For much of her career, Dana Lam has resisted easy categorisation. She has been a journalist, playwright, performer, feminist advocate, visual artist and author, moving fluidly between disciplines while remaining guided by the same quiet curiosity: how we live with one another.

This month, that lifelong inquiry takes centre stage as T:>Works launches the inaugural edition of The AGEncy Fest, a new annual platform celebrating the creativity, agency and lived experience of artists and cultural workers aged 60 and above. Opening the festival is Who Knows Where The Bird Goes: Dana Lam – Six Decades of Practice, Lam’s first-ever solo exhibition. Running from 22 July to 8 August, the exhibition traces six decades of making through drawings, writing, performance and newly commissioned works, including her first venture into painstaking frame-by-frame animation.

Best known to many Singaporeans for her journalism and her role in reclaiming AWARE during the landmark 2009 AWARE Saga, Lam has always worked across disciplines. Preparing this exhibition, however, revealed something she hadn’t fully recognised herself—that every chapter of her practice has been asking the same enduring questions about relationships, care, memory and the more-than-human world. Ahead of the opening of The AGEncy Fest, we spoke with Lam about embracing a new medium in her seventies, why artistic practice is an ongoing enquiry rather than a collection of works, and what creativity looks like after a lifetime of paying attention.

Bakchormeeboy: Looking back across six decades of work while preparing this exhibition, were there any unexpected discoveries?

Dana Lam: First, let me say how grateful I am to T:>Works and The AGEncy Fund for commissioning the exhibition. It gave me the push I needed to take on something I had always wanted to do but had found slightly prohibitive.

Making the animation involved technical skills I didn’t have and collaboration with another artist, Lynette Kwek, whose contribution to the work is indispensable. It also required, as I discovered once I was on it, quite a different orientation to the drawing process.

What I hadn’t expected was that preparing for the exhibition would lead me to a clear understanding of what my work has been, and still is, about. I realised that it has always been an enquiry into relationships, whether with a dog, with history, with the environment, with the domestic and the public. I had thought my writing, drawing and performance were separate from one another. I realise now they have always been engaged in the same enquiry, only in different languages.

An artistic practice, I came to realise, is not so much an accumulation of works as an ongoing enquiry.

Bakchormeeboy: This exhibition includes your first work in animation. What drew you to the medium at this stage of your career?

Dana: I have been interested in animation, specifically William Kentridge’s “drawing for animation”, for a very long time. I just needed an impetus—to get out of my comfort zone, mostly—and the commission afforded that.

A sheet of drawing paper is pinned to the wall and a camera is set up at an appropriate distance. I make a mark on the paper and walk back to the camera to take a photograph of the mark. Then I go back to the drawing and make another mark, and so on. The process is repeated—back and forth, hundreds, sometimes thousands of times. I then send the images to Lynette, who stitches them together into a video. Only then do I discover whether what I’ve been working on for days actually works.

I see animation as a natural development for a practice centred on drawing. But I quickly realised that drawing for animation is an entirely different discipline. My studio practice has always been about freeing myself from physical and habitual constraints to make drawings that feel alive and responsive. Animation demands something else altogether: precision, patience and an acceptance of not knowing.

It taught me to stay with the trouble.

I’m not looking for a new medium or trying to become an animator. I’m looking for another way of thinking through drawing.

Bakchormeeboy: Journalism, theatre, visual art and feminist advocacy have all shaped your career. Have they always been connected?

Dana: They ask different things of me, but they are all rooted in the same curiosity about how we live with one another and how relationships shape who we become.

Bakchormeeboy: Renewal, gender, grief, memory and our relationship with the more-than-human world run throughout the exhibition. Why do these ideas continue to matter?

Dana: I don’t think these concerns have become more urgent today than they were thirty or forty years ago. Preparing this exhibition has simply made me realise they have been with me throughout my practice. They have taken different forms at different stages of my life.

If there is one thread that runs through them, it is relationship. Renewal, grief, memory, gender and our relationship with the more-than-human world are all ways of asking how we live with others, human and non-human, and how those relationships shape us.

Age has perhaps changed my perspective. It has made me more aware of interdependence and of our place within larger cycles of life, loss and renewal. It has also made me less interested in certainty than in paying attention. Drawing, writing and performance have become ways of staying with these questions rather than trying to resolve them.

Bakchormeeboy: How has activism influenced your art—and what can art do that activism sometimes cannot?

Dana: I don’t think activism has influenced my art in the sense of giving it subject matter or message. Rather, both have emerged from the same set of questions about relationships, justice, care and how we live.

Advocacy often requires us to take a position and work towards change. Art allows us to remain with uncertainty a little longer. It creates a space where complexity, contradiction and ambiguity can be held without being prematurely resolved.

That, for me, is one of art’s great gifts. It doesn’t tell us what to think so much as invite us to look more closely. It asks us to pay deeper attention—to ourselves, to one another and to the more-than-human world of which we are a part. Sometimes that deepening of attention can be as transformative as persuasion itself.

Bakchormeeboy: The festival is called The AGEncy Fest. What does “agency” mean to you today?

Dana: Agency still means having choices, having a say in how we live, for instance. But I also think agency is about remaining open and responsive to the world. It is the freedom to continue asking questions, to keep learning, and to allow myself to be changed by what I encounter.

In that sense, creativity and agency are closely intertwined.

If age has brought me anything, it is not certainty but greater attentiveness—to the world, to others, and to what drawing, writing and performance still have to teach me.

Bakchormeeboy: Has becoming a grandmother changed the way you think about legacy?

Dana: Becoming a grandmother has certainly made me think more deeply about time and continuity, but perhaps not in terms of legacy. Legacy suggests something we leave behind. I find myself thinking instead about relationship and transmission—about what passes between generations, often quietly and without our even realising it.

As a grandmother, I have become more aware that what we pass on is not only our stories or our values but also our ways of paying attention to the world. Curiosity, kindness, wonder and care for others—and for the more-than-human world—are often absorbed simply through living alongside one another.

Perhaps that is true of art as well. I don’t make work in order to leave something behind. I hope my work invites others into the same spirit of attention, wonder and enquiry that has sustained me throughout my life. If it encourages someone to look more closely, ask better questions or discover their own way of thinking through making, that is legacy enough for me.

Bakchormeeboy: Finally, what do you hope visitors—especially younger audiences—take away from Who Knows Where The Bird Goes and the inaugural AGEncy Fest?

Dana: I don’t hope visitors leave with a particular message or conclusion. I hope they leave with a heightened sense of curiosity and attentiveness—to their own lives, their own relationships, and the questions that have quietly accompanied them over time.

The word Practice in the exhibition title is important to me. Practice is paying close attention. It is commitment. Preparing this exhibition has reminded me that an artistic practice is not simply an accumulation of works but an ongoing attention to life, to ourselves and others.

To younger artists, I hope this exhibition offers some reassurance. There is no need to have everything figured out or to keep reinventing themselves. Sometimes the work is simply to stay with the questions and trust that they will continue to unfold over a lifetime.

I also hope this inaugural edition of The AGEncy Fest helps us think differently about ageing. Not as a period of decline or retrospection, but as a time when new forms of work, new ways of seeing and new possibilities can emerge. A lifetime of practice is not only something to celebrate; it is also a resource for imagining what comes next.

Featured Photo Credit: Crispian Chan

The AGEncy Fest runs from 22nd July to 8th August 2026 at T:>Works, 72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road Exhibition entry is free with registration. Selected talks and fundraising events are ticketed. More information available on T:>Works’ website