Green Zeng is an artist and filmmaker from Singapore. His art practice explores issues of historiography and identity, and examines how history is scripted, perceived and disseminated. His earlier work focused on areas such as marginalised and alternative histories, student activism and left politics in Singapore, and the connection between the archives, the State and the individual, and the role that an artist plays in truth-telling.
Zeng’s recent work explores the connection between truth, power and resistance. He is interested in Foucault’s notion of “fictions are experiments in truth” and how fiction allow us to imagine an “alternative interpretation of the present”. Zeng’s work also explores the potential of re-speaking and its power to direct us to examine any discourse.
In 2015, his debut feature film, The Return, made its international premiere in competition at the 30th Venice International Film Critics’ Week. Zeng has also directed short films such as Blackboard Whiteshoes, which was selected for the International Festival de Cannes Film Festival (Tou Les Cinemas Du Monde) in 2006, and Passenger, which in the same year was awarded the Encouragement Prize at the Akira Kurosawa Memorial Short Film Competition in Tokyo.
As a practising artist, Zeng has exhibited widely in Singapore and abroad. In 2012, he was a Finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in Hong Kong. In 2014, he was nominated for the Asia Pacific Breweries Signature Art Prize. In 2018, he won the Bronze Award in the 36th UOB Painting of the Year (Established Artist Category). In 2020, he was an Artist-in-Resident at the NTU-CCA Singapore Residencies Programme. His most recent solo exhibition, Pulau Sebakau was held at Art Outreach, Singapore in 2023.
GREEN ZENG 