IN OUR OWN FRAME: 10TH YEAR ANNIVERSARY
Group exhibition
3 - 19 December 2020
Richard Koh Fine Art, Singapore
Art in Singapore has evolved over the past 10 years. In Our Own Frame offers an insight into development of the local art scene in which the gallery has humbly contributed to the recognition of Singapore and Malaysian artists in its own unique way and brand. As the gallery looks forward the future, its vision remains steadfast to its belief in developing an artist’s career via identifying understated, albeit promising practices, and providing it opportunities to flourish.
RIGHT HERE! RIGHT NOW! (ART GALLERY WEEKEND 2020)
5 Gallery group exhibition
9 - 11 October 2020
Participating galleries (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
Artemis Art, The Back Room, Core Design Gallery, Richard Koh Fine Art, Suma Orientalis
In an unprecedented collaboration in the art world, five galleries across Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya are coming together for a novel weekend-long showcase of contemporary art. Right Here! Right Now!, conceived during the height of the Movement Control Order, is a burst of energy in a time of diam diam, of stillness.
Each of the five galleries has put forth one of their represented artists, who has been tasked with creating a series of five new works. These works will then be distributed across the galleries, with each gallery showing one work from each artist for a total of five works per space. In the playful spirit of a scavenger hunt, visitors are encouraged to travel between galleries for the full experience, driving the motion of the moment as they traipse across the city over the course of the weekend.
Featured in the shows are the following artists and galleries: CC Kua from The Back Room KL, Syahbandi Samat from Artemis Art, Joshua Kane Gomes from Richard Koh Fine Art, Jane Stephanny from Suma Orientalis and Haafiz Shahimi from Core Design Gallery. Working in painting and mixed-media sculpture, these young artists – all below the age of 35 – bring an explosive formal sensibility to their experimentations. Charting their diverse practices across the geography of the city, Right Here! Right Now! is a kinetic transposition of the gallery-as-room to the city-as-gallery. There is no time or place like the present.
THE FOOT BENEATH THE FLOWER
Group exhibition
28 August - 31 October 2020
NTU ADM Gallery, Singapore
The Foot Beneath the Flower is an exhibition of contemporary art from Southeast Asia in the key of high-pitched camp and kitsch. Camp, as Susan Sontag has remarked, is characterised by artifice, frivolity and “shocking excess”, qualities that likewise mark the aesthetics of kitsch. The show proposes that such excess may nonetheless encompass themes that are in equal measure canny, critical, and redolent of the realities of life in Southeast Asia today.
The works here engage with the region in various ways, representing familiar socio-cultural narratives as stylistic froth and counter-ideological glee. Negotiating the realities of societal conventions, the works of Daniel Kok, Joshua Kane Gomes and Geraldine Lim are premised on subjectivities, utilising the visual idioms of kitsch as strategies of subversion to complicate the status quo.
The artists, who hail from Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and the Vietnamese diaspora, deploy the indulgence of camp and kitsch in radical and responsive ways. By co-opting the contours of urban existence for their own purposive ends, they foreground the possibilities of art from Southeast Asia as flamboyant, deceptively frivolous objects.
Locating Malaysian Contemporary Art: The Echo Boomers
Group exhibition
19 August - 12 September 2020
Richard Koh Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
In Locating Malaysian Contemporary Art: The Echo Boomers, the exhibition looks at young practices, specifically artists from the Echo Boomer or Gen Y, also known as the Millennials. This particular generation were born between 1981 – 1996. Each generation is presumably defined and shaped by powerful cultural events, and for this particular group, anthropologist have pegged it to the explosion of the internet and social media – in addition to terrorism (9/11) and the Great Recession. In essence, the ability to access knowledge and information has tremendously shaped the artist’s constitution. The artist is more ‘woke’, so to speak. The key artistic attributes of reading, observing/ looking, introspecting, satirizing has been enhanced by this cultural event, a far difference from the preceding generation whom had been largely shaped by post World War II optimism and nation building. Hence, the prevalence of social political concerns for this older group of artists. This exhibition provides hints of this cultural shift, if not, an indication that the urgency of socio-political commentary in Malaysian art is dissipating.
Joshua Kane Gomes’ and Sarah Radzi’s works question the efficiency of human dynamics and navigates unhealthy dependencies within relationships. By extension, the works serve as a mechanism for the artists to comprehend their existence taking place in an isolated solitary phenomenon in an absurd world. But nevertheless, it affords them freedom to define themselves.
Emerging: Collecting Singapore Contemporary - Selections fro
Group exhibition
In conjunction with Singapore Art Week 2020, The Private Museum (TPM) Singapore is pleased to present Emerging: Collecting Singapore Contemporary – Selections from the DUO Collection. As part of TPM’s 10th anniversary celebrations, the museum revisits its foundation of bridging the private and the public; this exhibition is the first in a series of five featuring an array of private collections in Singapore.
The DUO, whose collectors prefer to remain anonymous, started building their collection five years ago with a focus to support emerging artists in Singapore and Southeast Asia, though they have been collecting widely for more than a decade.
Emerging is the inaugural showcase of selected works collected in the past five years featuring 16 Singapore-based artists. These works reflect some of Singapore’s emerging urgencies in recent years by responding to themes of identity, migration, urbanisation, the environment, places and spaces. The exhibition seeks not only to stimulate new conversations on Singapore contemporary art through the lens of private collectors, but also to expand on their role in the art eco-system as imperative patrons of the arts.
11 January - 1 March 2020
The Private Museum, Singapore
S.E.A. Focus 2020
Art Fair, group presentation
16 - 19 January 2020
Gillman Barracks, Singapore
RKFA is proud to present a diverse selection of contemporary artworks. Featuring an exciting line-up of Malaysian artists including Faizal Yunus (b.1989, Malaysia), Haffendi Anuar (b.1985, Malaysia), Hasanul Isyraf Idris (b.1978, Malaysia) Joshua Kane Gomes (b.1993), Zelin Seah (b.1980, Malaysia), and Justin Lim (b.1983, Malaysia), alongside a special feature on emerging regional abstract painters, the booth also features the works of Liu Hsin-Ying (b.1991, Taiwan), and Pen Robit (b.1991, Cambodia). Surrounding the booth is an impressive wallpaper by Malaysia artist Hasanul Isyraf Idris, known for his energetic mixed-media drawings informed by his fascination of comic book form and language. The presentation comes together as a reminder that contemporary art is not necessarily convoluted, and can also be accessible via irony and parody.
The chosen artists’ works are relevant to the cultures and discourses of today. At the same time, they pay tribute to the narratives of history and excavate potential areas for further thought. For example, Joshua Kane Gomes’ assemblages create non-language entry points and atmospheric moods through his careful material choice.