Yavuz Gallery is proud to present our second solo exhibition with Jason Wee in Cruising, featuring new collages, sculptures, assemblages, prints and drawings.
The exhibition leaps between three sites and geographies that venture from the coastal to the oceanic. Cruising maps these secret choreographies of bodies in cycles of movement, and the ways these movements refute our sightlines and territorial limits.
Cruising begins with a coastal scene through a suite of unique collage prints that alchemizes Wee’s continued interest in landscapes and assemblages. These photo-based works, Uncommon Choreographies, are an ongoing series that features reassembled jigsaw pieces that both vitalise the image surface with fragmented information and obscures the initial images. Shifting between the expansive and the secretive, these collages dance between the cat-and-mouse navigation of seeking and acknowledging queerness, thereby creating and re-creating queer subjectivities.
Presented alongside are Wee’s new assemblages, sculptural forms that are drawn from our reclaimed beaches as well as the artist’s residency experience on an oil tanker in 2018. Depicting the textures of maritime living and vessel designs, these works speak of maritime shipping networks and expand on the possibilities of new voyages and our entangled supply chains in our current climate.
Cruising fully moves from inland to the oceanic in Wee’s panoramic Cruising to Nowhere, a digital drawing that alludes to our current preoccupation for escape, towards a horizon of both anticipation and anxiety – sentiments that surround our pandemic present and futures.
The geographical story-telling of Cruising connects the disobedient desires inscribed onto our coastal parks, to the maritime shipping networks that form the backbone of the supply chains so crucial in a global pandemic, to the escapist search for freer heterotopic temporalities in our ‘cruises to nowhere’. Cruising, as the artist suggests, is not simply queer desiring, but also queering our connections from place to network to place.
Venue: Yavuz Gallery, Gillman Barracks, 9 Lock Road, #02-23, Singapore 108937
When: 5 - 28 Nov 2021,
By: Ames Yavuz
