Richard Koh Fine Art (RKFA) is pleased to announce its participation in Art SG 2023

December 23, 2022 / News

23 December 2022

Blk 47 Malan Road, #01-26

Gillman Barracks, Singapore 109444 www.rkfineart.com

ART SG 2023

A Group Exhibition of Southeast Asian Artists

Booth BH03

Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre 10 Bayfront Ave, Singapore 018956

12 – 15 January 2023 Press Release

Richard Koh Fine Art (RKFA) is pleased to announce its participation in Art SG 2023 with the group presentation featuring artists across Southeast Asia.

The presentation aims to provide a survey of Southeast Asian contemporary art, ranging from works inspired by mythology with socio-political commentary embedded in them to direct engagement in one’s natural and social environment. These ideas eventually boil down to two questions: how we navigate the human experience and grapple with existence.

Artists Biography

Faris Nakamura (b.1988, Singapore) graduated with Bachelor in Fine Arts (First Class Honours) from LASALLE College of the Arts in partnership with Goldsmiths, College of London in 2014.

Through sculptures, installations and site-specific works, Faris investigates the way people navigate and orientate themselves as they encounter space. He desires to understand the attachment and detachments people have towards spaces, how these relationships develop, and their impact.

Hu Qiren (b.1983, Singapore) is a visual artist whose practice explores the myriad forms of image making, incorporating a wide range of media, including photography, video, installation and performance. Expressing a vibrant visual vocabulary inspired by his own identity and tradition, Qiren synthesizes

cultural binaries, while incessantly challenging notions of authenticity, belief and value systems.

Melissa Tan (b.1989, Singapore) is a visual artist based in Singapore and received her BA (Fine Arts) from Lasalle College of the Arts in 2011. Her works are based on nature, themes of transience and beauty of the ephemeral. Her recent projects revolve around landscapes and the process of formation. Interested in geography and textures of rocks, she explores to translate the visual language through different mediums. Employing processes such as paper cutting, painting and silk-screen techniques, she is interested in materiality and how the medium supports the work. Though trained as a painter, she also works with video, sound and objects.

Samuel Xun (b.1994, Singapore) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Singapore, graduating from LASALLE College of the Arts. His practice explores emblems of culture and identity, often centred around themes of emotion, cognition, and aestheticism. His work includes sculpture, installation, and textile compositions informed by film, culture, and personal narratives.

Xun’s oeuvre cross-references the hegemonic framework of queer identity within the national rhetoric and world-at-large, filtered through the lens of lived experiences and the psychoanalysis of self. His characteristically ornamented surfaces are governed by a cathartic process of making that posits the use of colour, texture, and text, as a means to convey humanistic resolutions to social discourse. Ultimately, Samuel is interested in how art can provide catharsis, facilitate empathy, preserve culture, and foster better interaction in a digital society.

*Samuel Xun’s work will be featured in NEW/NOW Sector in ART SG 2023

Chan Thean Chie (b.1972, Penang, Malaysia) works and lives in Austria. In 1999, he received his Masters from the MK Attersee, University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria. Chan has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Austria over the past 25 years, notably at the Museum of Modern Art and Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna, Austria. His last exhibition in Asia was in 2012 at NN Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Hasanul Isyraf Idris (b.1978, Perak Malaysia) was trained at Mara University of Technology (UiTM), Perak, Malaysia and is presently based in Penang.

His practice spans a variety of media, including painting, drawing, installation, video work and sculpture. His works typically manifest a hybridity of fictional and surreal iconography drawn from personal invention as from a melange of pop cultural references, such as comic books, science fiction, street art and film. He personifies his personal struggles as an artist with strange characters and creatures that inhabit his invented universes.

Justin Lim (b.1983, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) completed his postgraduate studies in 2006 with the Master of Art (Fine Art) programme by The Open University UK conducted at Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore after obtaining a BA(Hons) Fine Art majoring in painting. He has exhibited widely in Southeast Asia in various solo & group exhibitions.

Yeoh Choo Kuan (b.1988, Malaysia) lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

His practice articulates the tension between a spiritual élan and the magnetism of desire, violence and the flesh. The natural landscape and the overload of

information are extremes of a spectrum he embraces and represents in all its contradictions. With abstract painting as a strong foundation, he has in the latest years transcended into the conceptual realm of installation. His explorations of different artistic domains meet a sheer enjoyment of textures, mark making, and disintegration of the pictorial matter.

Zelin Seah (b.1980, Malaysia) received BFA at University of Central England (2007). Seah investigates the neglected ordinary spaces and objects that constitute human activities. Having in appreciating the aesthetic of the unseen, his process-based approach emphasizes the negative space that eyes may miss. Often site-related, Seah’s works deal with the limitations of space, and seeks possible ways to fill spiritual void. Seah uses materials that convey metaphorical meaning to him, and always challenges formal methods, from classic painting, etching, carving to weaving.

The combination of colours, lines, and forms is the essence of Fasang Navaaran’s (b.1967, Thailand) art. He perceives beauty in its simplicity. The sincerity of his work is revealed by the display of the materials’ natural substances. Often, found objects and colour hues are constructed and arranged into geometric forms. The appeal of his work is not in its order but in its harmonious composition.

Natee Utarit (b.1970, Bangkok, Thailand) studied at the College of Fine Art in 1987 and graduated in Graphic Arts at the Painting and Sculpture Faculty at Silpakorn University, both in Bangkok, Thailand in 1991.

Utarit’s multifaceted practice focuses on the exploration of the medium of painting, connecting it with photography and classical Western art. Light and perspective are some of the elements the artist chose to work with, focusing on painting as a means to explore image making. His complex pictures, juggle wide-ranging metaphors usually in the format of the traditional still life, allude to Thailand’s current social and political landscapes.

Svay Sareth’s (b.1972, Battambang, Cambodia) works in sculpture, installation and durational performance are made using materials and processes intentionally associated with war – metals, uniforms, camouflage and actions requiring great endurance. While his critical and cathartic practice is rooted in an autobiography of war and resistance, he refuses both historical particularity and voyeurism on violence. Rather, his works traverse both present and historical moments, drawing on processes of survival and adventure, and ideas of power and futility. More recently, Svay confronts the idea that “the present is also a dangerous time” through the appropriation and dramatization of public monuments that hint at contentious political histories.

Cam Xanh (b.1977, Vietnam) is the pseudonym of conceptual artist Tran Thanh Ha. Translated as “Green Orange” from Vietnamese, it is the first of many playful departures from the expected that characterise her work. Her physical works are often based on texts and poetry, or developed from previous performances by the artist, and branch across multiple mediums

including installation, sculpture, painting and video, often with elements only activated by audience participation.

Ha Manh Thang (b.1980, Thái Nguyên, Vietnam) is known for his bold and colorful painterly canvases that juxtapose Vietnam’s past and its rich heritage with fashionable images of consumerist culture.

Bridging modernity and tradition, Ha Manh Thang’s satirical paintings examine Vietnam’s culture and social history within the context of the dramatic changes the country has undergone since Doi Moi.

Trong Gia Nguyen (b.1971, Saigon, Vietnam) is a Vietnamese- American artist living and working in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. His wide array of works examines structures of power in their myriad forms, scrutinizing the soft foundation upon which contemporary life plays out, often behind the façade of fairness, sincerity, security, tradition, and civility. Regularly employing humour while at other times engaging sober reflection, Nguyen’s work elevates the condition of doubt as it reveals the undercarriage of our most trusted spaces –domestic, cultural, political, and economic-, labouring to disrupt the mundane while walking the fine line between joy and sorrow, subtlety and blatancy, night and light, and beauty and beast.

Working with video, performance, photography, sculpture and new media, Uudam Tran Nguyen’s (b.1971, Kontum, Vietnam) playfully provocative practice is today one of the leading lights of Vietnamese contemporary art.

Aung Ko (b.1980, Myanmar) studied Fine Art Painting at the University of Culture, Yangon. He exhibited in the group show “DEEP S.E.A. Contemporary Art from South East Asia”, at Primo Marella Gallery, Milan (2012), “Artist Beyond Boundaries” at The American Center in Yangon (2017) and many others exhibitions in Asia. Beyond the thematic role of the village in Aung Ko’s practice, his expression is fully community-centric, his performances and installations tied to the village and its people through production and participation. Ideas about geographies, histories, and customs emerge, pieces charting place and time through gesture and relic, an art recalling the

transience, hope, and illusion of existence. Yet these creations are not pictorial replications of a pocket of rural Burma, but rather distillates of its imagery, rituals and rhythms, which combined, build an art telling idiosyncratic stories, while also obliquely questioning the system and values dominating the

country today.

Tun Win Aung (b.1975, Myanmar) employs a wide range of mediums including photography, video, and installation. His practice focuses on local histories and environments and he often collaborates with artist Wah Nu on large-scale art projects and activities. Their works as a duo have been exhibited in institutional venues such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York, United States (2013); 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2011); and biennials including Singapore Biennale (2016); 4th Guangzhou Triennial, China (2011); and the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia (2009).

Wah Nu (b.1977, Yangon, Myanmar) began her artistic activities after studying music at the University of Culture, Yangon. She currently works in various media, primarily painting and film. Wah Nu has been creating pop- style paintings through which she expresses her personal emotions, employing clouds and foliage as motifs. In tandem with painting, Wah Nu also creates films with a distinctive floating sense that evokes daydreaming.

*Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu’s collective work will be featured in FILM Sector in ART SG 2023

For more information, please contact:

TQPR Thailand

Tom Van Blarcom or Nuie Titichayapon

Tel: 0 2260 5820

Email: tom@tqpr.com | nuie@tqpr.com

About ART SG

Presenting over 150 of world’s leading galleries, many of whom will be making their Singapore debut, ART SG is the biggest art fair launch in Asia Pacific in a decade.

Taking place across two floors at Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, ART SG is accompanied by a line-up of groundbreaking art installations, engaging panel discussions and experimental film.

Faris Nakamura

Emanation of Desire

2022

Emulsion on treated wood, acrylic and metal

110 x 80 x 21.5 cm

Hu Qiren

Memories (Red & White)

2022

Pigment on canvas in artist frame

182.5 x 242 x 14 cm

Chan Thean Chie

Untitled

2022

Ink on canvas

160 x 150 cm

Hasanul Isyraf Idris

Xing Xing

2022

Acrylic guoache and guoache on cotton paper

183 x 152.4 cm (work); 187 x 156.2 cm (framed)

Justin Lim

This is the day when things fall into place

2022

Acrylic on canvas

182.5 x 213.5 cm (work), 186 x 216.5 cm (framed)

Yeoh Choo Kuan

Fairy Frolic

2022

Acrylic on linen

205 x 150 cm

Zelin Seah

Where Have All The ( ) Gone?

2021

Collage of burnt and washed topography maps framed with Tru Vue® Optium Museum Acrylic® 210 x 67 cm

Fasang Navaaran

Painting 0252

2022

Acrylic on canvas

100 x 200 cm; 50 x 100 cm

Natee Utarit

Ruin of The Four Noble Truths

2022

Oil on canvas

210 x 250 cm (work); 212.5 x 252 cm (framed)

Svay Sareth

Red Asura

2022

Fabric, kapok and PVC pipe

116 x 71 x 52 cm

Cam Xanh

The Seven Capital Sins: The Perfect Love

2016

Mixed media installation

Variable dimension

Ha Manh Thang

Autumn waterfall #3 (Mùa Thu thác đổ #3)

2022

Acrylic, acrylic medium, charcoal, gold leaf and oil on canvas and silk 96 x 70 cm

Trong Gia Nguyen

Enid, Jepson Street

2017

Oil pastel on canvas, mounted C-print

84.7 x 127 cm

Uudam Tran Nguyen

Uudam Yelling Faces

2021 – 2022

Pen on canvas

20 x 25 cm (each); Set of 27

Aung Ko

The Burmese Tiger and English Hunter

2017

Acrylic on canvas

182 x 182 cm

Wah Nu

Cloud and The Sea #025-127

2021

Acrylic on canvas

46 x 61 cm

Samuel Xun

You’re Projecting Again

2022

Wall paint, glitter ribbon and polyvinyl acetate wood glue on wood base 119 x 105 x 9 cm

* Will be featured in NEW / NOW Sector

Tun Win Aung & Wah Nu

White Piece 0133; Thakin Pe Than’s Long March

2012

Black and white single-channel video, no audio Duration 3 seconds

Edition 2 of 3

* Will be featured in FILM Sector

Tun Win Aung & Wah Nu

White Piece 0164; Reading and Writing in 1989

2013

Black and white single-channel video, no audio Duration 14 seconds

Edition 1 of 3

* Will be featured in FILM Sector

Founded in 2005, with spaces in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Bangkok, RICHARD KOH FINE ART is committed to the promotion of Southeast Asian contemporary art on regional and international platforms. Centred around a core belief in developing an artist’s career, the gallery looks to identify understated, albeit promising practices, and providing it opportunities to flourish. Through its regular exhibition cycles, print & digital publications and cross-border gallery

collaborations, Richard Koh Fine Art engages the art community with the aim of developing regional and intercultural dialogue.

For further information about the exhibition, please do not hesitate to contact Wei Fung at +60 16 491 2644 or the gallery at info@rkfineart.com.

All images are subjected to copyright.

ww w.rkfineart.com info@rkfineart.com

MALAYSIA