practice to work as an artist. The early years focused on photography, video and participatory installation, examining everyday environments and the ways space shapes identity. Projects from that period include work shown at the Singapore Pavilion of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023 and the immersive exhibition Constructing Selves at NAFA in 2025.
In 2022 I began experimenting with generative tools. What started as curiosity on the platform X, posting under my own name during a period of daily making, gradually became a parallel practice. I created the account PoetAIArtist and began producing the slow-moving landscape videos that form the Otherworldly Landscapes series. These works treat the machine as a collaborator in the generation of continuous, non-narrative environments. They are paired with human-composed music and archived as places for open-eyed rest rather than as finished statements.
By late 2025 I felt a growing absence. When the image is generated by machine, the surprise and the flow belong to the system. I wanted those things to happen inside the artist again — through the resistance of materials, the uncertainty of the next mark, and the private satisfaction of watching something appear that only I had witnessed first. I returned to working by hand in watercolour, acrylic, drawing and pastel. The current paintings look at the people and animals closest to me.
The two practices now continue side by side. One remains rooted in latent space and slow atmospheric transformation. The other is rooted in the hand and direct observation. I do not yet fully understand how they will speak to each other. What I know is that both are attempts to make places where attention can rest and change, and that the primary experience of making must stay with the artist." - Lip Chiong, October 2026
