✷ Sundry AiR: The Gift That Keeps on Giving (2023)
✷ I’m Exhausted, Where is He? (2022)
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
✷ Of Dreams and Contemplation... (2025)
✷ 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
Lady Dior As Seen By
Travelling Exhibition (part of the Lady Dior Art expositions)
18 July–11 August 2024
Lady Dior House @ Jiak Kim Street
Singapore, Singapore
Images Courtesy of Dior
Related Artworks
You Deserve It (2023–2024)
Travelling Exhibition (part of the Lady Dior Art expositions)
18 July–11 August 2024
Lady Dior House @ Jiak Kim Street
Singapore, Singapore
Images Courtesy of Dior
Related Artworks
You Deserve It (2023–2024)
Description
Exhibition Text by Dior
Lady Dior As Seen By: All over the world
Lady Dior As Seen By is a unique art exhibition that has been expanding its corpus since 2011 with stops all over the world: Shanghai, Düsseldorf, Milan, Tokyo, Berlin... Through it, young talents and established artists alike express their vision(s) of the iconic Lady Dior. Stretching the limits of imagination, their exceptional creations offer an eclectic panorama of the contemporary scene, transcending disciplines and boundaries, from photography to sculpture. A virtuoso tribute to excellence, this event highlights, more than ever, the dialogues woven by the House at the convergence of past, present and future. A declaration of the love of art in all forms, in homage to Monsieur Dior, who was a gallerist and collector before becoming a couturier.
Sparked by a wonderfully passionate energy, Singaporean artists Grace Tan, Genevieve Chua and Samuel Xun have taken turns sharing their interpretations of the Lady Dior. Between heritage and metamorphosis, their works, revealed in the Lady Dior House, celebrate the essence and multiple facets of this perpetually reinvented bag.
Exhibition Text by Dior
Lady Dior As Seen By: All over the world
Lady Dior As Seen By is a unique art exhibition that has been expanding its corpus since 2011 with stops all over the world: Shanghai, Düsseldorf, Milan, Tokyo, Berlin... Through it, young talents and established artists alike express their vision(s) of the iconic Lady Dior. Stretching the limits of imagination, their exceptional creations offer an eclectic panorama of the contemporary scene, transcending disciplines and boundaries, from photography to sculpture. A virtuoso tribute to excellence, this event highlights, more than ever, the dialogues woven by the House at the convergence of past, present and future. A declaration of the love of art in all forms, in homage to Monsieur Dior, who was a gallerist and collector before becoming a couturier.
Sparked by a wonderfully passionate energy, Singaporean artists Grace Tan, Genevieve Chua and Samuel Xun have taken turns sharing their interpretations of the Lady Dior. Between heritage and metamorphosis, their works, revealed in the Lady Dior House, celebrate the essence and multiple facets of this perpetually reinvented bag.
Of placebos that sing sweet in the mouth and ache in the soul
20 June–29 July 2024
Richard Koh Fine Arts
Singapore, Singapore
Curated by Louis Ho
Images Courtesy of Richard Koh Fine Art
Related Artworks
It Feels Exactly Like This Sometimes (2024)
Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop (2024)
I Could Never Be a Saint Like You (2024)
I Would Have Loved for You to See (2024)
I Wish We Were More Alike (2024)
Envy, Van Houten (2024)
Becoming, Nestlé & Meiji (2024)
Indifference, Cadbury (2024)
20 June–29 July 2024
Richard Koh Fine Arts
Singapore, Singapore
Curated by Louis Ho
Images Courtesy of Richard Koh Fine Art
Related Artworks
It Feels Exactly Like This Sometimes (2024)
Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop (2024)
I Could Never Be a Saint Like You (2024)
I Would Have Loved for You to See (2024)
I Wish We Were More Alike (2024)
Envy, Van Houten (2024)
Becoming, Nestlé & Meiji (2024)
Indifference, Cadbury (2024)
Description
Excerpt of Essay by Curator Louis Ho
THE WAY WE WERE, and continue to be
Long gone are the days when gay men in Singapore had to resort to a bottle of water in hand to indicate one’s availability to a passing stranger; the advent of smartphones and hook-up apps put paid to the practice of public cruising. The other momentous nail in the coffin, of course, was the repeal of Section 377A of Singapore’s Penal Code, which prohibited “gross indecency” between men, on 3 January 2023. Theoretically, at least, queer representation in the little red dot should have blossomed in a newly liberated era of openness, unmoored from the veiled syntaxes and coded vocabularies that were formerly necessary ... yet, the signs and symbols that the queer community has always identified with continue to linger, like the beloved games or sugary candy of halcyon childhood afternoons. Of placebos that sing sweet in the mouth and ache in the soul celebrates the aesthetics of queerness that, despite continued socio-cultural coolness – legal revisions do not necessarily translate into overnight amelioration in general attitudes – live on. While there are no handkerchiefs or mineral water bottles here (though there is a carnation), the work of Haffendi Anuar, Johann M. F., Siew Guang Hong, Lucas Tan, Money Wang and Samuel Xun channel a language familiar to queer viewers. Their work speaks to the semiotics of the male body, from the sculpted muscles of bodybuilders to the lithe, supple forms of youth on the cusp of manhood; the suggestive iconography of the still-life and the material culture associated with the genre; the aesthetics of camp, kitsch and so-called bad taste, encompassing the gamut from the playful to the garish.
“Don’t Talk to Me Until I’ve Had My Goddamn Sugar” encompasses several bodies of work oriented around the motif of candy. Xun took a cue from a favourite childhood film, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), with the sequence that occurs in the candy- studded chocolate room providing especial impetus.
Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop includes a pair of massive inflatable figures in the shape of gummi bears, ornamented with sparkly, embroidered accoutrements that evoke his characteristic aesthetic. The bears – one pink, the other blue – are colour-coded to reflect traditional gender binaries. Both are reflections of the artist’s personal identity, and mark his shift lately from a comparatively more masculine gender expression to a feminized one, an ongoing process.
It Feels Exactly Like This Sometimes also features the gummi bear as an autobiographical surrogate. 31 hand- sewn soft sculptures are arranged into a wall-bound installation, with the sole silver bear set apart from its fellows – the lone figure against the crowd. It channels feelings of segregation and solitude that afflict many queer individuals, but, in Xun’s case, were amplified by recent psychological shifts.
He speaks of “new realisations and moments of acceptance” at this stage of life, including coming to terms with the likelihood that romantic attachments are increasingly difficult.
A trio of chocolate boxes, shaped like buildings, are each paired with a drawing. I Could Never Be a Saint Like You is shaped like the outline of the church at which Xun used to attend kindergarten classes – the Church of the Good Shepherd in Queenstown. In pre-school, a classmate arrived with a box of Van Houten chocolates as a treat for everyone and selected the smallest piece for herself, thereby earning praise from their teacher. Xun remembers disagreeing with the display. Even as an adult, he refuses to disavow an instinctive mistrust of public acts of altruism. The drawing, Envy, Van Houten, replaces the word “ASSORTMENT” (on a box of assorted Van Houten chocolates) with “ABSOLUTELY”, connoting an affirmative reaction.
I Would Have Loved for You to See recalls the façade of the now demolished Block 27A, Commonwealth Avenue, the artist’s childhood home. After-school care was provided by his grandparents, and he has fond recollections of candy-buying trips with his grandfather to the provision store at the foot of the block. Favourite acquisitions on these trips included Nestle’s FRUTIPS and Meiji’s Choco Baby, which are depicted in the drawing, Becoming, Nestlé & Meiji. In the drawing, a tube of Nestle’s fruit-flavoured pastilles are labelled “FRUITYGRANDSON”, while a container of Choco Baby reads, instead, “QUEER BABY”. The artist acknowledges that his late grandfather was the one paternal figure he felt comfortable around, and his association with much beloved childhood treats only reinforces the affectionate warmth of his memory.
The artist’s current home, a condominium complex, is alluded to in I Wish We Were More Alike. An only child, he lives with his parents – like most unmarried Singaporeans – and, in adulthood, came to realize how different he and his mother were as people. He remarks: “I used to think that we have at least one thing in common, a love of Cadbury chocolates, but my mum enjoys Hazelnut and my favourite is the Fruit and Nut variety, so ultimately we don’t even have that.” Indifference, Cadbury pictures two bars of chocolate, the Cadbury logo substituted with the phrase, “Completely DIFFERENT PEOPLE”, and, underneath, “FRUIT & MUM”.
Excerpt of Essay by Curator Louis Ho
THE WAY WE WERE, and continue to be
Long gone are the days when gay men in Singapore had to resort to a bottle of water in hand to indicate one’s availability to a passing stranger; the advent of smartphones and hook-up apps put paid to the practice of public cruising. The other momentous nail in the coffin, of course, was the repeal of Section 377A of Singapore’s Penal Code, which prohibited “gross indecency” between men, on 3 January 2023. Theoretically, at least, queer representation in the little red dot should have blossomed in a newly liberated era of openness, unmoored from the veiled syntaxes and coded vocabularies that were formerly necessary ... yet, the signs and symbols that the queer community has always identified with continue to linger, like the beloved games or sugary candy of halcyon childhood afternoons. Of placebos that sing sweet in the mouth and ache in the soul celebrates the aesthetics of queerness that, despite continued socio-cultural coolness – legal revisions do not necessarily translate into overnight amelioration in general attitudes – live on. While there are no handkerchiefs or mineral water bottles here (though there is a carnation), the work of Haffendi Anuar, Johann M. F., Siew Guang Hong, Lucas Tan, Money Wang and Samuel Xun channel a language familiar to queer viewers. Their work speaks to the semiotics of the male body, from the sculpted muscles of bodybuilders to the lithe, supple forms of youth on the cusp of manhood; the suggestive iconography of the still-life and the material culture associated with the genre; the aesthetics of camp, kitsch and so-called bad taste, encompassing the gamut from the playful to the garish.
“Don’t Talk to Me Until I’ve Had My Goddamn Sugar” encompasses several bodies of work oriented around the motif of candy. Xun took a cue from a favourite childhood film, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), with the sequence that occurs in the candy- studded chocolate room providing especial impetus.
Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop includes a pair of massive inflatable figures in the shape of gummi bears, ornamented with sparkly, embroidered accoutrements that evoke his characteristic aesthetic. The bears – one pink, the other blue – are colour-coded to reflect traditional gender binaries. Both are reflections of the artist’s personal identity, and mark his shift lately from a comparatively more masculine gender expression to a feminized one, an ongoing process.
It Feels Exactly Like This Sometimes also features the gummi bear as an autobiographical surrogate. 31 hand- sewn soft sculptures are arranged into a wall-bound installation, with the sole silver bear set apart from its fellows – the lone figure against the crowd. It channels feelings of segregation and solitude that afflict many queer individuals, but, in Xun’s case, were amplified by recent psychological shifts.
He speaks of “new realisations and moments of acceptance” at this stage of life, including coming to terms with the likelihood that romantic attachments are increasingly difficult.
A trio of chocolate boxes, shaped like buildings, are each paired with a drawing. I Could Never Be a Saint Like You is shaped like the outline of the church at which Xun used to attend kindergarten classes – the Church of the Good Shepherd in Queenstown. In pre-school, a classmate arrived with a box of Van Houten chocolates as a treat for everyone and selected the smallest piece for herself, thereby earning praise from their teacher. Xun remembers disagreeing with the display. Even as an adult, he refuses to disavow an instinctive mistrust of public acts of altruism. The drawing, Envy, Van Houten, replaces the word “ASSORTMENT” (on a box of assorted Van Houten chocolates) with “ABSOLUTELY”, connoting an affirmative reaction.
I Would Have Loved for You to See recalls the façade of the now demolished Block 27A, Commonwealth Avenue, the artist’s childhood home. After-school care was provided by his grandparents, and he has fond recollections of candy-buying trips with his grandfather to the provision store at the foot of the block. Favourite acquisitions on these trips included Nestle’s FRUTIPS and Meiji’s Choco Baby, which are depicted in the drawing, Becoming, Nestlé & Meiji. In the drawing, a tube of Nestle’s fruit-flavoured pastilles are labelled “FRUITYGRANDSON”, while a container of Choco Baby reads, instead, “QUEER BABY”. The artist acknowledges that his late grandfather was the one paternal figure he felt comfortable around, and his association with much beloved childhood treats only reinforces the affectionate warmth of his memory.
The artist’s current home, a condominium complex, is alluded to in I Wish We Were More Alike. An only child, he lives with his parents – like most unmarried Singaporeans – and, in adulthood, came to realize how different he and his mother were as people. He remarks: “I used to think that we have at least one thing in common, a love of Cadbury chocolates, but my mum enjoys Hazelnut and my favourite is the Fruit and Nut variety, so ultimately we don’t even have that.” Indifference, Cadbury pictures two bars of chocolate, the Cadbury logo substituted with the phrase, “Completely DIFFERENT PEOPLE”, and, underneath, “FRUIT & MUM”.
Between The Lines
28 February–26 May 2024
Appetite & Nouri
Singapore, Singapore
Curated by Tan Siuli
Images Courtesy of Appetite
Related Artworks
You’re Hiding Yourself Again (2023–2024)
28 February–26 May 2024
Appetite & Nouri
Singapore, Singapore
Curated by Tan Siuli
Images Courtesy 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’.
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’.