Here’s an equation: Object + Object + Object = Object assembly = Scene

The shade of a yellow curtain bounces off a white cup’s surface, turning its hue into a warm cream. Beneath the cup, its shadow creeps towards a roll of blue tape, its circular frame highlighting the silhouette of a shadow play cast by a nearby wind chime.

If an object is a singular noun, a one-dimensional adjective, or a faint presence, an assembly of things brings us into a fascinating world of visual syntaxes.

Open Scenes shares how Cally Tan, Lee Yueh Chen and Zhai Qiutong are charmed by objects and objecthoods. Each dealing with different materialities and approaches, their respective practices and artworks together illustrate a list of visual vocabularies that unpack the hard-to-describe allure of objects. Building on this vocabulary, from singular words to strung-together phrases, Open Scenes attempts to become a kind of playable visual dictionary, laced with example sentences, embodied as space.

Here, artworks are attached to mobility rigs that can be manipulated, letting viewers take the reins in forging changing relationships between artwork-objects. Distance, colour play, juxtaposition of shapes, and other visual cues become tools to curate scenes — some further obsoleting the presence of certain objects, while others pull them centre stage. In doing so, the exhibition paints temporal settings of objecthood as an ever-changing landscape, where peripheral objects are reconsidered as sites of potential meaning and invite new ways of seeing.