Synopsis:

This exhibition will feature a small collection of new works by Boo Sze Yang, Chiew Sien Kuan and Tay Bak Chiang.

The environment where the artists live has a direct impact on their senses, their emotions, their relationships with nature and wider culture. Singapore is an island city-state constantly in a state of construction and renewal. The notion of development and progress has given rise to a long-standing dilemma regarding solutions on modern living and the impact it has on the natural environment. The works in this exhibition attempt to capture nature, not only as they experience it – magnificent, enchanting, unpredictable – but that the reality in nature lies within a state of randomness.

Boo Sze Yang's recent series of monochromatic paintings conjures a natural world gradually dissected and displaced by urban development. This series of painting are constructed via a process of moving, marking, and shifting wet paint across a surface, balancing on the edge of recognition and abstraction to create dreamlike images where meaning is constantly shifting, and interpretation becomes multifaceted.

Chiew Sien Kuan's works are commentaries on the issues of modernity and rapid urbanisation that affect people's sense of being, creating altered states of mind. His work is preoccupied with issues of environmentalism, renewal, loss of urban spaces, economic progress and technological development that have inevitably influenced and changed people's sense of reality. His sculptures are characterised by the use of found objects sourced over a period of time sometimes 10 – 15 years. By formalising the accidental, he probes into the subconscious mind enticing the viewer to re-think and re-examine the subject matter in the work. The seemingly random assemblage of materials may not seem finished, it is constantly a work in progress.

Tay Bak Chiang paints subjects found in the nature of Singapore and Southeast Asia, such as heliconias, lotus ponds and rocks. He seeks to reinterpret them in terms of form, composition, technique, material and colour. Lotus flowers, for example, are depicted as minimalist forms in bold hues; lotus stalks as thick, unembellished black strokes; and stones as textured shapes and sculptural blocks in intense colours made by combining pigments and traditional Chinese ink. Through these subjects, he expresses his sentiments and philosophies.