About Face

Malaysian-born Siew Siang Tay is an Adelaide artist. Her passion for art started when she was a child, where she would replicate the black and white portraits of notable characters in history textbooks. At school she regularly won prizes for art, and at university she painted sets and backdrops for plays. She initially found creative expression as a published fiction writer, but it was at the tail end of her career in the tertiary education sector that she started painting seriously, training at the Adelaide Central School of Art and BAPëA Art School. A visit to China, her ancestral homeland, in 2016, prompted her to produce this series that explores her Chinese heritage. She was a finalist in the 2023 Kennedy Art Prize and 2024 West Torrens Art Prize.

Con Polychronis is an Adelaide artist who has trained under Peter Bok at the BAPëA Art School, as well as through various courses at the Adelaide Central School of Art over the past decade. He is a clinical psychologist whose interest in people has led him to express humanity through figurative artwork. Con’s painting style has varied from exhibition to exhibition, and in his recent work, his approach is influenced by the idea that he is painting people and scenes from a time that has faded into history.