Landscaped Grounds: Hilmi Johandi
Ota Fine Arts Shanghai is pleased to present "Landscaped Grounds", a solo exhibition by Singapore artist Hilmi Johandi. Featuring 9 new paintings as well as a recent installation piece, the presentation is a continuation of the artist’s fascination with how Singapore is portrayed through archival materials. In particular, Hilmi collects familiar and symbolic motifs from postcards and posters of the 1980s-90s, and reconstructs them on his canvases, creating a montage of real and imagined landscapes that may resemble parts of a theatrical set. This will be Hilmi’s first solo exhibition in Shanghai and his third with Ota Fine Arts.
Presented in this exhibition is Hilmi’s most recent painting series, Landscaped grounds, which focuses on the idea of reinventing spaces, planes and forms of the referenced subject. The motifs are drawn from Singapore’s national archives, and feature places of interest such as the seaside, hotel lobbies, and swimming pools that carry particular visual styles from specific eras and social contexts. Spaces in the paintings are broken up, partitioned, and collaged back together to create an uncanny world that is at once familiar yet foreign upon observation.
In comparison, the other series featured here, Destination image, introduces a closer and more intimate experience. Contrary to Hilmi’s larger paintings which combine several scenes together, these smaller pieces depict close-up, singular motifs. The subjects pursue ideas of pleasure and desire, and by scrutinizing these images, Hilmi delves into the core, questioning their superficial representations. Yet, by cropping these images, he displaces the depicted from its original context, creating a sense of ambiguity and uncertainty.
A three-part installation made of aluminium panels, Stagecraft: Sunset by the River (2023), is displayed alongside the paintings. Here, the two-dimensional found image of a scenic sunset goes through the process of lithography and is further layered with gouache and watercolour to create intriguing textural effects. It is then blown up into a life-sized digital UV print and propped up by wooden structures that are exposed to the viewer from certain angles, reminding one of props or backdrops on a stage set. Viewers are invited to walk around and "into" Hilmi’s transformed image for an immersive experience.
Ota Fine Arts Shanghai invites you to experience Hilmi Johandi’s painterly contemplations on the constructed realities in our daily lives through this presentation.
