Hilmi Johandi

Hilmi Johandi is a visual artist whose practice centers on painting, while expanding into installation and new media. His work explores the processes of framing, fragmentation, and reconstruction, using imagery that draws from Singapore's visual and cultural history. Hilmi composes montages from archival materials-postcards, posters, film stills, and photographs-layering and deconstructing them to interrogate the social and psychological effects of modernization. These fragmented compositions reflect a tension between nostalgia and critique, between personal longing and collective memory.

His recent body of work investigates how familiar and symbolic motifs from Singapore's past-such as seaside resorts, hotel lobbies, and swimming pools-can be repurposed to explore ideas of theatricality, displacement, and desire. In the painting series Landscaped Grounds, Hilmi extracts visual elements from national archives and reassembles them into compositions that mimic theatrical sets. Spatial planes are partitioned, flattened, or ruptured, producing images that feel both staged and uncanny. The resulting landscapes hover between realism and artifice, suggesting both memory and performance.

In contrast, his Destination Image series focuses on smaller-scale paintings that depict isolated motifs cropped from larger scenes. These close-up views probe ideas of pleasure, escape, and representation. By removing the subjects from their original contexts, Hilmi creates a sense of ambiguity and dislocation, prompting viewers to question the constructed nature of visual desire.

Hilmi also works in installation, translating his investigations into immersive spatial experiences. Stagecraft: Sunset by the River (2023), for instance, begins with a two-dimensional image of a scenic sunset, which is transformed through lithography, gouache, and watercolour. The final work-a life-sized UV digital print mounted on exposed wooden structures-recalls a theatrical backdrop. Visitors are encouraged to walk around and into the piece, encountering both the illusion and its supporting framework, thus engaging with the artificiality of spectacle and the mechanisms behind it.

Throughout his practice, Hilmi Johandi examines the mediation of experience through image-making, and how nostalgia and constructed memory function within rapidly modernizing societies. His work oscillates between painterly finesse and conceptual critique, offering viewers a layered and immersive reflection on place, time, and perception.

Biography
1987 Born in Singapore
2007-2009 Dip. Fine Arts, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore
2011-2013 B.A. (Hons) Fine Arts, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore
2018 MA Fine Arts, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore

Selected Solo Exhibitions
Landscaped Grounds, Ota Fine Arts, Shanghai, China (2023)
Landscapes and Paradise: Poolscapes, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, Japan (2021)
Stagecraft: Landscapes and Paradise, Ota Fine Arts, Singapore (2019)
Painting Archives, Rumah Lukis, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2019)
An Exposition, President's Young Talents 2018 Exhibition, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2018)
Dusk to Dawn | Fajar ke Senja, Galerie Steph / OCBC Art Space, Singapore (2014)

Selected Group Exhibitions
Singapore Deviation: Wander with Art Through the Rail Corridor, Rail Corridor, Singapore (2023)
Guest Relations, Jameel Arts Centre, Jaddaf Waterfront, Dubai (2023)
[im]print, STORAGE, Bangkok, Thailand (2023)
EMOTIONAL ASIA: Miyatsu Daisuke Collection x Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Genjuuan temple, Fukuoka, Japan (2022)
Progressive Disintegrations, Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore (2020)

Selected Awards
Young Artist Award, National Arts Council of Singapore, Singapore (2018)
Goh Chok Tong Youth Promise Award (2017)

Selected Collections
Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, China
ASE Foundation, Shanghai, China
UBS Art Collection, Singapore
Singapore Art Museum, Singapore