Gallery Exit Until Nov 19

shadow in the dark, an exhibition of the works by Singaporean artist Genevieve Chua and Hong Kong artist Trevor Yeung, is a game of hide-and-seek that plays on the idea of tracing the evasive association between the unknown and the fear that lurks under one’s consciousness – if not also behind the mythical framework of our society. The ambiguous sense of fluidity and movement in the placement of the works is marked by the irregular positions of Chua’s older works Of Cranes and Woodlands (2007), Mother Plant (2007, a series of small black and white drawings) and Yeung’s Sleepy Bed Series (2011), which lure the viewers into a subtle and mindless act of continual seeking, with an unknown objective or destination.

The act of searching resurfaces in Chua’s Adinandra Belukar #4 and Adinandra Belukar #5, a pair of graphite drawings that were first exhibited at Singapore Biennale 2011, unframed, covering the entire walls of the dimmed exhibition space. Here, the use of a glass surface provides an alternative viewing experience for the piece, as the difficulty in tracing the elusive black graphite lines on black paper from the previous show (due to the lack of light) is now replaced with the reflection of light. Though the drawings are a manual two-dimensional depiction of a computer rendering (also present in this exhibition) of a particular plant that vegetates and survives on degraded soil in marginal areas in Singapore, the repetitive curves and partial shades certainly reminds one of a cryptic still from a non-linear three-dimensional ECG, as if pinpointing the locations of growth and movement of these plants in the land.

The motion evidently witnessed in Chua’s drawings and computer rendering is solidified and altered on different levels in the visuals of Yeung’s delusional Patience Practice 1 (2011) and Patience Practice 3 (2011), parts of the artist’s ongoing series where he obsessively draws angular lines on wooden boards as a meditational exercise for the self. While the free-flowing form of the work is not restrained by the size and shape of the wooden panel, and is instead guided only by the intrinsic drive and thoughts of the artist, the coat of polymer resin at once resembles much of a freezing agent; it stops and freezes the liquid form at a precise moment in time, thus unravelling the microscopic labyrinth of intertwining threads that forms the artist’s subconscious state of mind.

The polarity between plasticity and stability is heightened in the recent Sleepy Bed Series (2011), where plasmic forms from the Patience Practice Series morph onto the surface of photographs taken by the artist in different hostels from around the world. It is in this work where the polymer resin frames and prolongs the tension between the artist’s own inner mind and the stranger’s static posture, a bridge from the self to the other that ultimately manifests itself into the issue of anonymity and voyeurism.

Piper Koh