Saubin Yap
Yap Sau Bin
Yap was born in Kuala Lumpur (1974), and lives and works there now. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art degree from the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, England in 1998. He is currently a specialist staff at the Faculty of Creative Multimedia, Multimedia University, Malaysia. Yap is also a founding member of Rumah Air Panas Art Society [RAP], an artist collective based in Kuala Lumpur.
His art practice encompasses conceptual work, installations, mapping projects, collaborations, performance and sporadic writings. He had received awards in the Young Contemporaries Arts Award by the National Art Gallery in 2000 and 2002, and has been selected for research residency in Japan under the JENESYS Programme for Creators by the Japan Foundation in 2008.
MappingKLArtSpace is an on-going project initiated by Yap in 2005 mapping the art spaces in the city from the past to present. It has been featured in conjunction with the 8th Havana Biennale in 2006; in Migration Addicts, a collateral event project in the 52nd Venice Biennale, and in the ShenZhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism & Architecture, curated by Biljana Ciric both in 2007; in The Independence Project at GAleri Petronas in 2007 and in Gertrude Art Space, Melbourne in 2008.
Together with his colleagues in RAP, Yap has also undertaken various curatorial projects and currently severs as its chairperson. Began as an independent art space in 1997, RAP is currently operating as a collective working on project basis, organising talks and dialogue sessions. It aims is to explore and coalesce visual arts and other cultural practices through collaboration in exhibition and project; documentation and exchange of ideas in discussion. The members of R.A.P. support an independent, aware and concerted artistic practice in engaging the artistic community and the art public.
Majujaya Community Playground Workshop (2011)
As part of a larger urban regeneration project for urban poor and council flats residential area initiated by artist Wong Hoy Cheong and
the state government of Selangor, RAP was invited to devise and conduct a workshop program to engage the children of the Majujaya Flats in finding out their wants and needs for a non-existing playground facilities in their neighbourhood. And to facilitate them in developing a working model for future building reference and encourage a sense of participation, ownership and thus responsibility to the playground project.
CAIS – Contemporary Arts in School (2008)
An eight-month project bringing different form of contemporary art practice into a secondary school in Kuala Lumpur, it began with series of workshops introducing mural, performance and experimental film to the
students which eventually proposed and made their own contribution of murals, performance for the exhibition period. Artists were invited to proposed new installation and media work which were sited across the school building. The project brought into existence and meanings of contemporary art work which is exceptional in the context of art ecology of the city through the different modes of production and experiencing of art.
