Other Things
(2022)Installation;
Pencil and cut-outs on silk paper, candle, dimensions variable.
What sits between the silencing and expressing of doubt?
Other Things is an ongoing installation of paper cutouts. In it, personal reflections are written on silk paper and then cut out.
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The series looks to embed the doubt and anxieties present behind any act of proclamation or disclosure, however bold they may sound, in material form. In the work, marks are made – and furthermore cut out – not onto printing paper but onto silk paper, typically used only to clean metal printing plates or protect finished prints, instead of being printed upon.
On silk paper – a humble material typically used to clean and protect finished prints – I wrote personal reflections, and thereafter cut the words out. This series of gesture, both additive and reductive, came from a desire to augment the seemingly-assertive act of printing and speaking, instead making manifest the gaps present in any kind of expression. In part, the work alludes to Martin Luther’s pasting of his printed “Ninety-five Theses” on the door of the Castle Church, an act of theological challenge against the Roman Catholic Church. Canonically remembered as an act of bold revolution that sparked the Protestant Reformation, it was in truth done amidst great societal and personal turmoil: from the Black plague tearing across Europe, to Martin Luther’s own enduring fears of divine judgment.
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In response, the series looks to embed the doubt and anxieties present behind any act of proclamation or disclosure, however bold they may sound.
The aim, then, is to dial the act of bringing words into the world into a gentler, more perishable form – as an expression of still speaking, but more vulnerably, tentatively, and carefully, with room for necessary doubt.
Exhibited at:
Material Memory, Spinnerei, Germany
The Faraway Nearby, Art Agenda S.E.A., Singapore
Reviews
Wong Kar Mun Nicole for Art and Market, "Review of Art and Market Small Rooms"
Jonathan Chan for Art and Market, “so imminent yet so beyond reach”
Miriam Devaprasana for Art and Market, “An Ode to Truth Which Binds Us All”
Amar Shahid for Art and Market, “An afternoon of reconciliation”
