"An Essay on Draw-ing"

ADrawing

Show

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This exhibition is published on the occasion of the exhibition:

A Drawing Show

1 August – 14 September 2014 Featuring the work of Ian Woo, Wong Lip Chin, Boedi Widjaja and Jaitip Jaidee.

Curated by Louis Ho

Copyright 2014, YEO WORKSHOP, the artists, and the authors.All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without the prior permission in writing from the publisher.

First published by YEO WORKSHOP 1 Lock Road #01-01 Singapore 108932www.yeoworkshop.com

Editors: Audrey Yeo, Louis HoProject coordination by Khairullah Rahim Photographs by Christopher Ong (Kind Studios) Design by Sari HandayaniPrinted by Cahaya Timur OffsetPaper : bookpaper 90gr, cover panka start 300gr

Special thanks to Irwin Hung, Venessa Tan, Bernice Volta Hidajat, Ning Chong (National Arts Council Singa-pore), Rene Anant Fedderson (338 Oida Gallery), Amelia Abdullahsani-Gerick, Steven Yip (Q Framing), Au-drey Widjaja, Gwen Pew (Timeout), Lauren Clarke Jensen (Harpers Bazaar), Aaron Wong (Creative Director, LIBA), Chua Cher Him (Photographer, Soobin & Him), Kari Tamura Chua, Lilou & Oomoo (Unicorn Quar-ters), Ng Ling Kai, Mr Wong & Madam Chong, Dr. John McNorton (Director, DRAWinternational), Grete McNorton (Administrator, DRAWinternational), Thakol Khaosa-ad, Reinhart Frais , Latthapon Korkaitarkul, Komsan Jaidee (Documentation and Text Translator)

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Contents

2Colophon

3Contents

5Introduction(by Audrey Yeo)

8An Essay On Draw-ing

(by Louis Ho)

13Ian Woo

(interview, works & biography)

29Wong Lip Chin


39Boedi Widjaja


49Jaitip Jaidee


4A Drawing Show

5Introduction

A Drawing Show

A Drawing Show looks at the expanded field of the medium in Singapore today. Drawings are typically understood as sketches, studio work or preparatory work for paintings. This show shows dawings that are challenged and treasured as objects as artworks of their own.

Featuring the work of three artists across three different generations Ian Woo, Wong Lip Chin and Boedi Widjaja. It attempts to provide a concise take on the realities and possibilities of drawing: from pencil-on-paper works, to structural interventions, to conceptual approaches to mark-making, we witness a progressive shift away from the object to the body, from an emphasis on the visual complex to the gestural force that animates it. Woo, one of Singapore’s leading abstractionists, extends his investigation of shape and form into the realm of the graphic, while Wong works with structural elements of the gallery space itself. Widjaja’s objects demonstrate a processual understanding of the medium, and the artist will also produce a site-specific installation on the columns of the gallery.

Yeo Workshop is a contemporary art gallery that produces a series of exhibitions, represented artists projects, and gallery based programmes such as talks and guiding research. It’s aim is to promote the work of contemporary local and international artists, and engage with the Singaporean and visiting audience. The space also houses its current production the Arnoldii Arts Club, a course based arts club. It is located at Block 1 Gillman Barracks, Singapore.

Audrey Yeo

Owner, Yeo Workshop

Wong Lip Chin & Boedi Widjaja “MY DRAWING IS BETTER THAN YOUR DRAWING”performance at the opening preview of A Drawing ShowYeo Workshop, 1 August 2014, 7.30pm

8A Drawing Show

---------

This is, as the title suggests, a disquisition on the practice and the implications of drawing – or, more specifically, drawing in Singapore, in the twenty-first century.

Ian Woo’s Hymn Spheres (see page 17), for one, evokes a vague sense of the apocalyptic, though a no less visceral one for that. Large swathes blow and billow across the surface of the paper, morph-ing from a concentration of surging, soot-dark clouds which calls to mind a scene of cataclysmic disaster, of geological and climactic disruption on a massive scale, to pallid penumbras spreading like layers of smoke over the composition, marbling the space with various shades of grey. Through the hazy atmospherics – Woo reveals that he used water, pencil and graphite powder to achieve the desired effect2 – swirling webs of lines dash and dance into a maelstrom of churning, ash-coloured swells. These range from running strokes sketched out with the point of the pencil, to thicker, darker, more deliberate notations, to slender linear contours that recall topographic maps or the layout of rice-field terraces; the lines terminate abruptly midway, they trail off into tapered ends or dissipate into the background wash; they are straight, curved, bent, barely discernible. Despite the immediate impression of an integral tableau, the single dominant characteristic of the piece, of its complex of conflicting patterns and textures, is tension. The chaos of the supposed scene of hellfire and brimstone gives way to the chaos of a farrago of visual information, ensnared in a fraught bal-ance between part and whole, between line and plane, between delineation and shading – between the ostensible stasis of the work, its foreclosure in the temporal register as a finished product, and the sense of dynamism and movement, the possibility that these lines and shapes could well con-tinue advancing and extending beyond the present moment, beyond the spatial confines of the surface of the paper, into an ongoing process of being.

An Essay On Draw-IngLouis Ho

“Drawing is a verb.” – Richard Serra1

Essay9

The preceding description is littered with verbs, not un-coincidentally. Serra’s remark was, of course, intended to recuperate the verb from the gerund, to emphasize the act of draw-ing in the paradigm of drawing. Not unlike the state of potential extension and flux connoted by the be-ing of Woo’s draw-ing, then, the present continuous tense of the latter gesture brings into focus what Catherine de Zegher labelled “an open-ended activity”, “characterized by a line that is always unfolding, always becoming.”3 Emma Dexter dubs it the “eternal incompletion” of the medium: drawing “forever describes its own making in its becoming…and its eternal incompletion always re-enacts imperfec-tion and incompletion.”4 Elsewhere, Michael Craig-Martin concurs: “… directness, simplicity, ab-breviation, expressiveness, immediacy, personal vision, technical diversity, modesty of means, raw-ness, fragmentation, discontinuity, unfinishedness, and open-endedness. These have always been the characteristics of drawing.”5 What these commentators stress, almost in unison, is the partial nature of the graphic line: the ever-present possibility of its continuation, the never-complete act of becoming, the incorporation of indeterminacy and ephemerality in its ontology. To boil it down to material matters, there is the curious fact, for instance, of the medium’s susceptibility to erasure: a painting has to be painted over, a piece of marble statuary re-carved, but a trace of the pencil may well be rubbed out physically without substantial damage to its support – a phenomenon well-attested to by one of the most famous experiments in this regard, Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, where the visual is produced through deletion of the mark, rather than its generation. A work of drawing is, in other words, inherently unstable, with any putative completion open to reversal, a reversion to a former state of existence. More importantly, there is the oft-cited primacy of drawing, its role as a tool by draughtsmen, by architects, by sculptors, by cartographers and painters and engineers; one drew before one painted, sculpted, made maps and buildings and machines. One made a basic sketch – rough, ideational, fragmentary – before one turned out a finished product. This ur-image, to put it another way, is also a mode of cognition, of recording thoughts, impressions, possibilities and concepts, before they realize final, explicit form in another material or medium.6 In fact, the primacy of mark-making pertains not merely to the process of planning or schematization, but is (pre-)historical and “mythic” in character as well, enjoying origi-nary status in the development of visual representation. As Dexter notes:

Drawing has a primal and elemental character; it enjoys a mythic status as the earliest and most immediate form of image making …… it is an activity that connects us directly in an unbroken line with the first human who ever sketched in dirt or scratched on the wall of a cave.7

One form of primacy dovetails with another here, the history of the medium suggesting its instru-mentality, its function as a means to an end. Such is the processual dimension8 of the drawn line: it is always provisional, abbreviated; always already unresolved and insistent on its irresolution; it is never something, always the possibility of something-in-progress. Rosalind Krauss observes, apropos of the grid motif, that “the given work of art is presented as a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric … compelling our acknowledgement of a world beyond the frame.”9 Like the grid, the graphic line, too, implies its own fragmentariness, its non-finality, within a prima facie finitude. In the case of Woo’s draw-ing, the viewer is quite capable of imagining the lines of the work extending into infinity, past the boundaries of the sheet of paper: that they mostly terminate within visible space seems to be arbitrary, a matter of happenstance; a small number sim-ply streak to the very edge, and probably ran off it into the space beyond.10 Ditto the background wash: the traces of water mixed with graphite powder, dried out into various tonal values, appear in certain areas to have flowed, seeped and dribbled off the margins. Unlike the artist’s paintings,

10A Drawing Show

which are neatly demarcated by the cessation of colour at the perimeter of the canvas’ surface, his draw-ing here seems determined by random facts of chance – of gestures that border on the au-tomatic,11 and the properties of fluid motion. So saturated with visual detail is Hymn Spheres that the facts of its present form – in all its messy, minute, multitudinous incidence – seems completely desultory. Ultimately, that the artist could well pick up a pencil to continue a particular stroke, or dribble some water into a corner to create more cloud-like shapes, or perhaps add more contours, or, say, deploy cross-hatching to achieve denser layers and textures – it all strikes the viewer as being en-tirely possible propositions, and interesting ones to consider. One could even take an eraser to it …

Question: What yokes, then, the practice of draw-ing, and the city-state of Singapore in the new millennium?

The unsurprising answer: Both, of course, are projects that happen in the present continuous tense, lodged as they are in the perpetual act of becoming, incompletion embedded in their very ontolo-gies.

Or, as Jeremy Fernando parses it, the trope of the ellipsis is key to understanding the particular, peculiar configurations of Singapore in this regard, the void at the heart of the little red dot. He cites Werner Hamacher: “[An] ellipsis is the rhetorical equivalent of writing: it depletes, or de-completes, the whole so as to make conceptual totalities possible. And yet every conceivable whole achieved on the basis of ellipsis is stamped with the mark of the original loss.”12 In the context of the island-state, Fernando remarks, the “elliptical nature of Singapore” is “always already haunted by a primordial loss.”13 This primordial loss, according to him, may be read through Singapore’s identity as, historically, a port city, and more recently, its aspirations to being a global one. Both identities, he suggests, are fundamentally hollow. The commercial basis of the maritime trade that built the island’s fortunes prioritized the movement of commodities rather than the nature of these goods, the “transience and flow” of the system being reflected in the economistic,14 value-laden logic of the contemporary global city-state:

… Singapore’s economy, being so closely linked to the world economy, suggests that everything here is inter-changeable with everything else, and this includes its people. It can be seen in the Foreign Talent Scheme adopted by the Singapore Sports Council: the underlying logic is that as long as you generate surplus value in the form of medals, you can be Singaporean.”15

This lacuna, as a matter of fact – the absence that structures forms of subjectivity and citizenship, which governs membership in the corporate body of the collective – is embodied in the very icon that stands in for the nation, a spectre of a symbol that, in its very ghostliness, signifies the truant core of identity:

Essay11

And when we meditate on the naming of this state, we cannot forget that the very lion that it calls forth is always already missing: each time the Lion City (Singapura) is uttered, all that is fore-grounded is the primordial absence of the very lion itself … The error would be to continue … looking for an essence that will remain fixed, certain. Instead, what has to be embraced is the notion of speed, constant movement, flow, change … there is no figure that captures distance, a gap in-between, and movement towards at the same time … [better] than the ellipsis.16

Juxtapose, then, the two: the speed, movement, flow and change of the so-called global city; the “fragmentation, discontinuity, unfinishedness” of drawing, as Craig-Martin has it. The synecdochi-cal figure of the ellipsis analogizes the image of the (hollow) dystopia and the practice of a (open-ended) medium: the provisional nature of the surface, vulnerable to effacement à la Rauschenberg, or to the possibility of infinite inflections in Woo’s case, is mirrored in the equally impermanent nature of Singapore’s urban fabric, subject as it has been to a dizzying cycle of construction, destruc-tion and reconstruction in the past decade. If we permit the notion of topography as text, here is the city as a palimpsestic surface, upon which successive layers of inscriptions mask acts of erasure, of drawing over, of primordial loss. Cities, of course, grow, evolve and decline as time and vicissitude wills, but Singapore in the twenty-first century, under new leadership,17 is a bright, shiny entity that seems to have sprung up overnight. The litany of conspicuous additions to its skyline in recent years is an impressive one – the movement and change that outpaced any ersatz locus of a stable identity is expressed here in material form, as the breakneck gait of urban development racing along to meet the country’s “world-class” ambitions. There is the Pinnacle@Duxton, Singapore’s first fifty-storey public housing project, a massive, tenement-like outgrowth, the result of an international competition for new ideas in public housing architecture. And there is the instantly iconic Marina Bay Sands complex, with its triple towers raising their boat-shaped cap to the sky like an abstract Colossus of Rhodes, and boasting what is probably the island’s only spherical structure, the Moshe Safdie-designed ArtScience Museum, curving up from the expanse of the bay like a cracked, snowy-white eggshell. More recently, the massive Gardens by the Bay project was erected on some 250 acres of reclaimed land in the new Marina downtown district, featuring colossal conservatories and so-called heritage gardens; the site was intended to be “a defining feature of Singapore’s aspirations to become a global city.”18

Like the eternal incompletion of the graphic mark – contingent, processual, mutable – the global city that is contemporary Singapore enfolds its own always-becoming into its being: a globality that serves as a signifier of ellipsis, that renders the city void precisely because “it can be like any other ‘global’ city in the world”19 …

… and, indeed, strives to be.

Or, rather, is striving to be.

12A Drawing Show

NOTES

1 Qtd. in Laura Hoptman, Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002). See her Introduc-tion, p. 11.

2 In conversation with the author.

3 Catherine de Zegher, “A Century under the Sign of Line: Drawing and its Extension (1910–2010)” in de Zegher and Cornelia Butler, eds, On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), pp. 21–123. See p. 23.

4 Emma Dexter, “To Draw is to be Human” in Dexter, Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2005), pp. 6–10. See p. 6.

5 Michael Craig-Martin, “Drawing the Line, Reappraising Drawing Past and Present” in Jim Savage, ed., Drawing Texts (Cork: Occasional Press, 2001), pp. 9–12. See p. 11.

6 De Zegher remarks: “If, for linguists, naming with the word was the act of consciousness through which we begin to know, for the artists the rendering of form in drawing transformed perception into naming, and so was the process through which they came to know. Cognition thus proceeds from creation, with line as indictor of a cognitive process.” (Italics mine.) See “A Century under the Sign of Line”, p. 24.

7 Dexter, “To Draw is to be Human”, p. 6.

8 For a look at the corporeal dimension of process and gesture in drawing, see, for one, Cornelia Butler’s essay, “Walkaround time: drawing and dance in the twentieth century” in On Line.

9 Rosalind Krauss, “Grids”, October, vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp. 50–64. See p. 60.

10 As they indeed did, according to Woo himself. In conversation with the author.

11 For a brief study of automatism in drawing, see Susan Laxton’s “The Surreality Effect” in Leslie Jones, ed, Drawing Surrealism (Munich: Prestel, 2012), pp. 152–61.

12 Qtd. in Jeremy Fernando, “On the Ellipsis; Singapore, Kafka, and If We Dream Too Long” in Koh Tai Ann and Neil Murphy, eds, Southeast Asian Review of English, “Singapore & Malaysia Special Issue”, no. 50 (2010), pp. 59–70. See p. 61.

13 Ibid, p. 65.

14 For another account of the economistic logic of the People’s Action Party’s policies in guiding the development of post-Inde-pendence Singapore, see C. J. W-L. Wee, “Our Island Story: Economic Development and the National Narrative in Singapore”, in Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee, eds., New Terrains in Southeast Asian History (Research in International Studies Southeast Asia Series), no. 107 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003).

15 Fernando, “On the Ellipsis”, p. 60.

16 Ibid, p. 66–7.

17 The country’s third and current Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, assumed leadership in 2004, succeeding Goh Chok Tong, who had been governing since 1990.

18 Alvin Chua, “Gardens by the Bay”, Singapore Infopedia (January, 2013). <http://infopedia.nl.sg/articles/SIP_2012-06-26_095923.html>

19 Fernando, “On the Ellipsis”, p. 59.

Essay13

Ian Woo

14A Drawing Show

Q : Not to begin with unfairly broad questions, but why do you draw (as opposed, perhaps, to painting, sculpting, performing etc.)? If your practice encompasses other mediums in addition to drawing, is there a relationship between those varied aspects of your practice? - e.g. if you paint as well, do you draw as a preliminary means to painting, or does the pencil/crayon possess its own aesthetic authority for you? If you also engage in performance art, is there a performative element to your acts of drawing?

I draw mainly because I am attracted to the materiality of paper, immediacy of image and momentum of drawing. Working with pencils, graphite and washes are very different physically and in terms of speed to that of painting on canvas. I think drawing is also something everyone can do, from kids to adults. I like that interactiveness it has. I do not draw before I paint, they each function with on its own purposes. However, there are similar systems occurring in both paintings and drawings. Compared to my paintings, my drawings sometimes have no colour. I used to think that it feels far away in time. But I am not sure now. It is difficult to do it for too long because I have to start working with colours again. It’s like restraining myself to just drinking water and eating vegetables every day!

Q :What does drawing mean to you, personally? A lot of the theoretical discourse around the medium is premised on the fact of the line (as the basic unit), but do you conceive of it differently, in your own way? For instance, to return to the idea of performance – is drawing about the gesture rather than the visual object for you? Or, to raise another example, do you see the ephemerality of the medium as being fundamental to its practice, discourse etc.?

Drawing reveals the process of thoughts. Erasing and realigning are drawing methods I use in my drawings that reflect unsureness and the process of making decisions. These decisions are marked and cannot be fully removed in my drawings. While, on canvas, there are ways to obscure earlier decisions. So it’s like an X-ray of thoughts. In terms of gesture and performativity, I am only concerned with the trace of drawing as a visual indicator. If you see me drawing, it’s a very boring activity. I am not exactly the most dynamic performer even if I am drawing a large drawing. I also have this association of drawing images with the appearance or emergence of sound, as metaphor. The same can be compared to my paintings. Imagery appear from out of nowhere and converge and intertwine till a complete picture is discovered.

Q : Is the fact that art history has consistently relegated drawing to a subordinate position – with regards to other mediums – a factor in your practice of it? Does it impact how you view yourself as an artist, or what your practice is?

interview

Ian Woo

15Interview

I remember seeing an exhibition in London, at the Hayward Gallery, called Drawing the Line, curated by Michael Craig-Martin. It was a history of drawings emphasizing the idea of line work. This exhibition made a big impact on me, instilled a belief that drawing played an important role in our society simply as a way to visually communicate emotion, ideas – and the future.

I think it’s natural that people need to be reminded about the importance of drawing. This is because we seem to have taken its relevance for granted, compared with art that is produced by machines. Drawing has a universal appeal and this can be seen in its primal relationship to our need to draw on caves, walls and surfaces at the beginning of time. I believe that drawing is about being human.

Q : How would you define drawing (if one would like to engage in such an exercise)? - Not simply with regards to your own practice of it, but in general.

I like the word “sketch”: it considers the initial thought of imaging more important than the completeness of a drawing; the spontaneity and freshness of an idea. So this raises the interesting possibility that the unfinished has the potential to offer imaginary interactiveness. So to sketch is an attitude or tool that I use within my drawings to create an open space where the viewer is encouraged by the incompletion of certain parts to fill in.

Q : In terms of drawing, who are some of the artists who have influenced your own practice? Which aspects of their work have been important for you?

I like Raphael, whose pencil rendered portraits have an evolving quality, emphasizing volume as if the image was appearing before you. I had a book when I was 20, of Joseph Beuys’ watercolours done with coffee, and it was around the time when the National Museum had a show of his works, mostly his objects and installations. I did not understand it but it had an engaging and poetic quality to it. Cy Twombly’s drawings I saw around the same time and something about it affirmed the direction I was interested in heading in, that spontaneous scrawl-like intention, like that of a child’s, but systematic in its own world. I saw a documentary, when I was about 18 or something, of Jimmy Ong being interviewed by [T. K.] Sabapathy in his Chinatown studio. I think his work in Singapore in the 1990s suggested to me a sense of intensity, of what a drawing could be. It was unique and the mark-making went places beyond representation. I enjoyed looking at it, it was like a dance.

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Hymn Spheres

2014 | graphite and charcoal on paper | 162 x 114 cm

17A Drawing ShowInterview

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19A Drawing Show - Ian Woo

Clicks

2014 | graphite and charcoal on paper | 56 x 76cmMoth Days

2014, graphite and charcoal on paper | 56 x 76cm

A Drawing Show - Ian Woo

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Tracker #1

2014 | graphite and charcoal on paper | 40 x 50cmTracker #3

2014 | graphite and charcoal on paper | 40 x 50cm

21A Drawing Show - Ian Woo

Tracker #4



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Tracker #2




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25A Drawing Show

Tracker #7


2014, graphite and charcoal on paper | 40 x 50cmSquare Time


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Zither High Noon


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28A Drawing Show

Ian Woo (b. 1967, Singapore)

Ian Woo was the recipient of the UOB Painting of the Year award in the Abstract category. He was also the Juror’s Choice for two consecutive years in South East Asia’s Philip Morris Award in 1999 and 2000. Woo is seen as an influential artist and academic, whose works are known to push the envelope of the medium of painting as a reflexive language, shifting between matter and space. Ideas pertaining to the incidental and that of spatial change are pivotal influences to his work.

Woo’s first solo exhibition “Mental Images: Paintings and Drawings” was held at the LASALLE Gallery in Singapore in 2000 and since then, he has been exhibiting both regionally and interna-tionally. Recent solo exhibitions include “How I Forgot to be Happy” at Tomio Koyama Gallery Singapore (2013) and “Ian Woo: A Review 1995 – 2011” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (2011). Select group shows include “Panorama: Recent Art From Contemporary Asia” at the Singapore Art Museum (2012), “Encounter: The Royal Academy in Asia” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (2012), and “Sovereign Asian Art Prize Exhibition” at The Rotunda, Exchange Square, Hong Kong (2010). His works are in the collection of major institutions such as ABN AMRO, Singapore Art Museum, The Istana Singapore, The National Art Gallery Singapore, UBS, and the Mint Museum of Craft & Design, USA.

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Wong Lip Chin

30A Drawing Show

interview

Wong Lip Chin


I don’t have a favourite medium. Certain ideas are better expressed through a specific medium, and that’s the reason why my practice encompasses a broad range of mediums. Drawing, in my opinion, is not unlike a child’s view of the world; a very raw and sincere form of expression. A kid will tell someone s/he’s fat, but an adult will be mindful. Drawing is one of the most basic mediums and modes of expression.

Drawing does boast its own aesthetic authority for me. There is so much variation in mark-making, in the pressure or speed you apply on to the surface. With painting, everything is pre-planned, or has to be, but I, for my part, seldom make preliminary sketches. Performance is about body language, and is about gesture also, much like drawing – which can describe one’s emotional state. Drawing is far more meditative, personally, then any other form of art-making; the attention and focus needed at times makes it feel like I am going into a trance.

Q : What does drawing mean to you, personally? A lot of the theoretical discourse around the medium is premised on the fact of the line (as the basic unit), but do you conceive of it differently, in your own way? For instance, to return to the idea of performance – is drawing about the gesture rather than the visual object for you? Or, to raise another example, do you see the ephemerality of the medium being fundamen-tal to its practice, discourse etc.?

Drawing to me is fucking naked. That’s the only expression to describe it. I have a love-hate re-lationship with it: it can be empowering, but it really can be also one of the hardest mediums to execute. Think of Chinese ink painting: the act of painting is much more reversible than, say, pencil or charcoal …

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Interview


I seldom put much thought into drawing; I am more interested in what the medium is and what can be done with it, materially speaking. It’s about exploring the possibilities of mark-making.


Drawing can be simply about pencil and paper, but it can be broader and abstract too – e.g. a wet umbrella as a tool for drawing on a dry surface. The approaches to mark-making – drawing, sketches, drafting or doodling – all possess a very similar energy, regardless of the tools involved.


I’m a big fan of Brancusi’s drawings. They have a certain childlike quality that’s very appealing, very enigmatic, for me.

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Sometimes You Make Me Smile

2014 | pencil on paper | 76 x 56cm

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Blue Veils & Golden Sands / Unicorn Quarter


A Drawing Show - Wong Lip Chin

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My Aphrodisiac is You / Unicorn Quarter


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When You’re Lost I’ll Find You / Unicorn Quarter


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/ Unicorn Quarter


37A Drawing Show

Richest Man in Babylon Unicorn Quarter


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Wong Lip Chin (b.1987, Singapore)

Wong Lip Chin was born in Singapore in 1987. As an artist, his practice runs the gamut from performance to drawing, to printmaking, painting and large-scale installations. His iconography is informed by pop culture and politics; his work is both autobiographical and socio-politically engaged, at once satirical and experimental, and almost always imbued with his particular brand of wit. After graduating from LASALLE College of the Arts, he was part of the SAF creative team during his national service years. He subsequently spent protracted periods of time abroad, in Eu-rope and the USA, as part of a self-imposed sabbatical. Wong’s work has been featured in a number of solo and group shows, both locally and internationally; he has shown with Michael Janssen Galerie, Shanghart and Yavuz Fine Art. His oeuvre also includes public works commissioned by the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), and the Marina Mandarin Hotel.

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Boedi Widjaja

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Drawing is probably less a chosen medium than an automatic corporeal impulse, in my case. I didn’t learn it in an art academy, but rather it’s something I’ve been doing since childhood. As with any recurring activity, it soon became habitual and after decades, it now feels almost involuntary. Drawing is more than an activity on paper; I perceive reality through its visual, tactile, aural and spatial dimensions. Depending on subject and parameters, the act of drawing manifests itself differently. Often, in the making of a work, different acts of drawing happen sequentially to get to the desired point. Hence, the final outcome is the compound result of this sequence.

Q : What does drawing mean to you, personally? A lot of the theoretical discourse around the medium is premised on the fact of the line (as the basic unit), but do you conceive of it differently, in your own way? For instance, to return to the idea of performance – is drawing about the gesture rather than the visual object for you? Or, to raise another example, do you see the ephemerality of the medium as being fundamental to its practice, discourse etc.?

I don’t think about drawing as a medium; I see it closer to an action, a method or in my case, a faculty. It is about sensing intuitively from my location, a point, and the act to reach it. Almost any gesture, be it making a line on paper, writing a sentence, building an installation, walking a path or a minimal turn of the body, can be acts of drawing.

interview

Boedi Widjaja

41

Interview


I don’t find myself having to wrestle with these ideas that are found in Western art history. As a child, I was always surrounded by drawings: comic books, cartoons, calendars with printed Chinese paintings, pencil marks on fabric (my mother sewed), technical drawings in the manual (my father repaired the sewing machine), etc. The primacy of drawing held true for me then and continues to do so now. I enjoy drawings that gently resist conclusion. This is often seen as a weakness but I see it as a mature attitude in contrast to the various forms of machismo that I experienced in the art world.


There are two aspects of drawing: action and outcome. I have talked about the former. The latter, I will generally say as anything with discernible figure-ground qualities. I aim for each work to be a sketch, or a diagram in Deleuzian terms: economical in process and material use, with the outcome being conceptually open and extendable.


The influences are so many. However I am presently interested to relook at how the philosophies and methods of Soviet artists like Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rod chenko and Wassily Kandinsky have informed my practice. I feel like they each practiced drawing through the disciplines of graphic design, sculpture and architecture. This multidisciplinary approach is something that I am keen on, to produce works as different instances of a gestalt.

To end with a quote from Alexander Rodchenko: “On the one hand, line is the entire construction taken as a whole…in this case the line is the carcass, the skeleton, the relationship between different planes. On the other, it fixes the kinetic moments of the construction of an organism used as a unitary whole made up of individual parts, and in this case line is the path ahead, movement, collision, conjunction, break and continuation… Only the line, then, tells us what has happened.”

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Paper Stone (Studies I) 2014 | Paint, wall paste and rock fragments on paper | 21.0 x 29.7cmSeries of 10

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Wall Paper (detail 2 & 3) 2014, Installation, 9 drawings (ink, paste and wall fragments on paper), glass sheets, bricks and video, variable dimension

45A Drawing Show

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Wall Paper (detail 4) 2014 | Installation, 9 drawings (ink, paste and wall fragments on paper), glass sheets, bricks and video, variable dimension

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Boedi Widjaja

Installation in progress

48A Drawing Show

Boedi Widjaja (b.1975, Indonesia)

Boedi Widjaja is a trained architect. His childhood experience of having to live apart from his parents due to ethnic tensions, rotating amongst stranger-families, has perhaps resulted in his impression of spaces as amorphous entities that exist as identities and mythologies. Widjaja often uses drawing and human interaction as methods in his practice. He makes phenomenological investigations into overlapping concerns of the urban migrant’s gaze; corporeal time-space in the city; handmade drawing and its agency; and post-digital aesthetics and materiality. His artistic outcomes are proces-sual and conceptually-charged, ranging from drawings to installations and live art.

Boedi’s recent awards and commissions include: First Prize in the Singapore Land Transport Author-ity Art Competition for Beauty World Station (2012); Public art commission Asemic Text (2012); Recipient of Substation’s Visual Art Open Call (2012); Highly Commended Award at the 31st UOB Painting of the Year Competition (2012); Commission by the Yellow River Arts Centre for Yellow River Arts Centre logo (2012) and Sungai, Sejarah (2012); Finalist for Celeste Prize 2012 for Ian, Rem, Kal; and Grand Prize (Sound Arts) for Palimpsest - INSITU Fort Canning Hill at Bains Numeriques #7 in France (2012). The last project was developed through INSITU.ASIA, an ongoing artist travelogue founded by Widjaja in 2010. The artist has developed solo exhibitions at the opening of Gillman Barracks, Singapore (inaugural exhibition at the Yellow River Arts Centre Singapore base); Jendela Gallery, The Esplanade, Singapore; and The Substation Gallery, Singapore. His works are in the collection of Yinchuan Art Museum, China and the private collection of collec-tors from different parts of the world, including Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan, China, London, Copenhagen, San Francisco and New York. Widjaja will be exhibiting in the group exhibi-tion «A drawing show», curated by Louis Ho at Yeo Workshop from 1 August 2014.

49A Drawing Show

Jaitip Jaidee

50A Drawing Show

interview

Jaitip Jaidee


I often combine drawing with other techniques, or material objects. The reason for using drawing as a primary medium is that I am fascinated with how the tools of drawing are used in everyday life - paper, pencil and pen. These are things we are familiar with, and we have utilized since child-hood. We use paper to write and make notes and record details of our lives, it becomes a space to create meaning. Though I use humble materials like colour pencils, crayon or pen, these signal the beginnings of art, which derive from my everyday life.

At the moment, I am often integrating my drawing with other objects because I’m interested in real-ity, in three-dimensionality. For instance, I integrate drawing with woodworking in order to create a dialogue and relationship between two- and three-dimensional mediums. The multi-dimensional object, so to speak, then becomes a part of the physical space in which it is displayed (I assume the latter to be part of my work as well). Ideas and art develop from how we see and learn things from other practices – from painting, sculpture, installation, performance – and from other pursuits like design, music, architecture or even cooking. Ideas come from consuming and understanding the world around us.

Q : What does drawing mean to you, personally? A lot of the theoretical discourse around the medium is premised on the fact of the line (as the basic unit), but do you conceive of it differently, in your own way? For instance, to return to the idea of performance – is drawing about the gesture rather than the visual object for you? Or, to raise another example, do you see the ephemerality of the medium as being fundamental to its practice, discourse etc.?

If I look at my mind, I reckon I am not just drawing on any material but also looking into it, look-ing at things around myself. Then, I realise that I see and am interested in something different from other.

I started drawing in an abstract sense – non-narrative, non-figural. I don’t draw in a functional way, or to represent concrete objects, physical reality. The way I see it, my works are akin to objects that have drawing as a complement. Over time, I collected various objects in my working area; I often use pencil or pen on paper, which might well fade with time. I reckon this is the strength of using pen and pencil, since everything fades, even feelings … John Berger said that “Seeing comes before

51Interview

words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” I’m interested in the gap between words and things, in the abstract. These invisible things? – feelings are our primary guide to them, and I let myself be guided by them. I let myself be controlled by the pen- I am only the intermediary, there to execute lines till no more space is left.


Drawing is a fundamental thing; it’s probably the reason that the medium is viewed as subordinate. Art history defines and promotes hierarchies, due to various factors – culture, the economy, value creation etc. But each medium, each work of art, has its own value and mode of beauty.


Anything created with pencil, pen, coloured pencil or whatever drawing or writing tool, may be labelled a drawing because a definition of drawing depends on the views of the artist, the audience, the art world.


Chitti Kasemkitvatana is someone who has had a lot of influence on my work. When I was in school at university, I had an opportunity to meet him, and he later became my advisor. He posed a series of fundamental questions to me, and taught me to think hard about what I enjoyed doing, and why. Even when I took a photo, he told me to really think about the message being conveyed by this simple image, because it’s a basic form of expression.

I love Walter Bishop’s remark that “What we perceive as solid matter is mostly empty space. Just as we may perceive that a life is full that is actually a series of empty encounters.” [From the TV show, Fringe.] Indeed, everything is possible, everything may be created from nothing. We assign value and meaning, and fill the emptiness with our ambitions.

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53A Drawing Show

(SILENCE) #01-Black Things or Another things2013-2014 | Ink on Veneer wood, Ebony wood, | 71.1 x 51.1 x 3.5 cm

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55A Drawing Show

(SILENCE) #02 White Things or Another things2013-2014 | Ink on Veneer wood, Ebony wood, | 71.1 x 51.1 x 3.5 cm

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57A Drawing Show

58A Drawing Show

Jaitip Jaidee(b.1989, Thailand)

Jaitip Jaidee attained a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine and Applied Arts from Bangkok University in 2010. After graduation, she has participated in several group exhibitions such as “Brand New Art Project, 2012”, “Thaitai Fever-Stage Two: The Politics (Drama) of a Certain Site” at Ocac in Bang-kok, “Spot Art 2013” at ARTrium@MICA, Singapore and “Sweet Nightmare Exhibition” at Bang-

kok University Gall.

Documents

"An Essay on Draw-ing"