Between The Lines

28 February–26 May 2024
Appetite & Nouri
Singapore, Singapore

Curated by Tan Siuli
Images Coutesy of Appetite


Related Artworks

You’re Hiding Yourself Again (2023–2024)
Description

Excerpt of Exhibition Text by Curator Tan Siuli

Between The Lines explores how contemporary artists engage with the medium of textile. One of the oldest forms of artmaking, textile has drifted in and out of the margins of art history, often sidelined as ‘women’s work’ or ‘craft’. The recent resurgence of interest in this medium may be attributed to a consideration of modes of artmaking and cultural expression outside of a Western modernist paradigm, and precipitated by the global pandemic lockdowns and rapid digitalization of the world which prompted a renewed interest in tactility and the handmade.

The exhibition’s title makes reference to the materiality of textile, composed from the interweaving of lines – its warp and weft. These vectors embody histories and the transmission of cultures and traditions, transformed by the hand of the artist into new narratives for our time. Between The Lines also explores textile’s subtext or its socio-political dimension, encapsulated in the processes of its creation, as well as its physical attributes of portability and apparent innocuousness – qualities that render textile an agile medium for conveying narratives of resilience and resistance. Last but not least, the exhibition brings together textile-based works that foreground crossroads and interstices, blurring the lines between creative disciplines, cultures and hierarchies.

Working between the lines of tangential creative disciplines – fashion and fine art – Samuel Xun presents two works that trace the evolution of his practice, from a three-dimensional wearable into a sculptural wall-bound work composed from materials more conventionally found in the apparel industry. Even when he was working along the lines of fashioning wearables, Xun’s practice was very much informed by visual art. In his earlier creations for instance, one can find references to Jeff Koons’s balloon sculptures, and the voluptuous excess and luxury of Baroque and Rococo, which have been translated into the FEMBUOYANT! series of soft sculpture wearables. Xun’s work threads between conventional creative silos, offering open-ended possibilities of engaging with notions of ‘art’ and ‘craft’ and bridging the worlds of ‘culture’ and ‘subculture’.