Chan Hampe Galleries Raffles Hotel Arcade presents: "Crisis of Monumentality: Made/Remade/Unmade", a group show by three Singapore-based artists: Boo Sze Yang, Tang Ling Nah, and Tay Bak Chiang. The exhibition is curated by Seng Yu Jin.

The crisis of monumentality refers to the European art movement that attacked monuments that were regarded as the physical and symbolic manifestations of political and religious control and power over common people. However, this avant-gardist rebellion against monumentality in architecture and art revealed the hidden monuments of modern architecture.

These artists' practices, rooted in painting, charcoal and Chinese ink, share a re-thinking of monumentality and how it relates to their art making through their lived experiences in the Asian context. They share a deep concern of new forms and concepts of the monumental and monumentality, and how they are made, remade and unmade in social and cultural constructions.

About the Artists:

Boo Sze Yang heralds the new monuments of Asia epitomised by megamalls and massive shopping arcades that have sprung up in Asia, fueled by booming economies and a concomitant rise on consumer spending. His painterly meditations of interior spaces of shopping malls reveal the grandeur of these spaces as the new monuments of Asia. Boo graduated from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), Singapore in 1991, completed his Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at the University of Reading, UK in 1995, and received his Master in Arts Degree from Chelsea College of Art & Design, the University of the Arts London, UK in 2005. He was a full-time lecturer at NAFA in the Department of Fine Art for 8 years and later Head of Department before he left to practice art full time in 2009.

Tang Ling Nah's commitment to charcoal whether on paper or the form of installation remakes the monumental by taking on an anti-monumental position. The gradual erasure of human presence in her works challenges the power of monumentality to subsume the individual through the strategy of absence. Tang is a Singapore-based artist. She is fascinated with the city’s transitory spaces. Her work seeks to reflect and address the conditions of the modern city, particularly its speed and the lack of interpersonal intimacy in urban life. In 2008, she represented Singapore in the 2nd Singapore Biennale and exhibited work in the 11th International Architecture Biennale in Venice (Singapore Pavilion). Her accolades include the Juror’s Choice in the Philip Morris Singapore-ASEAN Art Awards 2003, the Della Butcher Award 2000 and the Young Artist Award (Art) 2004 conferred by the National Arts Council, Singapore.

Tay Bak Chiang reinterprets the painting convention of monumentality in his stone series that intersects the idea of the stone with history, Taoist philosophy and nature. The motif of the stone as the exemplar of monumentality in Chinese ink painting traditions is deconstructed and laid bare as ruins for us to explore. Tay graduated with a Diploma in Fine Arts from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. In 2002 he was awarded the Young Artist Award for Visual Arts by the National Arts Council and in 2003 received first prize for the Traditional Chinese Medium Category of the 22nd UOB Painting of the Year Competition.