Sim Chi Yin’s research-based practice uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. Working across photography, film, installation, performance, and book making, her works combine research with storytelling to explore issues relating to history, conflict, memory and extraction. Since 2015, she has examined and engaged with the historiographies of the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) through photographs, video and sound installations, oral histories as part of ongoing project One Day We’ll Understand. The project is developed as a counter archive in three parts, challenging official histories and allowing for a generative response to gaps and absences in master narratives. It expands the definition of source materials in archives to objects, oral or musical traditions, and the land itself as repositories of history and conduits for personal and collective memory. In 2024, she premiered a theatre performance on the project which toured to the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts in Melbourne in February 2025.

Sim was an artist fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2022–2023) and holds a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London. Recent exhibitions include the 60th Venice Biennale (2024); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2024); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); and Barbican Centre, London (2023). She has also participated in the Istanbul Biennale (2022, 2017) and the Guangzhou Image Triennial (2021).