Simryn Gill grew up in Port Dickson, Malaysia, and has returned to make her work there since 1993. The key photographs in this book, in which the artist becomes an oil palm tree, are a continuation of her work Vegetation (1999– ongoing), where she records herself in various places disguised as local plants: tumbleweed and agave in Texas, grass tree and paperbark tree in rural New South Wales, and an epiphytic fern in a rare derelict site in Singapore.

Ute Meta Bauer is the Founding Director of NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University. For more than three decades, Bauer is a curator/co-curator of exhibitions and presentations, connecting contemporary art, film, video, and sound through transdisciplinary formats including Documenta11, the 3rd berlin biennale for contemporary art, and the US Pavilion for the 56th Venice Biennale, featuring eminent artist Joan Jonas. Recent co-edited books include The Impossibility of Mapping (Urban Asia) (NTU CCA Singapore/World Scientific Publishing, 2020) and Place.Labour.Capital. (NTU CCA Singapore/Mousse Publishing, 2018).

Anca Rujoiu is a curator and editor based in Singapore. As curator for exhibitions and later head of publications (2013–2018), she was part of the founding team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. In 2019, she was the co-curator of the third edition of the Art Encounters Biennial, Timișoara, approached as a one-year institutional programme. Whether working in a contemporary art centre, an independent space, an art school, or in the context of a biennial, she has been passionate about stretching art’s publicness, working across formats. First-Person Institutions, her PhD research at Monash University in Melbourne is focused on institution building, artists’ archives, and transnational imaginaries.