Yeo Workshop is pleased to present The Classification of Bodies, curated by iola Lenzi, a major solo exhibition by Singaporean artist Justin Loke and his first with the gallery.
The exhibition unfolds through a series of seductive provocations: audiences are invited to recline upon an exquisitely gilded teakwood opium bed. From there they admire a series of classical bamboo ink paintings rendered by a Chinese painter wielding a distinctively Western hand. They tune into an audio broadcast where a clipped-voiced British radio presenter teaches patois Hokkien, his crisp Queen’s English dissolving into the flat, swallowed vowels of a Lancashire drawl. The tension deepens with a politically incorrect image-text lesson on body classification, staged by a fictitious 19th-century physiognomist trawling Singapore’s Bugis Street brothels. Finally, a grainy black-and-white video, stylistically quoting 1950s French Cinema Verité, alludes to colonial-era rabies contagions through the unsettling filmic morphing of dogs and their human masters.
These pieces by multidisciplinary Justin Loke (Singapore, b. 1979), comprise an ambitious new body of work assembled under the banner The Classification of bodies, an exhibition curated by iola Lenzi for Yeo Workshop during Singapore Art Week. Playful, intriguing, and visually seductive, the works investigate the meanings of shifting, layered, and intertwined personal, linguistic, and national identities, which in Singapore are born out of diasporic migration, trade, and colonial histories. The exhibition’s installations, paintings, video and sound-works are Singapore-grounded in their references: opium, a dominant commodity in early-19thcentury Southeast Asia, its trade contributing to colonial revenue and power; Chinese dialects, revisited in several works, their co-existence composing a singular Singapore linguistic soundscape; subversively localised Chinese High Culture literati painting; the retelling of local mythologies and seedy encounters in Bugis Street brothels. Yet with their striking aesthetics, slightly-off historical quotations, rich materials, and immersive approaches eliciting viewer agency—the elegant opium bed can be touched and slumbered on—they coopt audiences into questions relevant everywhere: do religious, linguistic, racial, cultural, artistic, and national purity exist? Are we ascribed our identities, or may we choose them? How do we juggle multiple and sometimes conflicting types of social categorisations? Who determines cultural, religious, and national affiliations? What purpose, and whom do these classifications serve? Is purity in these spheres desirable, or even if possible?
Such questions are familiar in Southeast Asia, a region of ancient mixed peoples and new states. But Loke’s artworks, via their conceptually-undergirded and critical construction, are also resonant in a world experiencing closing borders and rising ethno-nationalism, backlashes against late 20th century globalisation. Not presenting a romanticised view of multiculturalism, exhibition pieces create conversations about cultural porosity, its potential for intellectual enrichment, but also its transactional nature as power hierarchies shaping exchange processes alter and reverse over time.
The immersive works of The Classification of bodies mark an evolution in Loke's practice as they use and abuse archival documents including colonial era photography, nation-building era language training textbooks, a pastiche of racialised intra-Chinese physiognomistic study, and other historical iconography and stories. But archives here are not the focus, rather they are mined selectively and sparingly, their referential elements among so many other tangible and intangible components constituting larger creations asking how tradition and history are commodified and reenacted, sometimes with episodes excised. With The Classification of bodies, Loke challenges static notions of authenticity, race, purity, and nationality, critical issues in our globalised but polarised world, whether Southeast Asia, or beyond. By exposing the contradiction between vaunted hybridity and coveted purity, the works function as independent critiques of how tradition is staged, policed, and commodified within a globalised Southeast Asia. Art here is a site of historical, cultural, and national interrogation, as through borrowings and their incongruous juxtapositions, Loke’s works confront the trope—and frequent marketing cliché—of Southeast Asia as an effortlessly harmonious "cultural melting pot," placing idealised notions of hybridity in tension with the region's parallel anxious obsessions with national origin stories, and static "authenticity."
Text by iola Lenzi
