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While hardly reminiscent of a boy band, Singapore’s very own Backstreet Girl wanders the quiet passages behind our older housing estates to get inspiration for her own impressionistic compositions with paint and brush...

Capturing a facet of Singapore’s urban landscape rarely broached in local art, Tan Ai Ngin finds artistic angles and viewpoints to romanticize hidden communal spaces amidst dense apartment blocks. Venturing from previous painterly forays into Tiong Bahru and Kampong Bahru, she now includes glimpses of Geylang and Tanglin Halt. Painting plein-air might attract nosy neighbours, but it allows her access to a diversity of atmospheres, cultures, people, weather and scenarios to document the unique charm and peculiarity of living in Singapore .

Tan Ai Ngin (born 1972, Singapore) obtained her Diploma in Fine Arts at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1996 and her Bachelor of Arts in Chinese painting at the Nanjing Arts College, China in 1999. She went on to complete a one-year course in visual arts at the School of Fine and Performing Arts Constantijn Huygens, in Kampen, The Netherlands in 2001.

She has been collected by the Frans Walkate Archief in The Netherlands and the Tokyo office of the Singapore Tourism Board. Backstreet Girl is her fourth solo exhibition, of her explorations of Geylang and Tanglin Halt in addition to her usual Tiong Bahru and Kampong Bahru.