Grayscale! Catalogue
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Grayscale!, curated by Savita Apte, highlights the working practices of Yanyun Chen, Madhvi Subrahmanian and Bestrizal Besta and introduces the work of Fiona Seow with a deliberate mediation on the various shades of grey between a luminescent white and the dark opacity of black. Whilst engaging with investigations into mark-making and materiality, the exhibition concentrates on the collaborative and cross-disciplinary conversations between the artists while elliptically underscoring the palliative energy of repetition and ritual. In doing so, it uncovers micro- narratives that are both intellectually, provocatively and visually diverse. Pg. 3 Grayscale! Essay by Savita Apte Grayscale! showcases the works of four disparate artists, Yanyun Chen, Bestrizal Besta, Madhvi Subrahmanian and Fiona Seow, living and working in South East Asia (Singapore, Indonesia). In doing so, the exhibition deliberately foregrounds the collaborative and cross-disciplinary conversations between these artists to reveal an underlying series of intellectually provocative micro-narratives, even as it engages with the larger questions of materiality and the act of mark making. Te very concept of collaboration especially intercultural and inter-community encounters is fundamental to the socio-cosmological worlds that make up South East Asia and account for its tradition as well as its contemporary cultural wealth. Te artists featured in this exhibition should be seen within this framework of exchange as the protagonists of a new dialogic potential. Seen against the backdrop of the pandemic, during which these works were conceived, visualised and made: and to which the works naturally allude – some directly, others more elliptically, the works in this exhibition resonate with our moment of enforced isolation, quiet introspection and heightened emotion and are offered as new possibilities in creativity in an attempt to apprehend and negotiate the enormity of this unique historical event. Grayscale! fnds its values in light, shadow, cast shadow, refected light and ambient occlusion and the artists, each in their own unique way, manipulate these values to investigate some of the arguments around the construction of memory and place. Yanyun Chen and Bestrizal Besta’s practice brings into sharp relief the disjunctures and consequent disorder of the Anthropocene: the dystopian consequences of which, are exemplifed by the zoonotic antecedents of the pandemic. Pg. 4 Besta’s œuvre is defned by the application of fgurative motifs entangled within exquisitely detailed strangulating lines in heavy charcoal on dark ominous backgrounds. In Live Only Once, (2020), the linen surface is replete with images drawn from his everyday life in Yogyakarta and tempered with the incorporation of culturally loaded shamanistic imagery drawn equally, from the cultural and material history of Western Sumatra, as well as from his fertile imagination. A prostrated fgure, with arms outstretched behind her, is clearly discernible through the graffitied overlay of texture, as are stray and random limbs that seemingly are unattached to bodies. Besta’s work does not reveal its symbolism easily or methodically but demands a constant return to the picture surface for clues. Live Only Once appears as a cautionary tale that grapples with existential questions concerning the imbalanced relationship between human beings and their surrounding ecologies. Saura Alam (translated to Voices of Nature) (2021), is an obsessively and meticulously rendered work depicting two magnifcently plumed birds – a peacock and a palm cockatoo on one side and a swan on the other, imprisoned in barbed wire entwined with real and imagined vegetal depictions, the whole held in delicately rendered upturned hands. Even through the silenced cacophony of the birds Besta’s question is tangible – can humanity think of is existence outside of nature? Duniya Yang Akan Datang (translated to Te World to Come) (2021), with its immaculately rendered, yet grotesque transformations of fora and fauna, studded with Coleoptera with jewelled wing cases, foregrounds the consequences of human alienation from nature. While delving into his own personal history, geography and cultural forbears as a foundation, and rendering work that pushes the boundaries of nature morte, Besta’s work resonates with deeply pertinent questions about the Anthropocene. Pg. 6 Like Besta, Chen too is an ardent visual critic of the dislocations of the Anthropocene — the era defned by humanity’s profound impact on Earth. Both artists create dreamlike scenes that fip back and forth between the symbolic and the specifc. Teir works are scrupulously detailed and the details speak to lived experiences as well as collective histories and memories. Whereas Besta’s work addresses humankind in general, Chen’s work addresses not only the relentless fow of imagery that has come to defne the 21st century, but also the deliberate slippages between word and meaning, so ofen exploited in local politics. Chen has tenaciously carved out an aesthetic space where her own strident personal politics and digital materiality meet. Known for her provocative and visually seductive moving-image and virtual reality works that collage together a wide range of source material, including 19th century continental philosophy as well as the hugely infuential philosophy embodied in In Praise of Risk by Anne Dufourmantelle; Chen’s meticulous draughtsmanship, honed by her classical training, is annotated and accentuated by animation in Constructing Mementos: Nation States I (2021) and Constructing Mementos: Nation States II (2021). Both works are deliberately displayed with the visual symmetry of Qing Dynasty peach wood hall couplets, which comprised two complementary poetic lines. Chen’s dystopian Chinese style couplets, on the other hand are not laudatory epistles but are veiled criticisms of the indiscriminate urbanisation that appears to be conjoined in nation states with the notion of development: such that, over time both the vision and symbols of progress depreciate, existing only as mirages. Tis slippage is captured in the accompanying animation or as Chen describes it herself, her animations are “a representation drawn from a representation, rotating indefnitely in the abyss of reconstruction, performing naturalness.” Complementary to the animations are drawings executed in meticulous chiaroscuro, deliberately drawing upon the nature morte tradition in European Art History to accentuate the discrepancy between laudable intent - in this case the valorisation of the hybrid Vanda Miss Joaquim and the capitalist reality of the concretisation of all fora. Pg. 8 Chen uses the contrast of the stillness of the drawn work against the movement in the animation to rebel against tradition, to redefne the idea of the original and simultaneously cast true focus on one part of the artwork that either makes the work more visible or deliberately invisible. Against the backdrop of the overwhelming shifs which exposed the chasms in the global, social and economic systems, Chen’s applied metaphor takes on an even greater urgency. Chen’s work and her constant probing, places her as a leading voice in the discourse around the relationship between nature and culture as she questions the possibility whether culture and critical thinking can ever signifcantly impinge upon local political discourse and the shifing beliefs of national agendas. Pg. 9 Contrasting with the dark aesthetics and dire dystopias of Besta’s and Chen’s practice, Subrahmanian’s and Seow’s works offer an antidote to the heightened anxieties of imbalance amplifed during the paradoxical mix of solitude and imposed togetherness, that recent months necessitated. Both artists fnd meditative solace in the healing ritual offered by mark making through repetition. Born in India, Subrahmanian moved between continents before settling to live and work in Singapore. Her peripatetic lifestyle guided her investigations into the constructs of memory and place and these formulations resonate throughout her practice. Subrahmanian’s current practice is directed by her investigations into the physical experience of the gesture and the myriad ways in which this can be expressed at the intersection of sculpture and installation. Her preferred material is ceramics, a uniquely cross-cultural medium which records and expresses a long history of individual and collective mark making. Informed by her transformative engagement with clay, Serra’s performative Verb List became both a source of contemplation as well as an inspirational framework for Subrahmanian. Afer Serra (2021) is both an acknowledgement of indebtedness and simultaneously a tribute to Richard Serra’s Verb List which he formulated between 1967 and 1968 as a subtext for his experiments with materials and infuses a calming repetitive cadence into everyday actions. Subrahmanian conceptualised her work as a set of graduated rolling pins, fve on each display, each with a verb mirror etched into its surface which instructs viewer to perform the everyday tasks that Subrahmanian undertakes as part of her process: fold, mark, twist, enclose, continue, roll, swirl, rotate, encircle, continue. Without the infnitive form that Serra used in his Verb List Subrahmanian’s word lists are transformed into urgent exhortations, at odds with the contemplative physicality of the process. Tis ambiguity infltrates the work and is transubstantiated into a source of creative energy so that the rolling pins become objects of action rather