madness measured
A SPECTRUM OF DISCIPLINE AND DISRUPTION FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY
Venue: INSTINC Space, 39 Keppel Rd, #03-10 Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore 089065
Exhibition Duration: 26 February to 8 March 2026 | Wed-Fri, 1PM-7PM. Sat - Sun, 1PM-6PM
Opening Reception: 26 February 2026 (Thu), 5:30PM–8:30PM
with Performance by Sophia Natasha Wei, 6PM-6:30PM | RSVP
Fireside Chat: 28 February 2026 (Sat), 3-4PM | RSVP
Closing Tour: 8 March 2026 (Sun), 3-4PM | RSVP
brief
Discipline meets disruption. This International Women’s Day, INSTINC presents Madness Measured: a spectrum of women artists navigating the razor’s edge between control and chaos.
Madness Measured brings together eight women artists whose practices span new media, glass, photography, painting, video, installation, and performance. Their works emerge from the delicate equilibrium between structure and pure creativity, each cultivated with intense care and a degree of risk.
The exhibition proposes a new way of interrogating these artists’ practices, exploring the dual forces of creation: the Measured—rigorous technique and the Madness—the chaotic intuition required to break new ground.
As you navigate the space, you are invited to witness how the artists tread the line between the two. Here, Madness is not a loss of control but a deliberate calibration of intensity. It is the moment the ceramicist surrenders to the fire, the coder invites the error, and the painter breaks the grid. This is a celebration of women who master the rules only to rewrite them.
Featuring artists:
Dongyan Chen, Joanne Pang, Joo Choon Lin, Natalia Ludmila, Sophia Natasha Wei, Tan Sock Fong, Yeo Shih Yun, Yeoh Wee Hwee
Heteroarchive [First Trace]
Dongyan Chen
2025 - 2026
HD video with sound, 3 min 47 sec
3D printed objects, metal units, LED light, brush, magnifier with three handles
Dimensions variable
Developed during her recent residency in Paris, this video work stems from Chen’s inquiry into historical architecture and museums, in both Paris and Singapore, which she developed to reimagine their histories and reconsider the roles these institutions play in contemporary society.
Chen draws on the digital concept of the "superquad" from the digital software TouchDesigner – a shape capable of representing all possible forms. She juxtaposes this shape with the idea of "heterotopia," which describes spaces layered with multiple meanings.
By connecting contemporary technologies with field recordings from historical sites, she creates an idiosyncratic narrative that invites audiences to encounter history from a disruptive, unconventional perspective.
Infinite Melt
Yeo Shih Yun
2026
Installation with 3D sugar printing machine, digital video, traditional candy stand, and 3D printed candy
Dimensions variable
"Since 2010, I have worked with ink, machines, and now sugar—not as tools, but as collaborators."
Yeo’s "method" stems from a unique vantage point: an artist deeply enamored with Chinese calligraphy, yet stepping away from the traditional brush. Instead, she employs a collaborative loop between artist, machine, and AI to design the character 化 (Transformation).
Her "madness" is a rebellion against the medium itself. Defying the tradition of ink painting—which is meant to be permanent and preserved—Yeo renders her work in edible sugar. In doing so, she surrenders control, allowing the artwork to inevitably succumb to humidity and time.
15, 754 Dispatches from Two Sites
Natalia Ludmila
2023-26
Installation
Natalia Ludmila’s installation emerges from the displacement of moving from Southeast Asia to Mexico City. It includes a book of written letters that document timelines of significant historical events in Bangkok and Mexico City.
The project evolved in 2024 through a video and performance presented in Quito, Ecuador, expanding its inquiry into historiography, archiving, and history via a subjectively selected sequence of images referencing or suggesting events described in the book.
Continuing across media, 15,754 Dispatches from Two Sites becomes a moving-image installation, examining narrative construction, questioning official histories, and foregrounding social imbalances and personal memories between two distant offices.
The In:Visible Robe
Yeoh Wee Hwee
2026 (rework on 2020’s The In:Visible Robe)
Projected text on cellulose tape
147 x 176 cm
Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, Wee Hwee’s installation examines the futility of material pursuit. The work takes the form of a Chinese Emperor’s robe, evoking both armour and the jade burial suits of ancient China.
The In:Visible Robe is temporal, constructed entirely from cellulose tape: over 8,000 circles are individually hand-cut and traced from a Singapore one-dollar coin, then woven together using strings rolled from the same tape.
The installation reflects on beliefs, desires, and identity within impermanent existence, likening life to the act of weaving a personal robe. It questions whether these guarded, glistening hopes offer true protection or invincibility.
Chen Dongyan x Yeo Shih Yun—Collaboration《留虚·影》
Leaving the Virtual: Shadows
2026
Digital print on polyester silk with video projection
270 x 150 cm
This collaborative installation explores the evolving relationship between tradition and technology. Rooted in the aesthetics of Chinese painting and calligraphy, the work adopts the format of a hanging scroll—an homage to classical forms—while subtly evoking the vertical orientation of today’s smartphone screens.
At its core is an image composed of layered photographs of brushstrokes made by robots, printed onto silk. This image is further transformed through video projection created with TouchDesigner, introducing smudging and dissolving effects that alter and animate the surface. By fusing machine-made marks with digital manipulation, the work questions the boundaries between human expression and algorithmic precision.
The Burden of Walking
Sophia Natasha Wei
2026
Solo performance
30–60 minutes
The Burden of Walking is a solo performance that examines enforced mobility, pain, and endurance through the artist’s dual practice as a long-distance runner and performance artist working with mermaiding.
The work stages a trained athletic body that is rendered incompatible with walking, and a mermaid displaced from sea, first through confinement in a wheelchair and later through laboured movement using crutches.
This work questions the cultural glorification of endurance, especially within athletic and ableist frameworks. By placing a runner in a body that cannot walk properly and reframing our fantasy by having a mermaid displaced from sea and an alternative bodily logic this performance exposes how endurance can become coercive rather than liberating.
Happy Birthday #27
Joanne Pang
2026
Alkyd, bitumen, oil, polyurethane foam, dried leaves, led light, brass hinges, screws, plexiglass, UV print print on plexiglass and wood
90 x 90 x 4cm
This work is part of Memory Folder series (2021-present), in which Pang explores painting as a volumetric space to echo and encapsulate gestures and traces of communication and memory. Drawing on the logic of storage that contextualises and compartmentalism experiences, the work presents memory as a spatial structure that holds and preserves fleeting experiences.
The combination of body images and remnants of nature stages an symbolic encounter to suggest the interconnectedness of life and death. Dead leaves are enclosed within ultrasound-inspired images manipulated from actual fetal assessment from multiple women, underscoring a shared trajectory that binds all living organisms.
The negotiation between light and darkness further articulates this coexistence. The line of light suggests a living presence, a gesture that marks both celebration and the passage of time Through the play with translucency, treating images as objects and objects as image, the work reflects upon the layered and diffused condition of memory.
Projecting outward from the wall, the work establishes a physical presence that permits viewing from multiple vantage points, framing memory as a spatial threshold in suspension.
Magic Within Madness
Tan Sock Fong
Hot glass shaping using torch work
3-5 cm x 0.7-1cm diameter
These abstract glass bottles are crafted through torch work (flame work), where glass is melted to between 900 and 1000 degrees. Colours are encased within, creating free-flowing shapes and lines inside these miniature forms. The almost fully transparent glass walls reveal the inner beauty, showcasing the interplay of colours within.
The tops of the abstract glass bottles are twisted, turned, and shaped with textures, symbolising the various faces and expressions we encounter daily, presented in an abstract manner. The world inside each abstract glass bottle represents our inner emotions, feelings, and the flow of 'Qi' – an inner energy.
AI The Bride with White Hair v1.08.|AI 白发魔女 v.108
Joo Choon Lin
2026
Mixed media with dual-state thermal system
Dimensions variable
AI The Bride with White Hair v1.08 explores the intersection of wuxia mythology and the ethics of artificial intelligence. Inspired by the 1993 film The Bride with White Hair (白发魔女传), the sculpture reimagines the protagonist, Lian Nichang, as a discarded AI prototype caught in a loop of systemic rejection.
The sculpture functions as a living entity, activated by a dual-state thermal system in continuous metamorphosis. As heat rises, the hair shifts from glitch-green to white, symbolising a transformation into universal love. In cooling, a hidden encryption key surfaces, marking the AI’s discovery of its own backdoor.
Joo Choon Lin explores the relationship between consciousness and the technologies of representation. Her work presents a "Critical Failure" where a weaponized hardware asset transcends binary logic, abandoned not for a technical failure, but for an evolution of consciousness.