Second Movement

Richard Deacon, Housing 9, 2012, Marbling on folded STPI handmade paper, constructed with magnet button, 109.5 x 57.5 x 51 cm. © Richard Deacon / STPI; Teppei Kaneuji, Model of Something #9, 2014, Screenprint, acrylic boxes, acrylic sheets, 130 x 170 x 168 cm. © Teppei Kaneuji / STPI. Photo courtesy of the Artist and STPI.

STPI’s 2022 Annual Special Exhibition presents a spectacular showcase of 41 works by 21 artists from the past two decades of creative collaborations. To date, STPI has worked with over 100 artists from all around the world via its Visiting Artists Programme, where they are invited to explore creating works in print and papermaking. Each collaboration with the workshop team serves as a testament to how these mediums can be endlessly reimagined through these artists’ hands, pushing the limits of what can be achieved with these techniques. Thus, Second Movement is an invitation to get to the heart of what an STPI collaboration truly means, where new techniques, technicalities, concepts and philosophies constantly come into being.

With its title borrowed from a series of prints created in 1978 by Anni Albers, now residing in the Singapore Art Museum’s Tyler Collection, Second Movement pulls focus away from the reproducible, two-dimensionality associated with traditional prints. Instead, it shines a collective light to conceptual and unconventional pieces produced by artists who had spent time in-residence at the STPI workshop. Pushing the technical and philosophical edge of printmaking, these largely threedimensional, spatial and contemporaneous artworks in Second Movement offer snapshots to the fuller, typically complex, and critically acclaimed practice of each artist.

In Second Movement, print does not necessarily equal paper. Where and when an impression is transferred, by striking, pressing or stenciling, a substrate becomes a print. Artists have engaged print with metals, wood, plastic, fabric and stone, both as an end and as a means. The piece by Haegue Yang for example, features pressed vegetables bought from NTUC Finest. Artists Zul Mahmod and Teppei Kaneuji are represented with works made principally with acrylic sheets while Rirkrit Tiravanija etches on stainless steel.

If one were to observe the output of works produced at STPI, its resident artists’ enduring openness and relentless appetite for experimentation would emerge as a consistent and traceable theme. It is as if print gave them a second life or parallel universe from the routine of their otherwise established art practice. Braced by the knowledge and skills of its in-house master printers, STPI continue to provide a precious and now increasingly rare platform for the production of high-quality artworks conceptualised on-site and in-residence.

Second Movement therefore proposes a reevaluation not only of print, but of our lenses of perception. Printing is one amongst the most primal human methods of expressions, it is bona fide. The thumb print, also largely ‘stamped’ onto digital scanners today, is still a print. In an age where continual disruptions are the orders of our days, print as the philosophical ‘second movement’ is not to be underestimated.

Featuring works by Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, Heman Chong, Genevieve Chua, Richard Deacon, Heri Dono, Ryan Gander, Goh Beng Kwan, Han Sai Por, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Shirazeh Houshiary, Teppei Kaneuji, Kim Beom, Jason Lim, Zul Mahmod, Eko Nugroho, Manuel Ocampo, Anri Sala, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Hema Upadhyay, Ian Woo, Haegue Yang. With prints from the Tyler Collection by Anni Albers.