Traces

Ota Fine Arts Singapore is delighted to present "Traces", a group exhibition featuring three artists: Tomoko Kashiki, Genevieve Leong, and Guo-Liang Tan. The works presented here suggest the presence of a figure or traces of touch through subtle layers and occurrences. This exhibition looks at how each artist creates experiences that transcend beyond the physical limitations of their chosen medium.

Tomoko Kashiki (b. 1982, Japan) observes beauty and wonder in the minute details in life, and she focuses on reflecting this in her paintings through the postures and facial expressions of the figures as well as their surroundings. In the painting Soup of Memories Served with Smiling Sunflowers and Bones (2020), she portrays the figure’s body in a curled-up position. The overlay of multiple elements creates an impression that the character could be lying at the far end of a room, or possibly floating in a pond or sky partially covered with patterned clouds. Her unique technique creates a flat, sanded-down surface on which she makes fluid drawing lines that appear as if they were imprinted by a pencil. Kashiki’s works are personal, dream-like, yet often verging on the ironic by combining both real and imaginative elements.

On the other hand, Guo-Liang Tan (b. 1980, Singapore) presents Figures I – IV (2019), a series of collage with layers of gauze fabric overlaying digital prints of images taken from everyday news media. These appropriated images depict various gestures of touch, which are made ambiguous by cropping and removing the figures from their original contexts. Devoid of events and narratives, one encounters these ghostly figures as abstract bodies, suspended and staged out of time. The overlaying gauze further enhances this sense of distancing, forming a veil that masks the images on one hand, while simultaneously charging their latent surface with material affect. In all the images, the gaze is either averted or consciously obscured. The absence of direct address not only emphasizes the interplay of visual and haptic forms, but also draws attention to the constant slippage between figure and ground, image and object.

Lastly, Genevieve Leong’s (b. 1992, Singapore) work attempts to visualize the intangible. Beginning with the immaterial, her work often combines text, image, found and made objects and the manipulation of space to create what she describes as “an almost physical image”. Evaporation Studies (2022) is a series of situations set up in the gallery space, each demonstrating its subtle transformation through evaporation. Objects, substances or materials are left as they are – in the space’s natural environment – to evaporate, each arriving in its own time to a change of state or final form. Through a transitory and invisible process such as evaporation, Leong is interested in the possibilities of manifesting visually or sensorially its traces, making visible its disappearance.

Ota Fine Arts invites all to experience the subtle yet suggestive portrayal of ideas and occurrences by these three artists.