Saturday, April 27, 2002
Feature Artist
Lim Mu Hue
Born in 1936 in Singapore, Lim graduated from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1955 and later taught there. His most active period is considered to be in the 1950s and 1960s when he was linked to a social realist grouping that included Choo Keng Kwang and Lim Yew Kuan. Influenced by the technique and form of China woodcut artist Li Zhaohua, Lim excels in woodcuts that reflect the social conditions depicting the lives of Chinese opera performers, hawkers and those living in poverty. The central focus of his works is usually on people as they go about their daily activities.
Friday, April 26, 2002
Simryn Gill - A Small Town at the End of the Century
Press Release originally 29 March 2001, republished in 26th April 2002, in view of participation at Sydney Biennale.
A Small Town at the Turn of the Century is a series of 39 images taken in Port Dickson, a small Malaysian town situated on the Straits of Malacca. The photographs depict the town’s inhabitants, at home, by the beach, at the pub, or at work. Seen together, they create a picture of a particular community at a particular point in time.
And yet “(t)he photographs are peculiarly timeless, of the present but not specifically so, for there are no millennial markers here. They have all been taken around the small town in Malaysia where the artist grew up, and still thinks of as home, but there is little which would tie them to that place alone. A child splashing her feet at the edge of a swimming pool, two men on a golf course, a woman seated in her garden with an industrial complex in the background all seem patently normal (at least for any developed or semi-developed country). The tropical vegetation in the background, or other images such as the rubber tapper standing amongst the rubber trees, locate them in a geographic territory, but the town, with its various characters caught in their everydayness could be almost any place.”
The apparent naturalness and ease of the local inhabitants of Port Dickson as portrayed in these images is all the more striking for the fact that everyone has heads made of fruit: “With their heads swathed in exotic tropical fruits the subject’s identity is masked, or perhaps disguised. They are anonymous, uncertain figures from a dream, with the light of their eyes hidden, and yet they stand or sit comfortably, relaxed in their surrounding environment. Is there a peculiar form of mind-body dualism here—as human is to plant, so mind is to body, for as rationality is surmounted by fruit, the person, the individual, becomes invisible in the surrounding landscape? The vegetal takeover of their bodies is complete, they seem rooted in place, taken over and fully naturalized.”
“For all of Gill’s return to the past in her childhood home, with a whiff of nostalgia creeping in around the edges, the images are not auto-biographical. There is no clear narrative provided, no activity being delineated in front of us, and the concealed figures provide no ready bridge for identification with their author or subjects. Perhaps better, following Raymond Bellour, they are a kind of self-portrait, something which ‘clings to the analogical, the metaphorical, the poetic, far more than the narrative.’ Their ‘coherence lies in a system of rememberances, afterthoughts, superimpositions, correspondences’ and they take ‘on the appearance of discontinuity, of anachronistic juxtaposition, of montage.’ They are, as he says, ‘a repository for memory images.’”
All quotes taken from “Here and Now” by John Barret Lennard, calatogue essay for “A small town at the turn of the century” Simryn Gill, PICA, Perth 2001.
Simryn Gill’s work has been exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at the EAF, Adelaide; IMA, Brisbane; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham UK; CCA Kitakyushu, Japan; ArtPace, San Antonio, Texas as well as galleries in Manila, Singapore, Helsinki, Perth, Sydney & London. Group exhibitions include The Third Asia Pacific Triennale in Brisbane and Flight Patterns at MOCA LA in 2000, Cities on the Move at the Vienna Secession and the 5th Istanbul Biennale in 1997 and Transculture at the 1995 Venice Biennale among others.
For further information, please contact Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, by telephone (02) 9331 1919 by fax (02) 9331 5609.
Feature Artist
Lee Wen
Lee Wen was a former bank officer whose entry into the art scene was relatively late. Born in Singapore in 1957, he received his formal art training from LaSalle College of the Arts, graduating in 1990 before completing his studies at the City of London Polytechnic in 1992. Lee's initiation into the art scene happened at Artists Village in 1989 when he participated in "Happening I" Exploring alternative pictorial language, Lee Wen's figurative paintings are rendered with expressive energy that projects a thematic urgency. He is known as the Yellow Man, for his performance works where he paints himself in yellow.
Wednesday, April 24, 2002
Moleculux - Luminescent Bodies in Hyperspace
1st April to 31st May 2002
Showcasing luminescent sculptures, Chng Nai Wee’s “Moleculux – Luminescent Bodies in Hyperspace” is the first outdoor light installation to be held at Sculpture Square, 155 Middle Road.
Tuesday, April 23, 2002
Feature Artist
Lim Tzay Chuen
(Singapore)
Selected Solo Exhibitions
1998
Surface, Wetterling Teo Gallery, Singapore
Selected Group Exhibitions
2000
Creativity Processes, Sculpture Square, Singapore
1999
Nokia Singapore Art 99, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore
Diaphanous, Chijmes Gallery, Singapore
Art Document 1999, Kanazu
1998
All Must Go, The Substation Gallery, Singapore
White Elephant Sale, Grey Area Art Space, Melbourne
The Home Show, Linden Gallery Next Wave Festival, Melbourne
1997
Clear, 1st Floor Artists & Writers Space, Melbourne
Monday, April 22, 2002
Women in the Arts
WITALK
c/o Amanda Heng
We are pleased to invite you to join us again at Telok Kurau Studio for the another witalk on 26 th April. Joining us for this witalk are two visiting artists, Shelly Silver, a filmmaker from New York who is here presenting her film (‘ Suicide ’ on 24/4)at the Singapore International Film Festival, and Nicola Meitzner, a German artist who is on a residency program in Singapore.
Speaker: 1 Shelly Silver
2 Nicola Meitzner
Date: 26th April 2002 , Friday
Time: 7.00 pm
Venue: Telok Kurau Studios Room 109,
Lorong J, 91 Telok Kurau , Singapore
About the speakers:
Shelly Silver is a filmmaker working in New York. Her works investigate how contemporary identity is both reflected and constructed by television and cinema and raise questions on storytelling, role-playing and the means by which popular narratives articulate fictions of the self.
In recent years Silver has lived for extended periods outside of the United States. Her experiences as an 'outsider observer' in Germany, France and Japan have led to works in which she questions the myths and realities of cultural and national identity. Interweaving modes of documentary, essay, and story-telling in works such as Former East/Former West (1995), and 37 Stories About Leaving Home (1997), Silver explores how we negotiate cultural narratives to arrive at definitions of the self.
Silver was born in 1957. She received a BA and a BFA from Cornell University, and studied in the Whiney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Media Bureau, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her works have been exhibited at festivals and institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Torino International Film and Video Festival, Italy; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; World Wide Video Festival, The Hague; Berlin Film Festival; Artists Space, New York; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Halle Sud, Geneva; and Laforet Art Museum, Tokyo.
Nicola Meitzner was born in Amberg, Germany and studied in Freiburg (90-92) and the Hochschule fuer Grafik und Buchkunst (University for Graphic and Book Design) in Leipzig (93-99). She graduated with a Diploma in Art photography in 1999. She has travelled and worked on projects in places like, Mexico, India,Thailand, Berlin and Zurich. Since 1996, she has been presenting her works in several exhibitions and was awarded a Scholarship from the Wuestenrot Foundation in Germany to continue her projects on the theme of 'City' in Singapore. She lives in Zurich.
Nicola has been working on the theme `City´ since 1996. In several projects she concentrated on special aspects concerning the changes in structure of the city and living in the city. She will talk about two art works she had realized and about her project here in Singapore.
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