Lyrical Abstraction

Singapore

Lyrical Abstraction: Works by Jeremy Sharma & Yeo Shih Yun shows works of two young Singaporean painters with very different painting styles will be showcased – Jeremy Sharma with oil on metal panels and Yeo Shih Yun with contemporary ink and new media. On this occasion, the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) has commissioned the two artists to create monumental scale painting installations in the museum alongside Chinese artist Jia Aili. Both the young Singaporean artists demonstrate creativity and the ability to shape seemingly conventional art techniques into witty and ironic new forms of ‘painting’.

Jeremy Sharma’s painting installation, ‚Kurosawa‘, offers a different view of painting, to oil on canvas paintings. Paint is poured on aluminium panels rather than on a cotton canvas, and allowed to drip at varying speeds. The pouring and dripping technique is reminiscent of western modern painters such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, while the work’s abstract nature made up of mainly white and black washes is inspired by the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (for whom the installation is also named after), whose films played much on the use of colours and shadows, and in which light and darkness were metaphors for good and evil respectively.

Yeo Shih Yun reinterprets Chinese ink painting by ingeniously incorporating silkscreen, performance and new media to recast this age old art form in a new guise. Yeo attempts to create marks done in Chinese ink by tying hair brushes to trees and allowing the natural swaying of the branches to create the marks. She then processes these ‘acts of nature’ on silkscreen, and combines them to create a completely new work that while abstract in nature, looks remarkably like a traditional Chinese ink painting.

Singapore Art Museum

July 6th – September 23rd, 2012
71 Bras Basah Road
Singapore 189555
Singapore

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