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Representing some of the most ambitious artists working today, the 2024 PLATFORM artists showcase the latest in contemporary art practice from around the Asia Pacific region and beyond.
Gordon Cheung’s mesmerizing work Home recreates traditional Chinese windows from financial newspapers and bamboo, symbolising homes lost to China’s rapid urbanization. Hovering between states of ‘being,’ these ghostly structures bridge the traditional and modern, gazing from the past through a financial frame into the future.
British abstract painter, Ian Davenport’s artistic exploration reaches new heights with his creation, Lake No.1 (Tide), a monumental painting-installation that required an astounding 120 liters of paint for its realization. An ambitious evolution of his renowned “puddle” paintings, this large-scale masterpiece emerged as a series of work, originating at the 57th Venice Biennale and evolving across diverse locations.
Ian Davenport brings his artistic philosophy to life, emphasizing that working on a large scale allows him to explore themes in painting that intrigue him. By manipulating paint on a grand scale, he transforms it into a sculptural entity, engaging in a captivating interplay with gravity and establishing a pronounced relationship between the artwork and the floor, akin to sculpture.
Woven Billboards: Nenek Moyang translating to “ancestor” in Malay, is made up of a woven “billboard,” a pair of woven “banners” and a pair of woven “postcards” which all come together in a large assemblage.
Part of Kueh’s Kenyalang Circus series, these vibrant works are crafted using industrial weaving machines and explore questions about Kueh’s identity as a Chinese-Malaysian from Borneo residing in The Netherlands. Drawing from Malaysian and Bornean imagery, Kueh cleverly juxtaposes them with raw street ads, multinational logos, and fluorescent threads, satirising the exoticisation and misunderstanding of Borneo’s diverse cultures by Westerners and Peninsula Malaysians.
Explore Donna Ong’s fantastical ‘worlds’ in her series: Desert, Garden, Underground, Undergrowth, Underwater. Made from hand-cut paper shapes of flora and fauna and arranged into intricate miniature landscapes, each ‘world’ is housed in a glass vitrine similar to that of a terrarium. While a terrarium contains real plant specimens, their placement and the environment are entirely deliberate and controlled, bridging reality with the magical.
Boedi Widjaja’s ground-breaking, bio-art installation Immortal Words dispenses synthesised DNA and text through gachapon machines. The project is a continuation of Widjaja’s decade-long research into body, memory, language and encoding and is supported by the National Arts Council and developed in consultation with geneticist Associate Professor Eric Yap of Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine.
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