Spaceships and Unicorns: by Curator Louis Ho

The lack of a self-conscious unity is apparent in the corresponding dearth of designations for the region as a whole. Early Indian seafarers and traders, followed by the Chinese and Arabs, coined their own names for Southeast Asia, with the former exalting it as Suvarnadvipa, the “land of gold.” Persians and Arabs named the region “the lands below the winds”, referring to the seasonal monsoons which carried ships across the Indian Ocean to the shores of the archipelago. The Chinese dubbed the archipelago south of Vietnam the “southern seas”, or nanyang, which the Japanese borrowed for their term, nanyo. All of these monikers share one thing in common, of course: they are exogenous epithets, names that emerged from historical contact points with lands and peoples beyond the seas, beyond the winds. Almost cynically, the present exhibition proffers the projections of an external gaze as the internalized imagination of identity. The reference to a litany of appellations that conjure the distant and the enchanting suggests the character of the objects here, a collection of works that are simultaneously self-essentializing and self-critical, hovering between acknowledgement of sobering realities and manipulation of material fact, positioned in the space between cold-eyed evaluation and reflexive exoticization. From the Land of Gold Below the Winds in the South Seas adopts a visual mode that is premised on stereotypical notions of Southeast Asian aesthetics, replete with baroque bodies and inflected materialities put together in ways that suggest claustrophobia, disorder, sensorial overload, superstition – qualities and phenomena reminiscent, perhaps, of lingering perceptions of this part of the world. 

These works are representative of Bali-based Filippo Sciascia’s abiding fascination with the materiality, the production and the metaphorical language of light. The Primitive Mornings series returns to the originary moments of human evolution and civilization, its ‘primitive mornings’. (All works in the series are similarly titled.) Light is utilized here as an analogy for knowledge, and an index of energy – two engines driving mankind’s development. The work is also indicative of the artist’s interest in semiology. The lighted branch in the painting, which replaces the representation of light with the actual phenomenon, recalls the shape of arrows, one of the most common motifs in European heraldry. The Lumina Mense sculptures likewise bear out the association of light as a civilizing force. “Lumina” means lights in Latin; “mense” is the Afrikaans word for people. Sciascia, himself a lifelong immigrant, is beholden to the cross-cultural exchange of knowledge across geographical borders and distances, and the use of an African language in the title refers to the notion of Africa as the origins of humanity, as well as the fact that he hails from Sicily, one of Europe’s closest points to the African continent. Here, he reproduces the crowd as a series of anonymous heads on objects that are suggestive of various cultures: a bull that recalls the creature’s centrality to Hinduism; a wooden sculpture from an indigenous community in Timor, Indonesia; an East Asian deity, one hand raised in the abhaya mudra, the gesture of fearing not. 

Ceramicist Shayne Phua interrogates histories and socio-cultural formations through the shapes of traditional vessels, often transforming functional objects into ornate, baroque curiosities, with the cumulative effect bordering on the uncanny. She is also fascinated by fountains, and their connection to the ceramic medium through the element of water. “I enjoy the fountain's ability to breathe life”, she observes, “into the sculptural forms with moving water. What’s interesting is that, in the process of making a ceramic work, water is a crucial medium, but upon completion, it is crucial to get rid of it. To introduce water back to the medium that once held itself together is a rather poetic reunion.” Another commonly seen motif in the artist’s vessels are the designs and patterns of vintage pastry molds, especially those used for savoury Teochew treats, such as peng kway (“rice cake”). A collector of these molds, she remarks, “I’m captivated by their symbolic nature, representing the humblest of crafts. The collection of molds from unknown craftsmen in the past allows for the possibility to combine works from different parts of the world, at different points in time, in a single piece. Each piece of pastry-shaped clay is a sculptural form on its own, and has the potential of creating a new form when carefully arranged and combined.”