Amanda Heng is recognized for her works with various approaches such as performance and collaborations with others involving literature, painting, photography, and even her audience demonstrating her concerns for the social problems in Singapore, a country rapidly changing and carrying diverse cultural backgrounds.  
Always by my side is a specially reconstituted set of photographs taken over a thirty-year period in 1996, 2014 and 2023 just before her mother’s death. It considers the identity and position of women within family structures through an examination of Heng’s relationship with her mother. The photographs, taken in the format of family portraiture, suggests the establishment and reclamation of ties between mother and daughter—a kinship that is often unacknowledged in traditional Chinese culture.

In the series of photographs, mother and daughter are pictured in embrace, standing side by side, and looking at each other. The images follow the development of life and relationship for both women, documenting shifts in intimacy and independence. Involved with the launching of The Artists Village in 1988 and Women in the Arts in 1999, Heng is one of the pioneers in contemporary art in Singapore, presented with the Cultural Medallion for Visual Arts in 2010.