Chng Nai Wee. Still from Sin of Apathy. 1991.

One of the earliest multi-channel video works made in Singapore, Sin of Apathy was conceptualised by Chng in response to an open call for artwork entries to the 1991 National Sculpture Exhibition. A newspaper review of the exhibition, published in The Straits Times on 29 November 1991, described the artwork in some detail. Boldly titled “But it IS art”—like an emphatic response to a dismissive art viewer—the article was a clear statement that new media artworks like Sin of Apathy should be welcomed into the fold of visual arts, precisely because they seemed to lie outside the conventional definitions of sculpture in Singapore at the time and had new things to say. Perhaps the work’s inclusion in the exhibition is a nod to the undeniably bulky and hefty form of the typical consumer television set during the 1990s, which could be seen as a sculpture in its own right.

The artwork was assembled for the exhibition with reference to a tape recording and handwritten instructions that the artist had left for his friend and the artist’s sister, as Chng had to return to Dublin, Ireland to continue his medical undergraduate studies before the work was due to be installed.

Sin of Apathy marked the beginning of a long-standing engagement with technology for Chng from the 1990s onward. He made another video installation titled Where Do You Go When You Close Your Eyes in 1992 and published several of his digitally coded artworks on his website, biotechnics.org, which was one of the earliest web directories built for artists in Singapore.