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A.I. is pleased to present STILL, a group exhibition with works by Haffendi Anuar, Yuki Nakayama and Dawn Ng. STILL explores the act of translating memories into colours. Like memories, colours fade, colours are nostalgic yet distant, colours melt, colours resonate, and colours speak. From playful retellings of history to more psychedelic and ephemeral interpretations of time and imagination, these three artists share a continuum of colouring books, painting us a story of what once was / is.
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YUKI NAKAYAMA
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Still, in movement no. 1 - 3 by Yuki Nakayama, from which the exhibition borrows its title is a triptych of acrylic and graphite on canvas paintings which explore the movement of stillness and its playful act. Using superimposed perspectives, the works explore the stillness of an object, its volume and its environment. Each character has its own rhythm claiming their relationships to one another. Each canvas may be viewed as a dialogue between objects in space. The razor-like blue objects punctuate spaces whilst the other objects function as pivoting points in which the shadows explore the crevices of its surroundings. They absorb and reflect like sound traveling between and within, inviting the eyes to fluidly change in scale as one moves through and beyond.
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HAFFENDI ANUAR
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Pilotis by Haffendi Anuar is a series of mixed-media table-top sculptures referencing supports such as columns, pillars or stilts that lift a building above ground or water. They are traditionally found in stilt and pole dwellings such as fishermen's huts in Asia. These vibrant sculptures, appearing like pseudo-artifacts, are constructed out of melamine tableware and industrial materials reference components from both modernist architecture and South East Asian rural dwellings. The watercolour studies explore the medium as a form of documentation due to its portability as well as its link to colonial exploration. and subject matter being temples in Malaysia and South East Asia as well as animal architecture such as mounds and anthills.
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Dawn Ng
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Holy Moly You’re the Apple of My Eye by Dawn Ng is a photographic work from a series called Clocks. The subject matter being time -how it flows, echoes and slips away. The image captured, a seemingly monolithic block of frozen pigments with layers of jewel-like tones has its own living personality. Its distinctive title, drawn from musical lyrics which the artist listens to from her studio, cement this. From the block of ice’s remaining swirling tones, a series of Ash paintings are born. The melted pigments in Restless Eyes Close Maybe It Will Go Away acknowledge time’s fickleness with an abstract and textural painterly outcome.These works are traces and residues of a sculptural block of frozen pigment's existence as it memorialises its states from solid to liquid, and eventually to air. This passage from monumentality to nothingness is a work of remembrance and an ode to the truth that the most beautiful things in this world are the ones we cannot hold on to no matter how we try. It is a journey of chasing time. Dawn Ng prompts us to reflect on the properties of cyclical passing, how beyond numerical chronology time is a matter of feeling and moment making.In relation to the paintings specifically: these are created by the manoeuvred staining, dredging and evaporation of melted pigment through large sheets of paper. The process involves twisting, pleating and weaving acrylic films, which sketch the flow and pooling of melted pigments across wide vats, to create topographical movements. Each vat is blanketed with watercolour paper that acts as a sieve, filtering time from liquid to air. Over time, the painting is manipulated to allow wet pigment to wash over certain areas, forming residual tributaries while coagulating in others, to encourage the chemical resurrection of paint. This prolonged steeping gives rise to a soft blooming of colour and frays the paper fibres, allowing parts of its surface to be peeled back by hand to reveal the patina of time.
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STILL
Past viewing_room
