New Sensibilities in Sculpture and Painting puts together four artists who use empirical experimentation, challenging today’s digital and static images in their work thus pushing the boundaries of what we understand as painting and sculpture. The artists hail from Singapore and Japan. The collaboration between Singapore and Japan provides particular synergies in its creation due to the platform for growth for artists in Singapore with its new and strong commitment to building platforms and institutions in the arts, and the cutting edge techniques used by artists in Japan. The artists are interested in the exchange with each other’s work and indirectly with the other’s culture. This group exhibition brings the artists together for the first time.
Zulkifle (“Zul”) Mahmod (b. 1975, Singaporean, Yeo Workshop represented artist) will create a labyrinth of scientific mechanical apparatus as a site-specific installation that when activated by computer programming produces an orchestra of sounds. This is typical of his practice as a sound sculptor - often times using everyday objects and assembling them in a calderesque1 and clean industrial aesthetic. When the computer programme is activated, certain objects strike deconstructed musical strings and sound nodes which then produce an industrial hum. This project and its input from the exhibition is the start or a sketch of a larger project which will be produced for Art Stage Singapore 2015. Mahmod will continue his development of this series in a residency in Japan, and at the Aliwaal Center later this year.
For this artistic collaboration, the Japanese artists were chosen as they create fresh sensational works that exemplify cutting edge technique and ideas in painting that push this medium beyond what we perceive as just painting. The artists use their knowledge of traditional history to pose a resistance in order to create new sensibility in painting. As a result, a new abstraction is discovered painting, these artists maintain the Japanese rigour, respect and discipline in painting technique, technology and learning in order to push their paintings further. This new abstraction reflects influences of today’s technologies, images and influences that are present in today’s digital and real stimulating environment. Haruki Ogawa creates colourful and strong canvases that appear 3-dimensional. On display at the gallery will be the object forms that Ogawa experiments with in order to emulate these forms in 2-dimensional flat painting. The results are colour forms that combat with the canvas itself, twisting and turning themselves into works with strong optical effects in order to create the perception of objects in motion or in 3-dimensional form. Taisuke Mohri creates realistic and meticulous pencil drawings of statues and human portraits that in the slowness of the pencil drawing technique translate into a cold detachment of the figures. On the surface, Mohri then draws cracks that are mimicked by the glass framing that is also cracked outside of it. The cracked glass and the concept is mimicked in pencil represent a moving commentary of human life and all its loneliness and fragility. Atsushi Koyama is a young artist who directly explores the relationship between human beings and science in his works both in the subject of the paintings as well as in the method and technique used. The paintings merge the metaphysical sketches of machinery with parts of the human body, but the thin lines, grided axes and planes of the calculations executed by the artist mimic those of a computer programme. On display beside the paintings, will be two video works that are part of an ongoing METAMACHINE project. Koyama’s studio practice is also in itself a reflection of his work as it is equipped with devices to help produce the images, mimicking in life the relationship between robot and man and their equal right to beauty.
*image (left)
© Haruki Ogawa
courtesy of the artist and Frantic Gallery
