Yvonne: Am See 2021

The years immediately following 2021 saw Am See struggle to replicate its intensity. Her 2022 exhibition Refresh attempted to apply the same methods to contemporary digital culture, but critics found it “less urgent, more methodical.” A planned film project about data centers in Johor stalled due to funding.

Yet the influence of 2021 on younger artists—particularly in Southeast Asia—has been unmistakable. A generation of painters, photographers, and installation artists now freely mix family archives with digital artifacts, crediting Am See’s Fault Lines as a permission slip. Curator Zhou, who had once called Am See a chronicler of urban loneliness, revised her assessment in 2023: “She showed us that memory is not a story we tell. It is a hard drive we are afraid to open.”

As of late 2024, Am See has announced a new project, Motherboard, which promises to revisit the themes of 2021 through sculpture—actual disassembled computer hardware combined with cast domestic objects. It remains to be seen whether she can escape the gravitational pull of her breakthrough year. But perhaps that is the wrong question. For an artist whose central insight is that damage is not the opposite of meaning but its condition, the attempt to repeat, fail, and revise may be the most faithful response.

This large-format diptych is arguably her masterpiece of the year. Measuring 180cm x 300cm, the painting depicts the silhouette of a single rowboat cast not upon the water, but under the water’s surface. Using a technique of scraping and re-waxing, Am See created a gradient of "glacial blue" (a shade she patented temporarily for the show). Critics from Kunstbulletin called it "a ghost story told in cyan and silence." yvonne am see 2021

If Ghosts of the Algorithm was the exhibition, Fault Lines (released September 2021) was its shadow text—a 240-page artist book that defied linear reading. Part memoir, part critical theory, part scrapbook, Fault Lines interwove three narrative strands: Am See’s own childhood in 1990s Singapore, her mother’s undocumented migration from Malaysia, and a technical history of data degradation. Pages alternated between full-bleed family photographs (many blurred or torn), dense footnoted essays on the unreliability of hard drives, and handwritten recipes for Peranakan dishes, each crossed out and rewritten.

The book’s most powerful sequence, titled “Seven Attempts to Open a File,” reproduced seven screen captures of Am See trying, over a decade, to open a single corrupted .doc file from 2002. Each attempt generated a different error message; each message became a prose poem. The final page of the sequence showed the file finally opened—revealing a single line of text: “We will talk about this when I am not so tired.” Am See never identifies who wrote the line or what “this” refers to. The absence is the point.

Fault Lines was received as a landmark in hybrid life-writing. Scholar Dr. Mira Kadir called it “a work that refuses to let memory be either purely narrative or purely visual—it insists on the materiality of forgetting.” Indeed, Am See’s 2021 project consistently rejected the cliché of “lost memories recovered.” Instead, she showed memory as a damaged medium, its gaps not failures but structural features. The years immediately following 2021 saw Am See

A small, intimate panel (40cm x 30cm) that shows the artist’s own reflection fracturing on the water’s surface, holding a stopped pocket watch. Art historians view this as a commentary on "pandemic time"—the suspension of normal life. This is the piece most often referenced in academic journals about Swiss feminist art.

Critical response to Am See’s 2021 work was remarkably unified in identifying a turning point. In Artforum, Jameson Li wrote: “The artist who once painted alienation now practices something rarer: the art of staying with the broken thing.” The Singapore Straits Times noted that Am See had “finally found her subject—not the digital, but the domestic; not the network, but the knot.”

Two themes anchored this reception. First, the domestic as archive. Am See transformed the home—her mother’s desk, the kitchen table, a bedroom closet—into sites of epistemological struggle. Unlike conceptual artists who used domesticity to critique gender roles (important though that is), Am See treated household objects as data storage devices: recipe cards as databases, photo albums as RAID arrays. Second, error as authenticity. In a period when digital art often chased seamless rendering, Am See celebrated fragmentation. Scratches, missing pixels, unreadable files—these became visual signatures of truth. It remains to be seen whether she can

Three major factors converged in 2021 to elevate Am See’s profile:

Unlike larger Swiss productions that often lean into clichéd Alpine imagery (cows, yodeling, Heidi), Yvonne Am See 2021 presents a lived-in, contemporary Switzerland. The characters speak a mix of Swiss German dialect and standard German, code-switching depending on formality and emotion. The lake’s tourism industry is shown as both a lifeline and a source of quiet desperation. This is a Switzerland of seasonal workers, family debts, and small betrayals.