As celebrations abound for Singapore’s 50th jubilee, STPI kick starts the year with a strong Singaporean and Southeast Asian presence at its booth at Art Stage Singapore, featuring works by exemplary local artist Suzann Victor, whose solo exhibition “Imprint: New Works by Suzann Victor” will be held concurrently at the STPI Gallery, displaying the full breadth of the artist’s latest and innovatively challenging creations. The booth will also feature a preview of latest works by prominent Indonesian contemporary artist Entang Wiharso, whose monumental 15m-long aluminum plate relief called Chronicle Fence greeted Art Stage visitors to the Indonesian Pavilion last year. His exhibition is slated to open at STPI in April 2015. Both their residencies at STPI led to impressive new works that highlight the confluence of ideas and methods, resulting in multiple ‘firsts’ for the artists and STPI.
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Suzann Victor’s conceptual prowess and ability to articulate complex ideas in technically challenging forms has made her one of Singapore’s most pronounced artists to date. Known for demonstrating sheer critical thought through clever use of form following function, Victor’s new body of work at STPI incorporates her skills as an abstract painter, as well as an installation and performance artist, in site-specific works at STPI where favourite visual devices like the use of light, Fresnel lenses and the recurring motif of concentric circles are adapted in print and paper explorations. The delicate and honest works at Art Stage are unique and rare additions to her creative oeuvre.
With her abstract, performative approach to etchings or ‘paintings with acid’, she has created the largest spit-bite
aquatints to be made at STPI, while the décollages capture her gestures and body movement atop large bodies of paper pulp that she gradually tore away. “You feel so many sensations, the slipperiness of the pigment, the water squished underneath you. It is quite an adventure on the surface itself, to be immersed or be impressing upon the
surface, and the paper pulp has become both surface and material. In the series Immaculate Conception of a Cloud
for example, the paper pulp is the pigment with which to paint rather than a mere receiving surface,” says Victor. The
artist has not dealt with paper so extensively and intimately in her practice before. “It is assembled in the most architectural, sculptural way, offering viewers multiple viewing experiences from afar and up close. Most of my works in this exhibition have no fixed orientation. The paper pulp on acrylic works are to me quite memorable as they are
unique in its references and asks questions about the process or definition of painting – what it is or how it can be
made,” says Victor.
Sydney-based Victor has garnered much attention in recent years particularly amongst local art institutions and identifies herself as a Singapore artist who sees her time away as a boon, giving her “the ability to choose and be discerning about the values one embraces to form one’s identity”, a notion she believes to be “less about purity and more about complexity and diversity”, for “we learn so much from the ‘other’”. And she does not forget her roots. In the series I was like that myself… we all held each other’s hands, Victor reflects on the ever-changing cultural landscape of Singapore, pondering the loss of what was once familiar and coherent to her such as the local vernacular. The work holds much nostalgia for the artist and induces viewers to ponder our own experience of the transforming nation, where primary markers of “Singaporeanness” are dissipating. Fresnel lenses affixed on top of black and white photographic images from coolie days at once display a sense of dislocation in its fragmented composition.
Her etchings have already graced the prominent fairgrounds of Art Basel Miami Beach in 2014.
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Entang Wiharso creates provocative works that speak volumes about the universal issues of power, dreams, loss
and love—exploring broad categories of ideology, philosophy and identity through ancient narrative tools andcontemporary materials. Instantly recognizable, his visual vocabulary of distorted human figures interconnected by tongues, tails and intestines, masterfully weaves concepts with social commentary and personal reflections, delivering a most raw and compelling representation of the world and humanity as he sees it.
At STPI, Entang translates his large-scale fantastical prose in the realm of print—reinvigorating methods by incorporating alternative materials like wires and nails in the print and papermaking process. Having discovered the
possibilities of the multifaceted medium, the artist has also embarked on a different trajectory, producing artworks that explore strong socio-political concerns and the idea of borders, division and differences in new forms that employ
acrylic and paper pulp—both never before seen in his oeuvre.