 |
Darren Soh |
|
Born and based in Singapore, Darren obtained an honours degree in Sociology from the National University of Singapore in 2001 while serving as a contract photographer at the country’s leading English broadsheet newspaper The Straits Times. For work, Darren photographs new buildings architects and developers but his personal work is largely focused on the change and destruction of his home country of Singapore, where urban growth and redevelopment is rapidly transforming the island nation. Darren’s first monograph While You Were Sleeping, a collection of nocturnal landscapes from Singapore was published in 2004. Subsequently, Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay in Singapore presented the images from the book as an exhibition. In 2007, a folio of Darren’s architectural work on public housing facades in Singapore was shown at the Kay Ngee Tan Architects Gallery. The project, titled Building Blocks, is still ongoing. In 2009, as part of a collective of volunteer photographers, Darren contributed to Resonance: Songs of Our Forefathers, an architectural photography tome documenting the National Monuments of Singapore. In 2010, together with several other photographers, Darren founded Platform.SG, an initiative to showcase documentary photography of Singapore or by Singaporean photographers. Darren’s work from the Singapore General Elections 2011 was also shown at the prestigious Noorderlicht Photo Festival in The Netherlands in 2011. Over the years, Darren has been placed in several international photography awards including the Commonwealth Photographic Awards,the Prix de la Photographie, Paris and the International Photography Awards. Darren was also listed by industry-leading Photo District News Magazine (PDN) from New York as one of PDN’s 30 Emerging Photographers to watch in 2009. Darren’s work on the last KTM trains to run in Singapore, SS24 The Last Train, was presented at the Hong Kong Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture 2012 as well as the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in The work was also presented at the 4th Singapore International Photography Festival in October 2014. Also in 2014, one of Darren’s images was shortlisted for the prestigious Arcaid Images Architectural Photography Awards held in conjunction with the World Architecture Festival 2014. Darren’s photographic work is collected by the National Museum in Singapore, The Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore as well as numerous corporate and private collectors from around the world. In 2015, on the occasion of Singapore’s 50th Anniversary, Darren held two solo exhibitions – Along The Golden Mile and In the Still of the Night (While You Were Sleeping). The former is a series of architectural images documenting the Golden Mile precinct in Singapore while the latter collects some 35 images of nocturnal landscapes around Singapore and is a sequel to his 2004 work of the same name. A monograph of the same title was also published. In conjunction with SG50 SG Heartmap, Darren’s Building Blocks HDB Public Housing Facades images were showcased at two pop up exhibitions, one at Old Airport Road estate and then at the Floating Platform. In 2017, Darren’s photographic work on Public Housing in Singapore was showcased internationally in two countries – at the Singapore Pavilion of the EXPO 2017 Astana in Kazakhstan as well as at the St+Art Urban Art Festival in Mumbai India in conjunction with the Singapore Tourism Board. In April 2018, Darren’s works from Platform.SG’s Twentyfifteen.SG project was shown at the Pera Museum in Istanbul Turkey, as part of the Singapore Unseen group exhibition that is possibly the largest and most comprehensive collection of photographic work from Singapore to be shown outside of the country. In August 2018, Darren presented his decade-long documentation work of threatened and demolished modern and vernacular architecture from Singapore in a new monograph, exhibition and video documentary all titled Before It All Goes – Architecture from Singapore’s Early Independence Years. Since 2013 after the publishing of For My Son, Darren has been strongly advocating the conservation of post independence modernist structures in Singapore as well as educating and informing the public about their In early 2019, Darren was named one of ten global winners in Apple’s inaugural Shot On iPhone Challenge. The winning image was a reflection of a block of public housing HDB flats at Potong Pasir and Darren was the only winner from Asia. In 2020, Before It All Goes – Architecture from Singapore’s Early Independence Years was nominated and shortlisted for the prestigious President*s Design Award 2020. With the launch of the Singapore chapter of DOCOMOMO, Darren became a founding member in 2021. Darren’s work documenting vernacular and threatened modern buildings in Singapore continues, and his latest project aims to bring together a historical survey of public housing blocks built since the HDB’s founding in 1960 through photography. In 2022, together with Architecture Historian Assoc. Prof. Chiang Jiat-Hwee and Design Writer Justin Zhuang, Darren published Everyday Modernism, a book on the modern architecture of Singapore. The book includes nearly a hundred images made by Darren over the past decade. In 2023, Everyday Modernism was awarded the prestigious Colvin Prize by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. The Colvin Prize is awarded annually to the author or authors of an outstanding work of reference that relates to the field of architectural history, broadly conceived. Darren’s large scale photographic collages from the Singapore General Elections 2011 also became part of the National Gallery Singapore’s collection in 2022 and two pieces were subsequently shown at Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia, the first exhibition on photography of this scale and scope ever assembled. |
|