WEST BUND ART & DESIGN

****André Hemer (b. 1981, New Zealand) is a painter whose work investigates the bounds of materiality and appearances, and what it means to create paintings during a time in history in which the experience of an object is continuously blurred between states of physical and digital experiences. Hemer scans physical objects – three-dimensional paint forms or found objects such as flora – en plein air to capture a version of the object, and its surrounding exposure to the natural elements of the sun, sky and lights from the scanner. Most of his recent works are captured across evenings in Vienna (where the artist is currently based) during sunset, where the shift in sunlight conditions are most striking. The resulting images are of vibrant reds, gold, and orange, which are then recomposed, overpainted, and overlaid with three-dimensional sculptural elements to create works that render seamless the demarcation between digital, painted object and the digital artefact.

Yeo Kaa (b. 1989) is one of the leading painters in Southeast Asia, whose signature candy-coloured style celebrates various emotional complexities that range from resistance, rebellion, anxiety, contemplation, and the individual. A central and recurring character in Yeo Kaa’s works is a big-eyed girl, which functions as an extension of the artist’s personality and an anonymous figure that lends itself to the representation of anyone who identifies with the sentiments the artist purges in her works. She is known for mixing a vibrant palette with doll-like figuration with jarring imagery – to shock and evoke discomfort to some, while easing the sensitivity of confronting real-life horrors to others. At times, her compositions find expression for the taboos and the unspeakable while conversely, they also act as the artist’s cathartic release, for an incisive examination of the various pressures of self-identity, sexuality and society. It is the tension between the pleasant and naïve, and the dreadful and irreverent where Yeo Kaa locates her art’s potency.

Alvin Ong (b. 1988, Singapore) is a graduate of the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, UK (2016) and the Royal College of Art, London, UK (2018). His paintings playfully capture quotidian moments of our contemporary world in surreal bodily compositions, playfully combining diverse visual vocabularies. Through vignettes of everyday life, the vocabulary of the mundane is transformed into a site of spectacle, a cabinet of curiosities in which audiences are implicated as flaneur and voyeur.

Patricia Piccinini (b. 1965) is one of Australia’s most-important artists known for her hyper-realistic and enigmatic sculptures that depict hybrid humanoid creatures. Rendered in materials such as fibreglass, silicone and hair, her works explore the dynamics of our relationship between families and species, science and nature, art, and the environment. Captivating and endearing, her sculptures challenge audiences to question what it means to be human today. Expanding the hyperrealist tradition in sculpture, Piccinini uses an array of materials— including silicone, leather, and human hair—to form beings that might result from genetic science. Beasties with soulful brown eyes and long ears, scales, or webbed extremities, appear simultaneously appealing and grotesque.

Hadieh Shafie (b. 1969) constructs intricate designs with low-relief paper sculpture. Her compositions are reminiscent of traditional Middle Eastern art, while the artist hides hand-written and printed Farsi text within the folds of elaborate paper spirals. Both process-oriented and impossibly refined, Shafie’s skillful works are often monumental in scale, overwhelming the viewer with a visual feast of colour.