Ceramic artist Shayne Phua’s objects are mischievous oddities. For her first solo exhibition with Yeo Workshop, she has fashioned a series of sculptures that are defamiliarized, fantastical forms, from multi-tailed fox spirits as incongruous bearers of Confucian morality, to candleholders in the shape of broken bones, to lights shaped like gallbladders. These surreal objects, however, more than simply suggesting the artist’s interest in the unusual, speak to the socio-political realities and complexities of contemporary life – especially in Singapore, where the artist was born and raised. Phua is particularly interested in the discourse of ‘Asian values’ that has loomed large in the collective consciousness of Singaporeans, a discourse that emphasizes the needs of the community over the claims of the individual. Her work casts a critical lens on the discontents of the twenty-first century through the visual language of the atypical – in the manner of the Qing-dynasty anthology, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, a collection of supernatural narratives that blur the lines between mortal society and spectral realms. The litany of peculiar objects in A roast of Asian nine tails topped with broken femur and bile, accompanied by more curious ingredients juxtaposes the artist’s ceramic objects with her personal collection of vintage furniture and collectibles, and represents an idiosyncratic, singular response to a world rife with contradictions.
