1 x 1 x 1
FOST Gallery is thrilled to announce the second edition of 1 x 1 x 1 with works by another seven artists, each work being no larger than one metre in any dimension. This second edition features an even greater variety of mediums, like cast plaster, glass, lacquer, painting, photography, print and textiles.
Several artists deal with the monumental in miniature. Jan Balquin’s Token Walls, small-scale cast plaster sculptures of fortress wall sections recall the constructions of cities. Yet, when arranged grid-like with equal gaps in between each piece, she absurdly negates their original objective of protection and fortitude. Meanwhile, the imagery printed on the glass blocks of Donna Ong’s An Uncommon Forest is drawn from important female botanical scientists like Marianne North (1830–1890) and Isabella Bird (1831–1904). Ong has interwoven portraits of these greats and other images of Southeast Asian animals and local people, emphasising the interconnectedness of natural and human worlds within the tropical forest.
Artists like Lavender Chang, Adeline Kueh and Phi Phi Oanh celebrate the ordinary in their works. Chang’s series A Dissection Of…… captures the individual components of favourite hawker dishes with handwritten explanations from people she had interviewed. With each telling, their emotional or non-emotional attachments are slowly revealed. Kueh’s installation of Swiss voile rosettes (The Sun, The Moon and The Earth) and embroideries (Forgetting and Remembering series), challenge us to reconsider the relationship we have with things and rituals around us. Taking heed from craft and wisdoms passed down through generations, her works examine the tensions between the gaps or limits of language—visual or otherwise. Oanh takes reference from the photos in her own smartphone camera reel, painstakingly recreating mundane scenes with Vietnamese lacquer (Pro Se series). This process highlights the difference between the present and a time before technology made image making so convenient and cavalier.
The subject matter in Jon Chan’s paintings are often extracted from different images taken by him or found on the internet (Bedok Reservoir). At the same time, they might describe detailed scenes that seem disconnected from a larger narrative or circumstance (Rubber Plantation). This compositional and narrative discombobulation lend an air of mystery to his paintings, and invite the viewer to posit his or her own narrative. Strategies of decontextualisation can also be found in Bea Camacho’s Sartre series, where she deconstructs the conceptual scheme of word language and presents them as a formal arrangement of characters. The works are based on a print edition of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (L’Imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination, 1940), where Camacho counts all the characters in selected pages of the original text and re-arranges them in alphabetical order. In doing so, she strips the text of its meaning, invalidating the author’s intent, and seeking the reader to reimagine the text.
FOST Gallery is thrilled to announce the second edition of 1 x 1 x 1 with works by another seven artists, each work being no larger than one metre in any dimension. This second edition features an even greater variety of mediums, like cast plaster, glass, lacquer, painting, photography, print and textiles.
Several artists deal with the monumental in miniature. Jan Balquin’s Token Walls, small-scale cast plaster sculptures of fortress wall sections recall the constructions of cities. Yet, when arranged grid-like with equal gaps in between each piece, she absurdly negates their original objective of protection and fortitude. Meanwhile, the imagery printed on the glass blocks of Donna Ong’s An Uncommon Forest is drawn from important female botanical scientists like Marianne North (1830–1890) and Isabella Bird (1831–1904). Ong has interwoven portraits of these greats and other images of Southeast Asian animals and local people, emphasising the interconnectedness of natural and human worlds within the tropical forest.
Artists like Lavender Chang, Adeline Kueh and Phi Phi Oanh celebrate the ordinary in their works. Chang’s series A Dissection Of…… captures the individual components of favourite hawker dishes with handwritten explanations from people she had interviewed. With each telling, their emotional or non-emotional attachments are slowly revealed. Kueh’s installation of Swiss voile rosettes (The Sun, The Moon and The Earth) and embroideries (Forgetting and Remembering series), challenge us to reconsider the relationship we have with things and rituals around us. Taking heed from craft and wisdoms passed down through generations, her works examine the tensions between the gaps or limits of language—visual or otherwise. Oanh takes reference from the photos in her own smartphone camera reel, painstakingly recreating mundane scenes with Vietnamese lacquer (Pro Se series). This process highlights the difference between the present and a time before technology made image making so convenient and cavalier.
The subject matter in Jon Chan’s paintings are often extracted from different images taken by him or found on the internet (Bedok Reservoir). At the same time, they might describe detailed scenes that seem disconnected from a larger narrative or circumstance (Rubber Plantation). This compositional and narrative discombobulation lend an air of mystery to his paintings, and invite the viewer to posit his or her own narrative. Strategies of decontextualisation can also be found in Bea Camacho’s Sartre series, where she deconstructs the conceptual scheme of word language and presents them as a formal arrangement of characters. The works are based on a print edition of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (L’Imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination, 1940), where Camacho counts all the characters in selected pages of the original text and re-arranges them in alphabetical order. In doing so, she strips the text of its meaning, invalidating the author’s intent, and seeking the reader to reimagine the text.