New Works

an excerpt of the commentary - by T Sasitharan

Chng's commitment to inventiveness is clear in the range of strategies and methods he adopts.

The exhibition spans the gamut, from abstract acrylics and the use of objects in paintings to what the the artist calls 'neocubistic' sculpture, photomontages and a video array.

Chng smothers the wooden surface of his pictures with liberal applications of acrylic in numerous hues. Onto this base, he introduces the innards of a computer - wires, circuit boards, microprocessors and chips.

The resulting image is both textured and complicated - a curious hybrid of biology and technology.

It is like confronting an organic electronic device, a sort of living machine.

In Untitled I and II, part of another series of mixed media efforts on wooden supports, the artist approximates the image of a mould or fungi on a wet surface.

The critical difference is that the subject is rendered in aluminium paint. This is particularly effective in Untitled II, where the paint has been allowed to gather and coagulate, forming what appears to be scraps of metal on the surface.

Again, one notes the mixture of the animate and the inanimate in the work. In this case, a living mould is transformed into inert metal.

There are only two pieces of 'neocubistic' sculptures in the exhibition: Man and Yearning.

They are irregular objects formed from folded photographs of human facial features, pure colours and lines. Thus, every plane of the objects, depicting eyes, noses and fields of colour, looks like the multiple-perspective, mono-ocular images of the Cubists.

The significant feature about these pieces is that they are the product of the manipulation of planar images...sculptures born of pictures, as it were.