Inside the Dream of a Durian Seller: VITRINE, OUE Downtown Gallery

Brandon Tay draws upon Cheong Soo Pieng’s The Durian Seller and the writings of Malaysian-Chinese author Chang Kuei-Hsing to imagine a visual tone poem—a matrix of sensations where the abject becomes seductive. Taking the subject of Cheong’s painting as a point of departure, INSULA speculates on what the titular Durian Seller might have experienced in their narcotic haze. The fruit, spikey and odorous, is a portal into the paradoxical condition of the tropical imaginary: where disgust and desire bleed into one another; where ripening and rotting are indistinguishable. Vapours and atmospheres carry states of intoxication and decay, dissolving the line between attraction and revulsion.

Mapping poles of experience between hallucination and addiction, infection and sensation, the work unfolds as a sequence of visual skits. These slip between mediums: the folkloric flatness of 2D cel animation, the grotesque mutability of Cronenbergian flesh, the compressed haze of vhs, and the accidental impressionism of pixelated mobile capture. Each mode exaggerates a different register of the uncanny tropics, as if the jungle itself were channel-surfing across styles of image-making to make sense of contradictory forms of sordid fascination. Beneath these surfaces circulate conditions never fully described: speculative maladies whispered rather than diagnosed, felt more as atmospheres than as names. They are present in the sweetness that drips, the vapours that thicken, the soils that exhale. Rather than narrative, INSULA composes a fevered terrain: fruits leaking syrup, soils exhaling bile, vapors heavy with rot. In this ecology, matter itself becomes medium, each secretion hinting at the presence of ailments that remain unnamed, yet palpable.