GROUP EXHIBITION

Focusing on how the artists intersect the qualities of images with the materiality of painting, the exhibition highlights the critical potential of painting in an age of visual excess. By offering points where the visual experience of artists who have grown up in the post-internet era collide and converge with painting as object and material, it underscores the enduring role of the medium in evoking visual and sensory experience of images today. Ultimately, the exhibition proposes that the ‘next painting’ to come will counter the acceleration of digital images, persistently championing the value of material reality and the sensory experience of slowness.

As per Hal Foster’s remark that ’[t]oday, many images neither document the world nor derealise it,’ today’s images are more geared towards effects that solicit optical attraction than remaining faithful to the real. This flood of viral, often manipulated images reconstructs reality through algorithms and user feedback. In other words, reality is edited and transformed via a secondary protocol of aesthetic and consumer economies. In this perplexing situation, the speed at which images are produced, distributed, and consumed inevitably clashes with the innate temporality and materiality of painting. The exhibition illuminates how the tension that arises between these two is reflected in the works of contemporary young artists.

Additionally, the opposition between the virtuality and materiality of an image is key to understanding the painting of the millennial generation. The excess of images produced by technological development has fundamentally disrupted the methods of production, distribution, and consumption of art. Having grown up with the experience of traversing the real and the unreal, digital natives have a contested relationship with virtuality and materiality, where they are exposed constantly to an influx of online and offline images whose terms continuously shift. But at the same time, the virtual both references and imitates the real world, operating as a quasi-material media. The meaning of the virtuality of the image here is not limited to its liberation from material constraints; it can also refer to its disguise, as though it were material. The quality of virtuality, while opposing that of materiality, is a dependent property of materiality in that it always exists in relation to this other pole. While the painting of the millennial generation is strongly influenced by digital image, the final result presented to us remains as a physical object and form. While contemporary images can take any source as a reference point—thereby flexibly moving from one image to another—painting is definitely a challenge premised on a huge material constraint.