✷ Sundry AiR: The Gift That Keeps on Giving (2023)
✷ I’m Exhausted, Where is He? (2022)
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
✷ Lady Dior As Seen By (2024)
✷ Of placebos that sing sweet in the... (2024)
✷ Between The Lines (2024)
✷ ASEAN ON PAPER (2023)
✷ Serving Thots (2023)
✷ Diverse Visions (2023)
✷ Nature and Now: Asian Art in Focus (2023)
✷ There Are Flowers in the Morning Mist (2022)
✷ State of Play (2022)
✷ It’s my party and I’ll if I want to, you’ll... (2022)
✷ only losers left alive (love songs for... (2021)
✷ The Foot Beneath the Flower: Camp... (2020)
SERIES & CATEGORIES
✷ Untitled (Chocolate Boxes) (ongoing)
✷ Who Knew I’d Be the Stable One (ongoing)
✷ Untitled (Radial Sculptures) (ongoing)
✷ Installation
✷ Print & Drawing
✷ Text
only losers left alive (love songs for the end of the world)
07 August–29 August 2021
Yeo Workshop
Singapore, Singapore
Curated by Louis Ho
Images Courtesy of Yeo Workshop
Related Artworks
Bouquet of Disappointment (2021)
Cunt Be Bothered (2021)
07 August–29 August 2021
Yeo Workshop
Singapore, Singapore
Curated by Louis Ho
Images Courtesy of Yeo Workshop
Related Artworks
Bouquet of Disappointment (2021)
Cunt Be Bothered (2021)
Description
Excerpt from Exhibition Catalogue by Curator Louis Ho:
‘only losers left alive (love songs for the end of the world)’ is a project with a central proposition: if our world were to come to a screeching halt tomorrow, what would we be left with?
Bouquet of Disappointment attempts to work through Xun’s personal feelings about non-normative experience in Singapore. The amalgamation of soft sculpture and fashion-derived sensibilities is owed to Euro-American lineages of camp and kitsch, and its relation to formulations of queer identity. Inspired by a canon of camp films such as The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Pink Flamingoes (1972) and Paris is Burning (1990), and informed by the writings of Eng-Beng Lim and Audrey Yue, the piece deploys the aesthetics of camp and kitsch to suggest how non-heteronormative experience in Singapore may be coded in the visual register - through textures and colours, as well as titular and other visual cues.
This abstractly-shaped piece, titled Cunt Be Bothered, is a visual representation of the artist’s personal dating history. As a series of modular quilts, the piece are strung together to form a sculptural tapestry of sorts, each representing a past encounter. The texture of the soft sculpture takes reference from films such as Gentlemen Prefer Blonds (1953) and Gone with the Wind (1939), in which hedonism is used as a coping mechanism for failure in romance. The quilts are individualistic in character, with the scale and extravagance of each drawing ironic parallels to the quality of the person they represent. Xun likens the curatorial proposition here - the end of the world - to the demise of a relationship or dating situation, which would prompt a period of questioning and self-doubt in him.
Excerpt from Exhibition Catalogue by Curator Louis Ho:
‘only losers left alive (love songs for the end of the world)’ is a project with a central proposition: if our world were to come to a screeching halt tomorrow, what would we be left with?
Bouquet of Disappointment attempts to work through Xun’s personal feelings about non-normative experience in Singapore. The amalgamation of soft sculpture and fashion-derived sensibilities is owed to Euro-American lineages of camp and kitsch, and its relation to formulations of queer identity. Inspired by a canon of camp films such as The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Pink Flamingoes (1972) and Paris is Burning (1990), and informed by the writings of Eng-Beng Lim and Audrey Yue, the piece deploys the aesthetics of camp and kitsch to suggest how non-heteronormative experience in Singapore may be coded in the visual register - through textures and colours, as well as titular and other visual cues.
This abstractly-shaped piece, titled Cunt Be Bothered, is a visual representation of the artist’s personal dating history. As a series of modular quilts, the piece are strung together to form a sculptural tapestry of sorts, each representing a past encounter. The texture of the soft sculpture takes reference from films such as Gentlemen Prefer Blonds (1953) and Gone with the Wind (1939), in which hedonism is used as a coping mechanism for failure in romance. The quilts are individualistic in character, with the scale and extravagance of each drawing ironic parallels to the quality of the person they represent. Xun likens the curatorial proposition here - the end of the world - to the demise of a relationship or dating situation, which would prompt a period of questioning and self-doubt in him.
The Foot Beneath the Flower: Camp. Kitsch. Art. Southeast Asia.
28 August–31 October 2020
NTU ADM Gallery
Singapore, Singapore
Curated by Louis Ho
Images Courtesy of NTU School of Art, Design and Media
Related Artworks
Bai Barbarella Chow (2020)
28 August–31 October 2020
NTU ADM Gallery
Singapore, Singapore
Curated by Louis Ho
Images Courtesy of NTU School of Art, Design and Media
Related Artworks
Bai Barbarella Chow (2020)
Description
Excerpt from Exhibition Catalogue by Curator Louis Ho:
The Foot Beneath the Flower is an exhibition held at the Nanyang Technological University, School of Art, Design & Media's ADM Gallery, featuring contemporary art from Southeast Asia in the key of high-pitched camp and kitsch. Camp, as Susan Sontag has remarked, is characterised by artifice, frivolity and “shocking excess”, qualities that likewise mark the aesthetics of kitsch. Guest curated by Louis Ho, the show proposes that such excess may nonetheless encompass themes that are in equal measure canny, critical, and redolent of the realities of life in Southeast Asia today.
The works here engage with the region in various ways, representing familiar socio-cultural narratives as stylistic froth and counter-ideological glee. The recontextualisation of everyday Southeast Asian visual and material cultures within the frameworks of camp and kitsch are being embodied across installation, sculpture and mixed media works.
The exhibition title was a wordplay on the book The Flower Beneath The Foot by Ronald Firbank, and we decided to make meaning of this through a graphic laden exhibition identity which also portrays an overall eccentric aesthetic. With the flower overpowering the foot, it conveys a subversive celebration of the complication of status quo.
Filmic and textual narratives, as well as sartorial aesthetics, provide visual impetus for Stephanie J. Burt’s material explorations, while issues of feminism and gender drive her installation-based practice conceptually. Here, in collaboration with Samuel Xun, the work assumes the florid excess and flamboyant artifice that characterize the stylistics of camp.
Bai Barbarella Chow takes as its initial inspiration the culture of pole dancing, which valorises the hyper-sexualisation of the body while submitting it to the gaze of erotic desire (frequently male). Draped around a makeshift stripper’s pole is a panoply of shapes, forms, surfaces, textures, compositions and densities, constituting a performance of campiness in the material register. These objects and textiles stand in for the body of the performer here, their selection also informedby a number of films that evince camp sensibilities, including Green Snake (1993), But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) and Barbarella (1968). The trope of performativity, from dancing to acting, underpins the piece: its pseudo-body represents a deliberately exaggerated enactment of the self, a defence, as Burt and Xun point out, against the sort of hegemonic mainstream values and patriarchal prerogatives that are alive and well even in a contemporary climate of woke culture. As fashion historian Anne Hollander points out, “when you are dressed in any particular way at all, you are revealed rather than hidden.”
Excerpt from Exhibition Catalogue by Curator Louis Ho:
The Foot Beneath the Flower is an exhibition held at the Nanyang Technological University, School of Art, Design & Media's ADM Gallery, featuring contemporary art from Southeast Asia in the key of high-pitched camp and kitsch. Camp, as Susan Sontag has remarked, is characterised by artifice, frivolity and “shocking excess”, qualities that likewise mark the aesthetics of kitsch. Guest curated by Louis Ho, the show proposes that such excess may nonetheless encompass themes that are in equal measure canny, critical, and redolent of the realities of life in Southeast Asia today.
The works here engage with the region in various ways, representing familiar socio-cultural narratives as stylistic froth and counter-ideological glee. The recontextualisation of everyday Southeast Asian visual and material cultures within the frameworks of camp and kitsch are being embodied across installation, sculpture and mixed media works.
The exhibition title was a wordplay on the book The Flower Beneath The Foot by Ronald Firbank, and we decided to make meaning of this through a graphic laden exhibition identity which also portrays an overall eccentric aesthetic. With the flower overpowering the foot, it conveys a subversive celebration of the complication of status quo.
Filmic and textual narratives, as well as sartorial aesthetics, provide visual impetus for Stephanie J. Burt’s material explorations, while issues of feminism and gender drive her installation-based practice conceptually. Here, in collaboration with Samuel Xun, the work assumes the florid excess and flamboyant artifice that characterize the stylistics of camp.
Bai Barbarella Chow takes as its initial inspiration the culture of pole dancing, which valorises the hyper-sexualisation of the body while submitting it to the gaze of erotic desire (frequently male). Draped around a makeshift stripper’s pole is a panoply of shapes, forms, surfaces, textures, compositions and densities, constituting a performance of campiness in the material register. These objects and textiles stand in for the body of the performer here, their selection also informedby a number of films that evince camp sensibilities, including Green Snake (1993), But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) and Barbarella (1968). The trope of performativity, from dancing to acting, underpins the piece: its pseudo-body represents a deliberately exaggerated enactment of the self, a defence, as Burt and Xun point out, against the sort of hegemonic mainstream values and patriarchal prerogatives that are alive and well even in a contemporary climate of woke culture. As fashion historian Anne Hollander points out, “when you are dressed in any particular way at all, you are revealed rather than hidden.”