EXHIBITING ARTISTS

Adeline Kueh makes installations that reconsider the relationship we have with things and rituals around us. Her works are imbued with a sense of desire and longing, and act as modern-day totems that explore personal histories and overlooked moments. She has exhibited at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore; Cabinet in New York; FASS Art Gallery in Istanbul, Turkey; Next 5 Minutes in Amsterdam, and many other contexts locally and internationally.

En Passant is an art project that explores fleeting run-ins and liminal spaces. The artist used to take the train from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur back in the 1990s. These images, shot at the Singapore railway station which ceased operations in 2011, evoke a sense of nostalgia whilst exploring the fleeting nature of time and place in a changing city.

Angela Chong is an installation artist who uses light, sound, narrative and interactive media to blur the line between fiction and reality. She has shown work in Amsterdam Light Festival in the Netherlands; Vivid Festival in Sydney; 100 Points of Light Festival in Melbourne; CP International Biennale in Jakarta, Indonesia, and iLight Marina Bay in Singapore.

3D Tic-Tac-Toe is an interactive light sculpture which allows multiple players of all ages to play Tic-Tac-Toe with one another.

Charles Lim’s work stems from his former profession as a sailor. This unique viewpoint helps him make visible physical realities that lie hidden from our everyday experience. He has shown work in major international exhibitions including Manifesta 7, the Shanghai Biennale, Singapore Biennale and the Venice Film Festival. In 2015, he will represent Singapore at the Venice Biennial.

The SEA STATE series is drawn from Lim’s ongoing exploration of Singapore’s maritime geography and history. Lim offers a compelling exposure of humanity’s impact on its physical environment, highlighting the interplay between natural and man-made, land and sea.

Chen Sai Hua Kuan’s works span across a range of media and techniques including drawings, film, performance, photography, sculpture, sound and installation. He utilises everyday found objects such as toys and fans to create deceptively simple and compelling works. He has shown at Singapore Art Museum; The Substation Gallery in Singapore; Moscow International Biennale for Young Art in Russia; Whitstable Biennale in the UK; and many other locations.

Bottles and Fans is a sound installation consisting of glass bottles and travelling fans. The fans are placed on top of bottles filled with water, which create a rich sound experience. The water evaporation resulting from the fan’s cooling force orchestrates a melody which changes over time.

Chia Ming Chien began his art career as a street photographer, before moving into documentary photography and photojournalism. His work has been published in international magazines such as National Geographic, and shown at Fullerton Heritage Gallery, Singapore; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore; VIVID in Sydney; the Melbourne Jazz Festival and Urbanscapes Arts Festival in Kuala Lumpur.

The Wires series makes visible one of the key infrastructures of our urban environment – power lines. Wires are often seen to be despoiling the cityscape, but in Chia’s work, their aesthetic qualities are revealed, causing us to ponder the poetry of our architectural environment.

Donna Ong is an installation artist from Singapore, best known for her evocative and thought-provoking environments made from found objects. Her works have been exhibited extensively, including at the Jakarta Biennale in Indonesia; Kuandu Biennale in Taiwan; Moscow Biennale in Russia; Singapore Art Museum; and National Museum of Singapore.

And We Were Like Those Who Dreamed is a series of sculptural works comprised of furniture and hand-cut illustrations from books. Like many of Ong’s installations, they recall the rich imagination of childhood, in which every object is imbued with magic, fascination and meaning. In this work, handcut images of tiny Madonnas of varying ages and demeanours are accompanied by angels, who together create a cabinet of curiosity.

Ong is also showing in the Eye Awards exhibition, and in Da Vinci: Shaping the Future, with her work The Forest Speaks Back II commissioned by ArtScience Museum.

Gerald Leow uses found objects from the cultural landscape and reworks them to shed light on the problematic nature of authenticity, culture and identity. His interests include anthropology and the study of material cultures. He has shown work at Singapore Art Museum and Queensland College of Art gallery in Australia, and was The Substation’s Associate Artist in 2014.

The Decline of the Western Civilisation playfully explores popular music. It features a figurine of Hong Kong’s Heavenly King, singer Leon Lai, being squashed by the weight of the metal text ‘Anthrax’, the name of a well-known heavy metal band. The work symbolises the clash of two ideologies – Western and Chinese popular culture.

Ho Tzu Nyen creates film, video, performance and multimedia installations. His work appropriates the structures of epic myths to reveal these narratives as fiction. They are not merely stories, but discursive processes. Many of his works focus on cultural histories in Southeast Asia, especially Singapore. He has shown work around the world including at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia; Artspace in Sydney; Mori Art Museum in Tokyo; and Singapore Art museum, and in 2011 represented Singapore at the Venice Biennale.

The Bohemian Rhapsody Project is a short film based on the lyrics of Queen’s 1975 hit, Bohemian Rhapsody. The context is a courtroom trial, filmed in the former Supreme Court of Singapore, with the court proceedings taken entirely from the lyrics of the Queen song. The film is at once a courtroom melodrama and a documentary of its own production.

Jane Lee is one of Singapore’s most noted contemporary artists. Trained in textile design, she is known for her highly tactile and visually spectacular paintings. She explores the very nature of the way paintings are constructed by treating the components of a painting —stretcher, canvas, and the paint itself — in inventive new ways. She has shown work in galleries and museums around the world including Singapore Art Museum; Hong Kong Arts Centre; Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York; and the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, Lithuania.

In her work Beyond the Blue, a sculpted mass of extruded paint cascades down the wall and collapses onto itself. For Turned Out, she painted long, narrow strips of canvas with acrylic paint then rolled them into a circle, which is mounted on the wall. The resulting object — which resembles a hose or a reel of cord — is more sculpture, or wall relief, than painting. Works like these explore the way paintings have traditionally been perceived.

Jason Wee is an artist and a writer. His practice takes up the dilemmas, conflicts and people’s interpretation of specific histories and spaces. He explores conundrums, enigmas, idealism and unexplored futures. He has shown work at Chelsea Art Museum and PS122 Gallery in New York; Singapore Art Museum; Asian-American Art Center; and Art Seasons Gallery in Singapore.

Master Plan is a result of Wee’s studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Architecture and Planning. It is an abstract model of a city, using geometric shapes. Wee writes of the work: “A new plan for the city has been drawn up, in black and white. The civil servant locks up and leaves; left alone, his symbols (office buildings) have other ideas…”

Jeremy Sharma works primarily as a conceptual painter. His paintings, which foreground surface and texture, are concerned with the process of constructing a painting as much as they are about the finished work. He has shown work locally and internationally at the Singapore Biennale; Institute of Contemporary Arts in Singapore, and Michael Janssen Gallery in Singapore. He was also a founding member of rock band Tiramisu and art collective Kill Your Television (KYTV).

Terra Sensa is an on-going series inspired by Sharma’s investigation of pulsars. A pulsar (short for pulsating radio star) is a highly magnetised, rotating neutron star. They are remnants of collapsed stars that continue to emit an electromagnetic pulse as their life ebbs away. Sharma obtained radiographs of collated data from pulsars of every decade
since they were discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967 in the UK. He plotted the data lines into three-dimensional column slabs of ridges, peaks and valleys. The resulting work evokes forms of terrain, early cave paintings and temple wall reliefs – yet they are made of lines of disappearing light. Through this work, Sharma addresses humankind’s preoccupation with the extra-terrestrial and the afterlife.

Justin Loke is a member of the art collective, vertical submarine, known for its witty art installations, which earned them the 2009 Singapore President’s Young President Award and the Celeste Prize in 2011. His solo work moves between painting, sculpture and film in order to play with different strategies of framing. He has shown work at Objectifs Gallery; Singapore Art Museum and Post-Museum in Singapore. He has also been an Associate Directors of TheatreWorks in Singapore, and an Associate Artist at The Substation.

The Seven Scenes of Barry Lyndon features paintings based on scenes from the period film Barry Lyndon (1975) by Stanley Kubrick. It explores the concept of framing beyond the borders of each image.

Kumari Nahappan’s bold public monumental sculptures have been commissioned in Singapore, Malaysia, China and the Philippines. She has contributed significantly to the artistic and cultural landscape of Singapore with a practice encompassing painting, sculpture and installation. She has shown at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo; Singapore Art Museum; Seoul Art Centre in Korea, and Museum Rudana in Indonesia, and has iconic sculptures at Changi Airport, ION Orchard, and the National Museum of Singapore.

The Red Trails series of paintings illustrate how Nahappan’s approach to contemporary art is decisively shaped by her cultural roots and beliefs. Nahappan believes that red is associated with power, strength and victory, and it speaks to us about positive and negative energies. Red is the colour of blood, the bond that all human beings share. Nahappan embarks on a laborious ritual of adding thin layers of paint to a surface, and sanding each layer down until light and form become visible. Using this method, her paintings appear to be flooded with light.

Lee Wen is one of the true pioneers of contemporary and performing art in Singapore. He works across media, focusing on themes of social identity. He was a contributing member of The Artists Village of Singapore, and in 2005, was awarded the Cultural Medallion for his contributions to the development of contemporary art in Singapore. He has shown work extensively around the world, including The Substation in Singapore; Kwangju Biennale in South Korea; and the Asia Pacific Triennial in Australia.

Much of Lee Wen’s work has been motivated by a desire to use art to interrogate stereotypical perceptions. Ping Pong Go-Round reinvents the structure and rules of Ping Pong to show alternative models of interaction between the players. Unlike the traditional table, Lee Wen’s Ping Pong table has no borders, allowing multiple possibilities for a broader dialogue between players involved.

Mintio’s practice is concerned with fantastical and spiritual worlds that are constructed through the mechanism of a camera. She has work in the collection of Singapore Art Museum, and has exhibited at Singapore International Photography Festival, Seoul Arts Centre in Korea, and San Francisco Art Institute, and she has been published in Confabulation, Straits Times, and Geo Magazine.

Concrete Euphoria is a series of photographs that explore the ever-changing cities of Asia, and their unprecedented growth. Using a large format camera and multiple exposures, without digital manipulation, Mintio creates large-scale abstract canvases out of repetitive structures and infrastructures of Singapore and other Asian cities. The result is kaleidoscopic contemporary landscapes, where borders and distinguishing marks of locality are dissolved.

Sean Lee is a photographer whose work explores the dialogue between permanence and fragility, often exploring topics that may appear taboo in certain social circles. His work is in the collection of Singapore Art Museum, and he has exhibited at Galeria TagoMago in Barcelona; New York Photo Festival in USA; Empire Project in Istanbul, and at Singapore Biennale.

Lee’s Shauna series documents his transformation into an alternate transsexual personality, Shauna. The series began in Siem Reap in Cambodia, and records the artist relearning simple, everyday tasks such as dressing, putting on shoes, and walking down the street. As Sean becomes Shauna, the lines between performance and reality, between photographer and photographed, are blurred.

Yeo Chee Kiong is an award-winning sculptor known for his uniquely playful and unexpected juxtapositions, which have garnered critical attention around the world. He has shown extensively, including the National Museum of Singapore; Singapore Art Museum; and Busan Biennale in Korea.

A Secret Garden is a site-specific installation where wool is used to depict a rainforest. Wool allows Yeo to materialise natural phenomena, such as rain, shadow and night. The use of this material creates a warm, soft and alluring ‘garden’, which visitors are invited to physically enter. At once surreal, elegiac, and poetic, A Secret Garden is emblematic of Yeo’s sculptural sensibility, which is both realistic and imaginary at the same time.