Under the Sun: Time’s Witnesses presents a new body of charcoal powder works that engage the themes of futility and transience. Inspired by the Book of Ecclesiastes, the exhibition reflects on the brevity of life, the passage of time, and the traces they leave behind. Rather than dwelling solely on impermanence, the works consider how an awareness of life’s fleeting nature prompts a quest for that which endures and transcends individual existence.
Charcoal powder – a substance born from the burning and breaking down of once-living wood – is here reconstituted as an artistic medium. This transformation, from organic life to elemental residue, resonates with the exhibition’s concern with endurance through change. Mixed with water, it gives rise to images of withered wood and ancient stone – forms marked by stillness and quiet gravity. While visually recalling the traditions of East Asian ink painting, the works deliberately depart from conventional brushwork. Instead, they foreground the fragility and materiality of charcoal, reinterpreting East Asian aesthetics through a contemporary sensibility.
The wood and stone depicted here are not inert objects offered for passive observation, but entities that long predate human life, silently enduring decay and fracture. As remnants shaped by time, they stand as witnesses to innumerable cycles of existence. In encountering them, viewers are confronted with a reversal of perspective, recognising themselves as momentary presences before forms that have outlasted generations. Against such temporal depth, human life is fragile and fleeting, prompting reflection on what we ultimately seek to hold on to.
Within these works, time resists a strictly linear reading. Faced with these remnants, time appears to pause, echo, or fold back upon itself. The natural forms serve as vessels of memory, carrying the past more fully than we can, bearing the visible traces of history and change. In this encounter, observation becomes reciprocal: the viewer looks and is simultaneously looked back upon. Time in this context transforms into afield of quiet resonance between human presence and material persistence.
The exhibition offers a space for stillness and observation, inviting attentiveness to presence and absence, to the transient and the enduring. Through sparse compositions, subdued tonalities, and the inherent vulnerability of charcoal, the works point to human finitude alongside what persists beyond it. By transforming a once-burned material into a contemporary visual language, Under the Sun: Time’s Witnesses expands the expressive possibilities of charcoal and, within Singapore’s plural artistic landscape, opens a contemplative dialogue between human ephemerality and the slow endurance of wood and stone.