LIFE OF OBJECTS

With the advent of the engagement of ready-made objects and images as a legitimate mode of art making, artists have explored a wide a range of issues, using pre-established form and content in critical and innovative ways.

The exhibition, Life of Objects, presents propositions that reconsider the role of the object in contemporary art-making. These include the re-reading o formality and composition in sculpture, the activation of found material and contemporary assemblage, as well as the negotiation with digital technologies that destabilise the notion of medium specificities, as well as materiality in the work of art.

Chun Kai Qun (Singapore) presents a philosophy of sculpture that uses humour and failure to play off the futility of ambition against the ideal of excellence in art. Torlarp Larpjaroensook’s (Thailand) work engages with repurposed objects as part of a larger narrative that combines personal memory and whimsical imagination. Martin Constable (United Kingdom) deploys images as objects, relying on established film imagery to reconstruct ways in which images are being made and consumed today. The videos of Hiraki Sawa (Japan) interweave object and space to create intimate psychological dimensions that shift with senses of motion and dislocation.

By blurring material properties and function, the artists in the exhibition accentuate, and undermine perception and reality, through artistic devices that open up new contexts for regarding the relationship between art and the object today.

About the artists

Hiraki Sawa

Hiraki Sawa (b.1977, Ishikawa, Japan) trained in sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College, London, and later engaged with video a primary medium of art-making. He showed at museums such as the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2016), the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2014), State Hermitage Museum (2013), as well as major presentations such as the Chengdu Biennale (2011), the Biennale of Sydney (2010), the 6th Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia (2009) the Yokohama Triennial (2005). He has held solo presentations at the Opera City Gallery, Tokyo (2014), Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo (2012), la Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archeologie, Besançon (2010) and the National Museum of Victoria, Melbourne (2006).

Torlarp Larpjaroensook

Graduating in painting from the Chiang Mai University, Torplarp Larpjaroeksook (b. 1977, Autthaya, Thailand) is also a founder of Gallery Seescape, and artist-run gallery established in 2008. Some of his major projects include the mobile gallery 3147966, a gallery on wheels that travelled through the city, showcasing artworks of Thai and international artists, and his participation in the Koganecho Art Bazaar in Yokohama, Japan. Torlarp’s works can be found in the Singapore Art Museum and other private collections. Presently based in Chiang Mai, the artist continues to run Gallery Seescape while producing artworks at his studio.

Martin Constable

Artist and academic Martin Constable has published widely on the topic of computational aesthetics. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in Singapore, such as A Figment of Film (2016), Dear Painter (2015), The Phygital World (2014), Pennangalanamania! (2013) and Micocosmos (2012), to name a few. His works can be found in the collections of David Bowie, Lord Gowrie (former Minister of the Arts, UK), Proctor & Gamble and the National Arts Collection, UK. Constable is also part of the art collective Grieve Perspective. Formerly at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Constable is presently based in Vietnam, where he teaches at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Ho Chi Minh City.