Part of “A Home Away From Home”, Framing Tomorrow: DECK Fundraiser Weekend 2025
About The Artist
Cynthia Delaney Suwito (b. 1993, Jakarta, Indonesia; lives and works in Singapore and Jakarta) is an artist who bends everyday norms to understand and relook at our surroundings. Taking many forms, including sculpture, installation, and digital media, her work is noted for its quiet humour and laborious impracticality. Knitting Noodle (2016), a video showing the artist knitting instant noodles, was featured on BBC Asia in 2017. Other subjects explored include the misfortunes of plastic bags, the misuse of clothes pegs, and the perpetual turning of toilet paper rolls.
She has staged her solo exhibition, while we wait, at The Substation (Singapore, 2020). Notable group exhibitions are Sama Sama (Whitestone Gallery, Singapore, 2025) Singapore International Photography Festival (Peace Centre, Singapore, 2022), Superfluidity: The Parallel Universes Daily Mimicry (FreeS Art Space, Taipei, 2022), Suksesi (ISA Art and Design, Jakarta, 2021) and Bandung Contemporary Art Award Assemblage (Lawangwangi, Bandung, 2019). She was amongst the 2017 FORBES 30 under 30 Asia in the Arts. She has a BA Fine Arts (with First Class Honours) from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore.
Potted Pots | 2025
By Cynthia Delaney Suwito
Archival Print Awagami Bamboo Paper | Unique
Sculptural Piece
Potted Pots is a series of work that revisits abandoned flowerpots after futile attempts at highrise gardening.
"These uncanny paper plants, composed of digitally stitched photographs of the very pots they occupy, mimic real plant species yet remain resolutely artificial: forever alive, yet never quite living. At once familiar and strange, they return life to what has been forsaken, embodying an urban longing for nature that forever eludes the artist. In this playful act, failure blossoms into flourish, irony into quiet renewal." (Michael Lee, "Tender Returns", catalogue essay draft for Towards Happiness, Prosperity and Progress, 2025)
Potted Pots 20 resembles a Money Tree (Pachira aquatica). It was made specially for DECK’s Fundraiser as a wish for good luck, prosperity and abundance.
A Home Away From Home
Curated by: John Z.W. Tung
In the heart of Singapore's heritage shophouses, generosity takes architectural form. A Home Away From Home emerges from an act of patronage: these storied walls opened as sanctuary while DECK's permanent photography centre takes shape, transforming family dwelling into cultural commons.
Here, photography finds itself arranged not as institutional display but as domestic inhabitant. Works hang as one might place family portraits — intimate and accessible, woven into the rhythms of daily life. Living room walls become galleries, kitchens house photobook libraries, and dining spaces foster the gatherings that sustain artistic community.
This exhibition serves as DECK’s housewarming, a celebration that launches our residence within these gifted walls while Singapore’s first purpose-built photography centre takes shape elsewhere.
What binds these works is not curatorial distance but the warmth of proximity. The home becomes method and meaning: a space where art encounters audience as guest meets host, where photography learns to inhabit the world as neighbour rather than artifact.
By Cynthia Delaney Suwito
Archival Print Awagami Bamboo Paper | Unique
Sculptural Piece
Potted Pots is a series of work that revisits abandoned flowerpots after futile attempts at highrise gardening.
"These uncanny paper plants, composed of digitally stitched photographs of the very pots they occupy, mimic real plant species yet remain resolutely artificial: forever alive, yet never quite living. At once familiar and strange, they return life to what has been forsaken, embodying an urban longing for nature that forever eludes the artist. In this playful act, failure blossoms into flourish, irony into quiet renewal." (Michael Lee, "Tender Returns", catalogue essay draft for Towards Happiness, Prosperity and Progress, 2025)
Potted Pots 20 resembles a Money Tree (Pachira aquatica). It was made specially for DECK’s Fundraiser as a wish for good luck, prosperity and abundance.
A Home Away From Home
Curated by: John Z.W. Tung
In the heart of Singapore's heritage shophouses, generosity takes architectural form. A Home Away From Home emerges from an act of patronage: these storied walls opened as sanctuary while DECK's permanent photography centre takes shape, transforming family dwelling into cultural commons.
Here, photography finds itself arranged not as institutional display but as domestic inhabitant. Works hang as one might place family portraits — intimate and accessible, woven into the rhythms of daily life. Living room walls become galleries, kitchens house photobook libraries, and dining spaces foster the gatherings that sustain artistic community.
This exhibition serves as DECK’s housewarming, a celebration that launches our residence within these gifted walls while Singapore’s first purpose-built photography centre takes shape elsewhere.
What binds these works is not curatorial distance but the warmth of proximity. The home becomes method and meaning: a space where art encounters audience as guest meets host, where photography learns to inhabit the world as neighbour rather than artifact.