Titled after a video-essay by artist Korakrit Arunanondchai – one of the most adroit chroniclers of our zeitgeist – this exhibition explores the contemporary condition through the eyes of a younger generation of artists.
Their searching works convey a sense of vague disquiet, distractedness, fleeting intimacies and estrangement: fragments of an age and hyper-digitalised consciousness where signs are often unmoored from their referents; where the speed at which information is written and overwritten results in a collective amnesia.
By turns surreal, tender, and unsettling, these interior worlds attempt to evoke and remember relationships, identity, history and meaning, even as these slip from our grasp.
“Quarter Past” and “Departure” are Loh’s attempt at capturing a certain emotional resonance in pictorial form. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Edward Hopper and Singaporean photographer Nguan – who adroitly captured scenes of urban alienation, solitude and tenderness – Loh’s paintings speak of an introvert’s desire to escape the ‘noise’ and hyper-activity of a fast-paced city like Singapore. The stilled, cinematic quality of these paintings express what the artist describes as “an inevitable longing to be in a different place or time”, while simultaneously suggesting a subtle connection between people, time and space. The blurred, translucent figures of these tableaus evoke a certain ambiguity and surrealism within their settings, suggesting a fleeting collapse of temporalities: they are like ghosts or traces of a prior presence in a particular space and time.
Click on link for more information: https://appetitesg.com/event/theresaword/