Lynn
Loo

Lynn Loo’s films can be divided into two categories - materialist and impressionist. She works with systems designed to challenge visual perception, creating connections between representation and abstraction. The works are presented in various forms: single-channel, installation or live multiple-projection performance.

Born in Singapore in 1975, Lynn initially taught music before making her first film, Untitled, on 16mm black-and-white film. This early experimental work led her to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998. During this period, her films explored the dynamism of moving image and sound, forming a kind of narrative without words. These works can be described as poetic and diaristic. Her graduation film, Unfinished Symphony, earned her a Fellowship award, which she used to purchase a NIZO Super-8 camera. In 2004, she was awarded an artist residency at The McDowell Colony in New Hampshire.

In the same year, she moved to London UK where she encountered a different form of filmmaking by local film artists. Immersing herself in materialist and structural film practices, she began producing expanded cinema works such as Vowels and Consonants (2005), created with UK film artist Guy Sherwin, Autumn Fog (2010), End Rolls series (from 2009), Washi series (from 2014) and Asanoha (2024). Her approach is grounded in the belief that in shapes, forms and movement there is depth and complexity in simplicity.

Alongside these works, she continued producing short digital single-channel films, including Walk to Station from Work (2013) and Shadowplay Ginkgo (2024). These developments led to her more recent digital Conversation series (from 2021).

Lynn has curated artist film programmes and served on jury panels for international film festivals, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival. She has participated widely in film, sound, and arts festivals, and her work has been exhibited at institutions and venues such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam; EXiS Experimental Film Festival (South Korea); (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico (Spain); Performance Biennale New York; Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London; Singapore International Film Festival; Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; Café Oto, London; L’Âge d’Or, Brussels; He Xiangning Art Museum, China; and the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, Tokyo.

Her practice has been mentioned in selected publications: Cinema Expanded. Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia by Jonathan Walley; Experimental and Expanded Animation. New Perspectives and Practices, edited by Vicky Smith & Nicky Hamlyn. Her conversation with Guy Sherwin is published in Film Talks, edited by Simon Payne and Andrew Vallance. Her essay A Series of Accidents, was published in English and Korean in ‘Asia Experimental Media Issue’ published by EXiS. Seoul in 2009, also in Chinese in 富代驾藝術&投資 Contemporary Art & Investment, 2010 July issue 43.

In 2017, Lynn approached Dr Louis Curham of Teaching Learning Cinema in Canberra, to develop instructions for Autumn Fog for distribution as a multi-projection performance.