Ad Hoc suggests an improvision, a solution to a problem. The works presented show a small survey of a variety of artists who are at the forefront of contemporary art production and working within Singapore today. This group of artists pose a prescription in their work to tackling the current issues and problems of contemporary society through technique and concept. This exhibition explores these trends in the current showing of prints, paintings and drawings.
Ian Woo’s drawings are a study into the question of “What is a Drawing?”. By extension, this opens up an analysis of the question of what are the fundamental characteristics of a “drawing” versus a “painting”. According to Ian Woo, drawings involve an instinctual movement dealing with shapes and forms versus an exploration of light in painting. As a respected painter in Singapore working with colour, Ian presents his drawings which read into lines that open up dimensionality on paper.
Antoine L’Heureux (b. 1978 in Quebec, Canada) develops an ongoing series of paintings, sound works and objects that trace the journey of an enigmatic figure, The Emperor. Borrowing characteristic traits of 1970s male rock stars, hippies or representations of Jesus Christ, The Emperor embodies simultaneously notions of nostalgia and utopia, operating a blurring between past and future. L’Heureux aims to remove the former’s associations with machismo, cliché and religion, endowing it with new affective potential as it is employed in the elaboration of a narrative that blurs with his own travels and life in Asia.
Maryanto envisages the strangeness and beauty of landscape and how the natural environment responds to the foreign and alien objects introduced by the juxtaposition of manmade mining and construction tools and equipment. Throughout his practice, Maryanto has been concerned with the problem of pollution, landscapes degraded by mining, corruption of the land and food sovereignty. His current work are paintings from charcoal, where he focuses on the beauty of nature, capturing its delicate and ephemeral strange nature before it disappears prematurely.
Xue Mu presents beautiful high quality pristine prints blown up using the most cutting edge technology. The essence of Mu’s work hinges on lightness, nothingness, whiteness and, with it, the complementary extreme opposite: its stark and strange darkness.
Haruki Ogawa problematises dimensional readings of sculpture and paintings. He creates large canvases resplendent with his formally and learned techniques in order to attempt to break the structures that entrap an image into its 2-dimensional reading via an oil on canvas painting.
