Wong Lip Chin, Why are you so curious now when you should have, 2014, Acrylic on Linen, 65 x 105 cm
From the appropriation of an entire bus stop, to getting tattoo-ed as part of an exhibition opening, to a performance involving a live cow, Singaporean artist Wong Lip Chin’s practice is defined less by the logic of conceptual themes or visual motifs, but rather by an attitude of unconventional risk-taking and a spirited, venturous approach towards art and visuality that would be termed, in popular parlance, ‘crazy’. One of his most recent pieces, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat (2020), was a performance staged at 2 Cavan Road, in which the artist read aloud excerpts from Hal Herzog’s eponymous text on animal rights to a live cow, as part of his homage to Joseph Beuys’ seminal work, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare.
The present exhibition marks Wong’s first solo collaboration with Yeo Workshop. The title of the show is a sound clip, which can be accessed only by scanning the QR code – designed by the artist – that serves as a key visual reference; the show is also subtitled “sometimes i (you) don‘t dive hard enough”. Most of the paintings in the exhibition were produced in 2014, when Wong was a relatively young artist, and struggling to articulate a personal creative vision and to negotiate his place in the broad, complex world of contemporary art. Viewed collectively, these works offer an almost diaristic glimpse of the artist’s mental universe at that stage in his life, an autobiographical tale told in a series of flatly delineated, vibrantly coloured images that evoke the pictorial vocabulary of graphic design or comic books.
Venue: Yeo Workshop, 47 Malan Road, #01-25, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 109444
When: 6 Sep - 1 Nov 2020,
By: Yeo Workshop
