Artify Gallery presents a dual exhibition of two award-winning emerging artists, united by their chosen medium of pencil on paper, canvas, and architecture. Hong Kong born, New York-based Sarah Tse and Kanagawa born, Tokyo-based Momoko Suzuki are both concerned with subjects of time, memory, and imagination, transporting viewers to the tenuous boundary between public and personal space.

A graduate of Central Saint Martins College, Sarah Tse’s practice is characterised by captivating and exquisitely detailed pencil drawings that reflect universal paradoxes inspired by her childhood memories, travels and dreams. Tse’s new series of ceramics as well as sketches of youth together produce a fragile, nostalgic, timeless and often disturbing ambience. Appearing in a surreal world; a Capricorn is juxtaposed with a hanging speed scale, a circus clown overlaced with sofas, water taps and a butterfly, a deer-drawn carriage stacked with florals and illustrations of human etiquette, towering stacks of objects and cities from which innocent woodland creatures appear, all inviting curiosity and imagination.

Through her sketches, Tse manipulates the meaning of objects, re-interpreting the perspective of the world for audiences. The artist recreates personal dreams in an alternate realm, a transient world where adults and children alike can escape momentarily from reality, and remain carefree and innocent as if lost in the poetry of time.

The sentiment of time and transience is shared by Momoko Suzuki, likewise a graduate from Central Saint Martins of the same year. Suzuki’s exhibiting project, the ongoing Untitled Drawing Projects, will appear on parts of the gallery’s walls, and will disappear from the venue to return to a state of “nothingness”. At the core of this project are notions of growth and transformation, from one fictional organism to another, to be ‘formless’ and to transform through drawing, one’s ideas and visions. Suzuki believes that no visible material form lasts forever, unless time disappears from the matter altogether. Her drawing project represents the image as a part of a wider productive cycle of the universe, and invokes an experience of architecture, space and time.

Suzuki creates images that induce the viewer to be freed from the pressures of form, concept and politics; rather, situating the corporeal in the boundary between public and personal space, by continually deformalising the image into a series of repeating and overlapping shapes which suggest creeping foliage and fractals – a metaphor for the infinite development of the universe. For the artist, walls provide a surface for expression that lacks the vulnerability of paper, necessitating a transient quality similar to that of time and nature. Suzuki performatively draws directly onto architectural structures to create site-specific installations, with intentions to leave the work “unfinished” in reflection of the entropy of the universe. Her practice is founded on and inspired by Minimalism, dealing with the spatial relationship between the spectator and the object, as well as object and surrounding space. To quote Sol LeWitt, who mentioned that conceptual art is usually free from the dependence of the skill of the artist, Suzuki is concerned not about skill and theory but as LeWitt says in his Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, about being ‘intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental process and it is purposeless.’

Image: © Momoko Suzuki, Artify Gallery