Genevieve Chua’s practice explores the fear of the unknown, focusing in particular on projections of things that remain unseen. Through an unfurling narrative, the artist mediates alternate realities, which present open-ended questions. Often informed by Southeast Asian superstition and horror, the works are contingent realities presented as installations, images and objects. In Parabola, and future works to come, Chua looks into painting and its materials to formulate configurations for the way it is made and shown.
Concept:
Parabola is the second part of Chua’s Unnatural History Drawings series, whose approach is derived from the taxonomy of museum specimen classification systems. Presented as a series of paintings in the form of shaped canvases, Parabola draws from the subject of the pelvic bone as the premise of evolution, and the incarnations of pelvis morphology as a point of reference for the presented shaped paintings.
With attention on the formal qualities of curves, a shape that resembles the pelvic bone blooms into being. The shape’s concavity inverts upon itself while its birth canal closes up and eventually multiplies itself in an accelerated fashion. Each time, evolving in form, scale and dimension. The work’s motivation harks back from the artist’s interests in flora and pollination; and making spatial possibilities with an all-over screenprint on paintings, as seen in her earlier Ultrasound series.
Artist Biography:
Genevieve Chua (b.1984) lives and works in Singapore. Her selected solo exhibitions include Cicadas Cicadas (Gusford Gallery, Los Angeles, 2014); Birthing Ground not a Sound (Singapore, 2012); Adinandra Belukar at the Singapore Biennale (2011); Raised as a Pack of Wolves, at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival (2009), Full Moon and Foxes at the Atelier, National Museum of Singapore (2009). She was a recipient of the NAC Georgette Chen Scholarship in 2003/4 and the Young Artist Award in 2012 conferred by the National Arts Council, Singapore.
The artist has also participated in shows such as Future Proof (Singapore, 2012); BMW Young Asian Artist Series II (Singapore, 2011); Art Project Ideas at Hiroshima MOCA (Japan, 2011); Cross-scape at the Kumho Museum of Art (South Korea, Seoul, 2011); Shadow in the Dark (Hong Kong, 2011) and CUT 2009: Figure, New Photography from Southeast Asia (Kuala Lumpur; Singapore 2009).
