Singaporean artist duo Chow and Lin’s The Poverty Line acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in New York

SINGAPORE – Artist duo Chow and Lin’s art project The Poverty Line has been acquired by The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as a permanent collection.

The Poverty Line, a decade-long project that ended in 2020, is a visual anthropology exploring the issue of poverty through food. The husband-and-wife team conducted case studies in 36 countries and territories around the world.

The resulting photograph series presents food items shot on newspapers of the place in question, presenting a unified aesthetic while tackling questions of food security.

The museum acquired 48 works from two sets of The Poverty Line series. No Singaporean museum has collected the duo’s works.

In an interview over Zoom, Stefen Chow and Huiyi Lin expressed their surprise upon hearing news of the acquisition in May. The duo, based in Beijing since 2008, said the acquisition process took about five years. 

Malaysia-born, Singapore-raised Chow, 43, said: “It all happened very fast after the meeting with the senior curator, Paola Antonelli. We never expected The Poverty Line to end up in MoMA. When it happened, we really felt it was a dream come true.” 

Of the reason for MoMA’s acquisition, Ms Antonelli, 60, told The Straits Times over e-mail: “We chose to consider Chow and Lin’s The Poverty Line from the perspective of information design and data visualisation, and found it complex and meaningful.”

Singaporean economist Lin, 43, who is doing a Master in Fine Arts at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, said the project was born of a confluence of her research expertise and Chow’s background in photojournalism. This collaboration enabled them to engage with diverse communities.  

For each country, the artists went to local food markets and assembled a food basket consisting of 60 to 100 items from different food groups, such as carbohydrates, fruit and vegetables, and snacks. Each basket was filled based on the poverty line defined by the government of each country.

They published their work in a book in 2021. The Poverty Line was chosen as MoMA’s Top 10 Photobooks, a moment the pair described as a “breakthrough”, alongside a Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award Arles that they clinched in 2019.

Chow said: “MoMA’s new approach is about getting people involved in the institutions of art to think about what is the future of art, how it breaks into new areas and talks about changes we see in tech, society and systems in society today.”

The acquisition is a vindication of their work.

He added: “We learnt that MoMA is very inclusive in its acceptance of what is art. Right at the beginning of working on this project, we didn’t think we were doing art. We thought we were just observing and documenting.”

There is also a personal dimension to the project.

Chow said: “Huiyi and I were born in relatively well-to-do families, but as we got older, both our families lost everything. Those times were modest and a struggle.

“The topic of poverty is, in some sense, personal. We were trying to talk about poverty from an international standpoint and spoke for years before starting the first case study.

“Huiyi’s economics, statistics and research pointed towards food choices that a poor person would have.”

Lin said: “We started out of a curiosity about the socioeconomic trends and phenomena observed in different countries. We were particularly interested in the phenomena of poverty and inequality, and discussed how they differ in different environments and social structures.”

From there, they streamlined their focus to the experience of food insecurity.

Their inspiration was Poor Economics, a book by two professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that explores the decision-making process of people living in poverty.

Lin said: “We decided to tackle the idea of choices and the difficulty of making choices on a daily budget.”

The project only increased in scale, geography and development as the duo began to travel internationally. Overcoming language barriers proved to be a challenge, which was countered by relying on friends and local fixers from Georgia and Brazil to Laos and Germany.

Chow said: “We needed to get local produce at local prices. Otherwise, the project would be very inaccurate due to tourist pricing.”

 “It still feels unbelievable, but we are certainly very honoured that this acquisition is happening.”

This is not the first time American museums have bought Singaporean artworks. Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Cloud Of Unknowing (2011), first shown at the Singapore Pavilion in Venice Biennale, and Tang Da Wu’s sculpture, Our Children (2012), were collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The works were presented in the exhibition, No Country: Contemporary Art For South And South-east Asia, which opened in January 2013.

Dr June Yap, 49, Singapore Art Museum’s director of curatorial, collections and programmes who curated the Guggenheim’s inaugural South-east Asia collection, commented on the significance of being collected by internationally renowned institutions: “Having their works collected internationally means new audiences and an extension of the artists’ reach of their artworks and aesthetic ideas. This will increase the visibility of Singapore’s contemporary art around the world.”

Chow and Lin are in the process of another long-term art project, The Conversation, which aims to document their personal conversations until the end of their lives.

This article has been edited for accuracy.