Group Exhibition Art Fairs Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore, 39 Keppel Rd, Singapore 089065
Vernissage (by RSVP only)
17 Jan 2025 (Friday)
6pm – 9pm
VIP Hour
18 Jan 2025 (Saturday) – 26 Jan 2025 (Sunday)
12pm – 1pm
Public Days
18 Jan 2025 (Saturday) – 26 Jan 2025 (Sunday)
1pm – 8pm (Last entry 7.30pm)
ShanghART will participate in SEA Focus for the first time, presenting a trio of artists that vary in phases of their careers, approaches to artmaking, and use of materials and mediums. The presented works by Lin Aojie, Li Dezhuang, and Lai Yu Tong reflect upon the curatorial theme "Disconnected Contemporaries", while also invoking questions on contemporary art revolving the notion of Southeast Asia.
Lin Aojie’s (b.1986) artistic practice departs from his personal experiences. The artist has a keen and delicate record of the trivial details of daily life or deliberately planned events with strongly improvisatory and humorous images, while a seemingly dispassionate tone threads the whole narrative structure. By beating around the bush he tries to question, ridicule, and criticize the capitalist mode of production, the artist's survival predicament, and the relationship between artists and other art professionals.
My Global South is a work created for Lin Aojie’s solo exhibition at ShanghART Singapore in September 2024, his first major solo presentation in Southeast Asia. Using his signature humour, Lin questions the concept of “Southeast Asia” by referencing “The Situation in the Far East” and incorporating contemporary geopolitical motifs.
Presenting the work of a Guangzhou artist at S.E.A. Focus further challenges conventional regional boundaries, inviting reflection on his inclusion in the Southeast Asian art scene. Including areas like Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the demarcation of Southeast Asia in his work, Lin playfully reimagines what it means to be a “Southeast Asian artist,” expanding the possibilities of regional identity. Perhaps Lin Aojie is a Southeast Asian artist.
Li Dezhuang, also known as Lee Teck Suan, was born in Singapore in 1953. Winner of the 2023 64th Chinese Literature and Art Medal (Taiwan), Li Dezhuang studied western art and graduated from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1970. As a modern poet, columnist and Chartered Fellow (FCILT), his varied experience provided him with a diverse perspective.
Li’s landmark “Well M Farmland” (Jing Shan Tian) series draws from his study of Chinese Han characters. Combining the most representative Chinese characters井 (well), 山 (mountain), 田 (farmland) with three basic geometric shapes: circle, triangle and square to represent each of the Chinese character, Li created this contemporary ‘new ink painting’.
Lai Yu Tong (b.1996) routinely investigates notions of the mundane and adequacy in daily life by way of drawing, sculpture and photography. The artist’s practice relies on the conditions of observation (ie. what can be seen or heard from his apartment windows, wherein he also has his studio) and modest, ubiquitous materials like newspapers, cardboard boxes, and wood. From this perch, symbols of life emerge and are recorded, marking the innocuous as peculiar, sad, hopeful.
Two series of works by him - Newspaper Paintings (2019-2021) and Car Drawings (2021-2022) - are presented alongside a new installation Dead Animals (Domestic Scene). The installation piece consists of various household furniture—a chair, a table, a bench and a shelf—with six sculptures resting on them that each resemble an animal—a dog, a parrot, a praying mantis, a lizard, a squirrel and a chicken. The animals are all dead. Made out of burnt wooden blocks sawn to geometric shapes, they lay motionless in foetal positions taking the furniture as their final resting place.
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