Searching Operations: Bodies Of Painting by Ng Joon Kiat
Curated by Isabel Ching
Gallery Director: Michelle Ho
18 January — 6 April 2019 ADM Gallery 1. School of Art, Design and Media Nanyang Technological University
main wall text
From surgical operations in the Enlightenment period up to our obsessions of reducing the world into numbers
today, there is a belief that abstraction can be a magic bullet for solving problems from medical illnesses to
population control. But abstraction has a violent and cruel side. I have a deep desire to critique and decolonise the
language I use in a way that can also open new painting directions in my practice. –Ng Joon Kiat (blue text)
How can painting be viable, and vital, today? For Ng Joon Kiat, the language of abstraction, coming with its
particular historical burdens, continues to be fecund and teeming with possibilities — when one looks deeper. The
paintings for the exhibition have been selected from five bodies of work that Ng had developed, but not shown, over
the last six years. Wry reference is being made to the visual reduction in modernist monochrome and “white
paintings”, and to the formalist framework for American Abstract Expressionism, with its emphasis on the “allover”
flat surface. In subversion of these viewing regimes, our frontal gazes on the paintings are often dispersed towards
their edges or directed beneath the surface. This may be achieved by way of a physical act of “operation”. The
paintings are cut off or cleaved into so that their thickness and constitution, and not just their surface, can be
highlighted. They also court oblique viewing angles through processes of carpentry and construction, cut and paste.
These are all acts of resuscitation and recovery that in wielding the contrast between representational qualities and
concrete materiality, equally try to stimulate narrative imaginations. The tension between the layers of a work and
the shallowness of its surface also plays out on the picture plane itself. Various marks, some taking from the graphic
contours of financial charts, layer over each other and joust for surface visibility. Through their visual tanglings, Ng
tries to suggest something of the city’s disorganised psychological vibrations in the face of relentless change. At
other times, the contest for visibility between intimate drawing marks and the ubiquitous ordering logic of charts
creates the main visual interest, and comments on the wider representation of human phenomena today. All the
different work included in this exhibition are propelled by the desire to reveal, carve out, and push for solutions in
painting. They investigate a deeply ambivalent stance towards the language of abstraction as simultaneously
presenting an exciting, living tool and a problem of limitations for painting. Together, they mark a departure for the
territories of language as (self-)critical core of the artist’s practice. But Ng also understands abstraction as a mode
of visualisation that has broad applications and deep roots in the world. It follows that his works are undergirded by
the search for ways of expanding abstract painting into political and narrative domains. Aiming to decentre
normative discourses and pursue new prospects in painting, they mobilise histories and contexts at once personal
in scale and transnational in scope. - Isabel Ching (brown text)
1 of 5 sections
Cosmeticised Corpse Painting (2013 – 2015)
Cosmeticised Corpse Painting (2013 – 2015)
Historians fix paintings to their pasts. Museums monumentalize them. Conservationists try to pump life into worn
out works. In all these acts, new marks or meanings are inevitably layered over paintings. They are like mummified
painting-corpses with many tinted layers. By slicing off their edges, clues and residues of what has been concealed
can show.
What might an aftermath of a long history of paintings that have been prematurely sentenced to death look like?
Cosmeticised Paintings stages a scene of “corpses”, covered over by a white surface resembling embalming powder
or a body sheet. Only by slicing off the painting’s edges does its coloured strata of lives and histories get revealed.
These works make wry reference to the visual reduction in modernist monochrome and “white paintings”, and to
the formalist framework for American Abstract Expressionism, with its emphasis on the “all-over” flat surface. In
subversion, the paintings’ facades now obscure our view, splitting and dispersing our frontal gaze towards their
subtly “bleeding” edges. This series can be understood as a deliberate attempt at intervening in and circumventing
restrictive frameworks for painting; an important entry point into the later bodies of work in this exhibition.
2 of 5 sections
Autopsy Paintings (2017 – 2018)
Autopsy Paintings (2017 – 2018)
Stories told about painting continue to echo. It’s life and death; how it lives again. Zombie tales, universal stories
and particular stories. I wanted to discover what could lie beneath, what I can release, and what lives. Cutting was
not about reducing, as it was a way for me to uncover fictions and find ways forwards. The knife becomes my
investigative lens.
Furthering the exploration begun in Cosmeticised Paintings, paint and colour now assume more organic properties. Each painting’s body has been formed over a long period of layering paint to register a “thickness” of mass and time. The primal act of cutting opens up an avenue for material (and psychic) releases to take place. The resulting new visualities and compositions stimulate our imaginations. They also propose that narratives and representations are “latent” to the painting. Like a body’s organs, they belong to the painting, rather than derive simply from its surface.
Autopsy Paintings recall murder mystery stories and investigative work at the operation table. They also resonate with resurrection narratives both horrifying and hopeful. At once gruesome and fictional in quality, they mean to haunt the line between life and death, form and de-form, endings and beginnings.
3 of 5 sections
Painting Vocabularies (2017 – 2018)
Painting Vocabularies (2017 – 2018)
Can there still be anything totally new? Somewhere, someone would have done it before... so many artists, artistic
histories and experiments, even if they are not remembered. Still, each genealogical track of developing a painting
practice is different and how a painting language is used is different. This set of works tracks down a history of my
studio processes across different times and developments. Some residues seem to have stories or rejections
embedded that can open up ideas for painting.
Painting Vocabularies: continue to play on the tension between the picture plane and the work’s depth. But rather
than cutting and reducing, the method is additive, involving processes of carpentry and construction, cut and paste.
Finished paintings and extraneous dried-up paint material from the artist’s studio are stacked over one another.
Their subtly-varied surfaces interact visually to contrast representational depth with concrete materiality. While the
all-over white canvases often occlude the frontal view of other paintings, the collage effect in turn undermines
monolithic vision and interpretation. It encourages one to look obliquely, suggesting the presences of different
stories and particularities across time that maybe salvaged. Recovering materials to build up a contemporary
language, the artist reanimates the histories of painting as refracted through personal experience and practice.
4 of 5 sections
Plastic Remains (2015 – 2018)
Plastic Remains (2015 – 2018)
Cities that want to globalise seem to take the same route. At some level, locales disappear under the gentrification
of districts, bright colourful plastics become a dominant aesthetic, and emotions are led by the highs and lows of
financial charts. History, heritage, identity and landscape are actively being made and re-made. Human experiences
and physical geographies become just memories. What is distinctive about these ‘post-country’ visual
environments? How would painting reflect the collage nature and psychotic conditions of these big urban spots
across the world?
The works in Plastic Remains: want to distill, through the translational medium of painting, some constitutive visual
elements of the global cities of today. To do so, they take on an imagination of themselves as the (future) artefacts
from these cities. Their layered fragments hint at practices such as the widespread use of plastics and the abstract
imaging of human desires and demands through financial charts. The tension between the layers of paint and the
shallowness of its surface plays out on the picture plane. Bright thick paint, sketchy marks, snarly lines and broader
areas of color joust for dominance. Some marks gain obvious upperhand in the field of visibility, others get
obscured. The visual tanglings suggest the restless vibrations of psychological life in the concentrated sites of
human population and wealth.
5 of 5 sections
Fleeing Charts (2016 – 2018)
Fleeing Charts (2016 – 2018)
The discourse on American Abstract Expressionism was used as a political tool to synchronise varied global artistic
phenomena. Promoted by the CIA, generations of painters became indoctrinated with a homogenous framework of
how to think of the historical development of painting. Economic power also allowed Abstract Expressionism to be
endorsed as the American art identity that valued human freedom in individual expression. The abstract language
in art has been used to promote very specific thoughts and ways of being. I would like to strike up a conversation
about abstraction’s identity.
Yet, what remains of human freedom, individuality and action in the late stages of capitalism? For the artist, charts
epitomise a form of coercion and control; in their systems of abstracting from human phenomena, some answers
may be found. Charts reduce the irregularities of human activities to strategic and consumable data. Elseways,
drawing captures the subtleties and variables of hand movement. The visual tension structured between intimate
drawing marks and the ubiquitous ordering logic of charts is channelled towards symbolic and aesthetic resolution
in the big painting. Numerous random, light-toned strokes denoting the “noise” and “spark” of human activity
spread across an aerial view of a geographical area of world proportions. The strokes all but fully cross out and
erase the many underlayers of archetypal financial chart lines, and blend airily into the painting’s light-colored
areas. Fleeing Chart’s outlook is optimistic, even as it downplays the the role of the individual. May the liveliness of
human existences en masse triumph over their instrumentalization and commodification!
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