SARAH CHOO JING

For Singapore Art Week 2018, Yeo Workshop is pleased to announce its representation of Sarah Choo Jing with a solo exhibition entitled Accelerated Intimacy. Sarah Choo’s multi-disciplinary practice is premised on the moving image. She is counted among the most interesting of Singapore’s emerging generation of artists, and was most recently included in ArtAsiaPacific Magazine’s “New Currents” line-up. The artist transformed the gallery, emulating the layout and set-up of a hotel lobby and room. To complete the ambience, the gallery invited, for the first time, an operating “hotel lobby” bar by EC Proof. This unique art bar opened for the duration of the exhibition, serving high quality whiskey and cocktails along with whiskey bottle service. Within the gallery, Sarah Choo’s latest work, Accelerated Intimacy, is a 5-channel immersive video installation projected on the acrylic furniture of the hotel room. These spectral objects hint at the semblance of a quotidian space, and the series of moving images projected upon them enact elusive and allusive narratives. Choo’s cast of solitary figures rehearse a disjointed textual collage of found dialogue, appropriated and spliced from scripts of famous films. The artist has decontextualised these conversations, in turn, reconstructing a potential narrative surrounding each character, who all have been filmed occupying iconic hotel rooms in Singapore. Between the characters and their frames, Choo has carefully constructed uncanny coincidences that are incomplete, open-ended, and methodically ambivalent. In this environment of staged intimacy, the five hotel guests seemingly speak to each other, encountering each other as strangers, yet simultaneously set apart. Alongside the video installation, photographic prints and objects that have been used in the films are also on display. This dual presentation of images and objects creates a complex staging of “lived” experiences that exist concurrently across time and space. Rather than offering any kind of resolution to the histories of these characters and the sites they occupy, Accelerated Intimacy is a series of coincidences that are unfinished, culminating and ongoing, revealing further complexities upon each reading.