MIKE HJ CHANG

With bright hues and hints of play, the gallery presents work that considers the body’s orientation within space and the landscape. The human body is interpreted through forms and perspectives that are unconventional, uncanny or even tangential. Painting and wallpaper provide the limbs, movements and angles through which a fresh conception of the human body can be glimpsed.

Mike HJ Chang’s striking new series of watercolour paintings press the body into jarring corners and colours, as it navigates the interstices between recognisable, urban Singapore and more abstract dimensions. Clashing lines lead into each other, according to an asynchronous rhythm. Cartoons and mismatched contours end in tragic, difficult and awkward points. Figures sprawl over park benches, snakes disguise themselves as humans, and the body is spun around every which way. Thus, Chang pushes the limit of optical comfort, challenging and disorienting the viewer as much as he does the fictional body in his own imaginary spaces.

Edward Clydesdale Thomson’s Pattern 4 wallpaper from a series entitled dead-standing, bark-peeled, clear-cut, windthrow, lumber, pulp extends a small format to the large-scale of an entire wall. Thomson’s speculative research on the intersections between domestic wallpaper patterns from the 1970’s and the development of modern, industrial forestry in Sweden during the same period evolved into this triple-layered mono-print pattern. Though the human body is nearly eradicated (the traditional logger replaced by the factory), it is implied and distilled into a seed. It is a simple industrial potting tray used to spread seedling pines that becomes central to this recurring theme, and with this unassuming article, the artist critiques the march of modernisation in diminishing both the human body and its landscape.