Side Affects: Chua Chye Teck, Manon de Boer, Tsuyoshi Hisakado
Ota Fine Arts Singapore is delighted to present 'Side Affects', curated by artist Guo-Liang Tan and featuring the works of Chua Chye Teck (Singapore), Manon de Boer (Netherlands/ Belgium), and Tsuyoshi Hisakado (Japan). Thinking about Duchamp's concept of 'infra-mince', Tan is interested in how the subtle shifts within things can be embodied in materials and gestures. "I am drawn to the works of Chua, de Boer and Hisakado because the three artists share a certain sensibility towards seeing the world and art-making [...] 'Side Affects' is an invitation to think more deeply about what we might want out of art and how attention may be formed or given in the absence of meaning or spectacle, "states Tan. From works on paper to sculpture, installation and video, diverse expressions by the artists in the exhibition highlight the ephemeral and the overlooked.
In Manon de Boer's 16mm film Maud Capturing the Light On a Clear Day (2015), shots of a screenprint by Agnes Martin is captured by its collector, with instructions from de Boer to film the work whenever she passed by and would look at it - for as long as she watched it. The differences in light and colour in the film correspond to the different moments of looking at the work and make the image merge with its environment to various degrees. This emphasis to attentiveness is a recurring component of Manon's practice. Featured also in this exhibition is The Untroubled Mind (2016), where we see a collection of constructions or situations created by her son, filmed over the period of 3 years. Everyday objects are assembled through play - at times seemingly ordinary, other times reflecting what appears to be a thoughtful pattern, or a sense of tension in the way objects balance against one another.
Tsuyoshi Hisakado's latest sculpture work, Tunnel #1 / Case (2018), appears to be an empty glass vitrine at first glance. On closer observation, one sees that a circular piece of glass has been cut out from one of the glass panels, tilted at an angle and rotating continuously by the use of a motor. This delicate misalignment opens up a gap that can simultaneously be read as an entrance and an exit, and inside and out. Expanding from his explorations on space and time is the crossfades series (2018 - present, ongoing) of works on paper. Against a background of blotches, splashes, or strokes of ink, Hisakado has silkscreened a spiral of minute numbers derived from the mathematical constant pi, so faint that it is almost invisible.
Like Hisakado and de Boer, the work of Chua Chye Teck can also be said to be an invitation to slow down and look more intensely. Working between photography and found objects, Chua treats the printed image almost sculpturally, paying special attention to its materiality and its interaction with light and space: "I'm not just interested in the image alone. I'm interested in a leftover piece of paper and having an image on it [...] What I'm interested in here is when the images appear almost like curtain, with folds." Chua's work Under The Bodhi Tree (2019) is an installation of found objects - often discarded materials, detached or torn off from its origin - and photographs printed on paper and folded by the artist. Through his subtle manipulations of the object and the image, the relationship between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional is blurred, creating alternative perceptions.
Ota Fine Arts Singapore invites you to experience the subtle affects conveyed through the works of these three artists, looking into art-making as a way of producing affect and drawing attention to the imperceptible.
