Artworks in order of appearance:

1.

Maybe, Just Maybe
2022
Acrylic paint, glitter ribbon, felt, interfacing, and polyvinyl acetate glue on stretched canvas
90 x 93 cm



Part of “Veneer & Visage” at Supper House
Curated by Weiqin Chay
Excerpt by Weiqi Yap & Samuel Xun

Veneer and Visage is an art and fashion exhibition staged at Supper House, an interdisciplinary space for creatives nestled in an industrial building on Tagore Lane in Singapore. Curated by Weiqin Chay, the exhibition seeks to explore “the ways identities are projected when (un)covering the facade of one’s appearance”1. The exhibition’s premise is a topical one, as masking and concealing one’s face continues to be a mandatory safety measure in many places around the world. It is not uncommon for fashion exhibitions to respond to cultural events—galleries and museums have long drawn on historical events as points of curatorial germination. Most recently, the ICOM Costume Committee unveiled ‘Clothing the Pandemic’, a virtual exhibition of Covid-19 face masks curated by museums worldwide, including masks from the collections of Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum.

Maybe, Just Maybe takes its initial point of reference from artist Samuel Xun’s fashion informed archival works. The work incorporates faciality as a strategy, engaging with notions of the monstrous on a psychological register. Recontextualised to reflect Xun’s personal feelings towards his personal experiences with gender identity, the work is a visual representation attempting to describe his views on non-normative identity. Utilising materiality as a visual cue, the abstract facial forms extract tropes of campness, that is open to interpretation.