Public Programme: Artists' Talk Saturday 18 July 2009, 3:00pm

Curated by Patrick D. Flores

Osage Singapore is pleased to present Second Skin, an exhibition of works by Chow Chunfai and Wilson Shieh, curated by Patrick D. Flores. Chow and Shieh are both fascinated with the notion of re-dress, or the ways in which habits are woven as fabric of social life, worn as second skin, shed, mixed and matched, kept, and reinvented as camp or retro in gongbi (Chinese fine brush) or Shanghai Tang.

Treading the fine line between history and contemporaneity, the artists collect images from cinema and painting, creating a rupture from the past, cutting out bits and pieces from the vast textile of movies and pictures so as to ‘refashion’ them. Chow restages the theatre of modern art, while also lacing a yarn based on a Chinese tale around Caravaggio's paintings; Shieh reconfigures the fitting roomas a means of gaining access to the very methods of materilalisation through the very matter of adornment. Their works express a vital aspect of subjectivity or self making, techniques of materialisation, and the distance from 'identity' through necessary fictions and acts of dissembling.