Drawing together works from the Gallery’s contemporary collections, ‘Earth and Elsewhere’ features artists whose works frame the past and help shape our understanding of the delicate and often paradoxical synapses between memory and history, empathy and reception. The exhibition tracks a path across the planet’s surface and atmosphere, mapping an interpretation of the human condition through a series of poetic and philosophical associations. From fissures in memory, to structures of interpersonal relations, and the in-between spaces that have the capacity to transport us from here to elsewhere, the exhibition is presented in three interconnected constellations of works — ‘The cracked earth’, ‘Personal cosmologies’ and ‘Farewell to the sea’ — that begin on the ground before taking to the stars.

The exhibition was inspired by Patricio Guzmán’s poetic film essay Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light) 2010, which positions memory as central to understanding the human condition. Set in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the film features three interconnected searches into the past: astronomers study distant stars and solar systems located billions of years ago; archaeologists exhume and study carefully preserved human remains and artefacts; and a group of women search for Chile’s desaparecidos ― loved ones assassinated during Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year military dictatorship whose bodies are believed to have been scattered in the desert. Nostalgia de la luz unites these different attempts to connect with the past by balancing that which defines one’s personal experience of the world with the larger narrative of how and why we remember.

Harun Farocki, Czech Republic/Germany b.1944 | Übertragung (Transmission) 2007 | HD video transferred to Digital Betacam, colour, stereo, 43 minutes | Purchased 2011. John Darnell Bequest | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | © The artist

Like Guzmán’s film, ‘Earth and Elsewhere’ asks why we are drawn to, and grounded by, acts of remembrance. This question is connected to the creation and reception of art itself, conjoining the processes of retaining and reviving impressions of the past with the motivations for making physical that which cannot be reconciled by memory alone. Art becomes a site in which the experience of memory is given primacy, and to borrow Guzmán’s expression, embodied as a ‘fragile present moment’ when he ends Nostalgia de la luz with the suggestion: ‘Those who have a memory are able to live in the fragile present moment. Those who have none don’t live anywhere’.

Simryn Gill, Malaysia b.1959 | Dalam 2001 | Type C photograph on paper | The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2003 with funds from The Myer Foundation, a project of the Sidney Myer Centenary Celebration 1899–1999, through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | © The artist

‘The cracked earth’ brings together works that make symbolic connections between bodies and landforms, revealing the imprint of lived experience and the complexities of returning to a past which is now beyond our grasp. Some artists excavate individual and collective trauma by showing the earth broken and damaged, while others summon spectres from the past to make visible the gaps in social and political histories. The body’s material presence is given primacy in works that record its imprint and allegorise the fragility of land with the bodies that inhabit it. ‘Personal cosmologies’ examines the larger world of emotions constructed through personal exchange, confession and participation, with artists’ structures and archives recovering lost pasts or imagining repositories for individual and collective memories. Other works in this section encourage activities in the gallery space that make empathy the subject of art itself. ‘Farewell to the sea’ considers the vastness of the earth’s liminal spaces: the sea and the sky are recurring characters in the final section, as are metaphors for the dissolving of physical and psychic boundaries and the infinite possibilities offered by abstraction.

Dadang Christanto, Indonesia b.1957 | For those: Who are poor, Who are suffer(ing), Who are oppressed, Who are voiceless, Who are powerless, Who are burdened, Who are victims of violence, Who are victims of a dupe, Who are victims of injustice 1993 | Bamboo, cane, 37 pieces of varying lengths | The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 1993 with funds from The Myer Foundation and Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | © The artist

‘Earth and Elsewhere’ stresses the importance of the past ― indeed, that we have no future without the past ― and highlights our collective desires to seek objects and images that connect us with it. The exhibition queries what binds these questions of personal and social desire to bigger ideas about our place in history and the universe. From the experiences of trauma seen on the ground, the exhibition ends by looking outward, above and beyond, as an alternative means of understanding and reconciling our relationships with the past, present and future. For, as Guzmán urges, “the matter of our bodies is the matter of the stars. We belong to the Milky Way – that’s our home, not just the Earth.”

Segar Passi, Meriam Mir people, Australia b.1942 | Kerkar meb 1 2011 | Synthetic polymer paint on paper | Purchased 2011 with funds from Anne Best through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | © The artist

The exhibition also features work by Sadie Benning (USA), Latifa Echakhch (Morocco/France), Tracey Emin (England), Guan Wei (China/Australia), Emily Jacir (Palestine/United States), Anish Kapoor (England), William Kentridge (South Africa), Dinh Q Le (Vietnam), Lee Mingwei (Taiwan/USA), Jose Legaspi (The Philippines), Jorge Mendez Blake (Mexico), Rivane Neuenschwander (Brazil), Henrique Oliveira (Brazil), Mitra Tabrizian (Iran/England), Chandraguptha Thenuwara (Sri Lanka), Judy Watson (Waanyi people, Australia), Sharif Waked (Palestine) and others.

‘Earth and Elsewhere: Works from the Contemporary Collection’ opens at GOMA on Saturday 25 May with a curatorial talk and a welcoming performance by artist Dadang Christanto in relation to his work, For those: Who are poor, Who are suffer(ing), Who are oppressed, Who are voiceless, Who are powerless, Who are burdened, Who are victims of violence, Who are victims of a dupe, Who are victims of injustice [pictured] 1993.

Edmund Rosenstengel, the most highly regarded furniture maker in Brisbane from the 1920s to the 1950s, provided the benchmark of excellence in his field for several generations. This acquisition, purchased for the Collection with the generous assistance of Valmai Pidgeon, AM, is a piece that Rosenstengel made for himself.

Edmund Rosenstengel (1887–1962) was born in Toowoomba, where he was apprenticed in 1902 to Rosenstengel & Kleimeyer, his father’s cabinetmaking business. He was later to work in Sydney, Auckland, Vancouver, and the Grand Rapids in the United States, as well as in England and Europe, before returning to Toowoomba to rejoin the family firm in 1911. In 1922, he settled in Brisbane and established a business of his own in Fortitude Valley, where he remained until his retirement in 1958. Rosenstengel’s work was distinguished by the use of Queensland timbers, particularly Queensland maple and silky oak, together with elaborate carving and marquetry inlay.

Popular items included black-stained oak dining tables and sideboards in the Jacobean style, suited to the ‘Tudor residences’ and ‘Spanish mission villas’ that were popular in the fashionable suburbs of Brisbane from the late 1920s. Other popular suites of furniture, for dining and bedrooms, were made in a simplified Queen Anne style. His most exceptional works date from the 1930s and follow the Edwardian taste for period revival styles. The Duke of Gloucester (later the Governor-General of Australia, 1945–47) toured Australia in 1934 to participate in the centenary celebrations of the state of Victoria; during his visit to Brisbane, he slept in a suite of Louis XV-style furniture specially commissioned by the Queensland Government for Government House.

Chest of drawers photographed in Rosenstengel’s home in Harcourt Street, New Farm

The use of Wedgwood’s blue and white cameo reflects the inspiration of Neoclassicism

The furniture Rosenstengel made for his own home in Harcourt Street, New Farm, such as this chest of drawers, was of equivalent quality. The chest follows the model of that in the Government House suite but the bound reeds at the corners (fasces) reflect the inspiration of Neoclassicism in the succeeding period of Louis XVI. This is emphasised by the use of Wedgwood’s blue and white cameos, which were widely used in English furniture of the late eighteenth century. A contemporary element is added by the black glass (vitrolite), which protects the top surface.

After surviving the Depression and the restrictions of World War Two, Rosenstengel was able to return to active business — indeed, by the early 1950s, his workforce and output rivalled those of the pre-war years. However, around this time, Rosenstengel’s health began failing, and he announced the closure of the company in 1956. A final flurry of orders from his loyal clientele required him to remain in business until March 1958, at which time he finally closed up rather than risk tarnishing his reputation.

Chest of drawers is currently on display in the Australian art collection display in the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries, Queensland Art Gallery (QAG).

Installation view of Chest of drawers at the Queensland Art Gallery

It is often said that Zavros’s subject is beauty itself, but it is, more generally, symbols of status. His canon of beauty is aspirational – keyed to notions of privilege, tradition and the faux-aristocratic taste of luxury brands. Zavros’s work speaks to a desire for status, and therefore also to our fear of not having it – what television-philosopher Alain de Botton famously called ‘status anxiety’… Those who love him think his work epitomises precisely what art should be (which is what they have or want, like and are); those who loathe him think it is everything art should not be (class, ideology). The strength and clarity of Zavros’s project lies precisely in his ability to polarise his audience…

For me, what is so sharp about Zavros’s art is how utterly, rigorously and deliberately uncritical it is.

With this in mind, I have come to suspect that when Michael ‘likes’ something, he may well like it with a greater commitment than another person might in a similar situation. When, as Leonard notes, ‘Zavros is an aesthete: he paints beautiful things beautifully’, I think to myself, Michael likes certain objects so much — objects that he finds beautiful — that he cannot help but paint them in dedication or devoutness.

When I took Michael through the QAGOMA Collection storage looking for works to include in ‘A Private Collection’, I noticed how very easy it was for him to discern what he found appealing. Michael could say with speed and conviction as we walked at pace through the racks of artworks: ‘yes’, ‘hmm’ (meaning polite no), ‘yes, I love this’. Less concerned with historical context, social function, cultural significance, Michael is motivated by satisfying his very attentive eyes.

Installation view of the Abstract Room in ‘A Private Collection – Artist’s Choice: Michael Zavros’

As Michael explained in our recent video interview, if he feels positively towards an artwork, piece of furniture or item of clothing, it inspires him to exercise a kind of intellectual ownership over it. In the studio, he becomes committed to forming a visual understanding of his affections, converting his meditations into a drawn or painted image, using his knowledge of form and tone. Often he creates scenes or interiors to contextualise his subjects and give them depth.

Applying this strategy to ‘A Private Collection’, Michael came to ‘own’ certain works from the Collection by creating a series of decorative settings, a visual balance through the display, and making the works accessible through the more familiar or comfortable vernacular of the domestic, rather than the standard museum method.

Walking through ‘A Private Collection’ we can see the world the way that Michael does – keyed to beauty, splendour, and playfulness — exploring his personality projected into the space. The exhibition itself becomes an artwork, a space that we imagine sharing time in, living in, and reflecting upon.  Whether he is railing against a fear of not having things, I am not so sure but he certainly is aware of what quality means to him in terms of human achievement. I suspect his intention is to try to fix beauty in taxidermy, art, or even the exhibition catalogue of installation photographs, revealing not so much a status anxiety, but an awareness that everything, beautiful or not, is transient — whatever precautions we may take to stop it from fading away. 

‘A Private Collection – Artist’s Choice: Michael Zavros‘ is on display until 23 June in the Xstra Coal Queensland Artists’ Gallery at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG). Mirroring Michael Zavros’s recasting of the Gallery space as home to a distinguished private collector, the accompanying publication continues the fiction. With photography modelled on the style of a lavish interior decorating magazine, and captions imagining the collector’s life and adventures, this is a beautiful guide to the works on display.

Looking at Albrecht Dürer’s representations of the ‘last days’ – as described in the Book of Revelation of St John – it is not hard to imagine that, given a movie camera and a Hollywood studio budget, he would have turned his fantastic Apocalyptic saga into a major cinematic blockbuster. However, in the late fifteenth century, Dürer turned to the woodcut print to create a sequence of images that combined both high drama and mass appeal.

The Apocalypse had been a subject of art since around the fourth century, but it wasn’t until the Middle Ages that depictions of the Day of Judgement became commonplace, becoming more pertinent to followers of Christianity as the Black Death devastated Europe (1348–50). With the impending turn of the millennium in 1500 inducing fears of an apocalypse, Dürer brought the story of death, cosmic destruction and eventual salvation alive in a way that no other artist before him had managed to do. Published in book form in 1498, The Apocalypse revolutionised the graphic arts and became, in historical terms, an ‘international best seller’. It was this incredible response that prompted Dürer in 1511 to republish the series, both bound and available for sale as single sheet illustrations, together with a title page announcing it as ‘Apocalypse with figures’ (in contemporary terms, something like ‘The illustrated  Apocalypse’).

Thinking about the almost cinematic scope of Dürer’s illustrations, I can’t help but make comparisons with Swedish director Ingmar Berman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet). While Dürer belonged to an epoch that unquestioningly believed in the existence of Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil, Bergman’s twentieth-century telling explores the widespread existential crisis of faith that characterised the atomic era following the end of World War Two. In Dürer’s drama-filled illustration of The Seventh Seal (c.1496-97), (the seventh woodcut in the series), he shows the brief pause before the final three trumpet players sound their horns and an angel (in the form of an eagle) flies down crying ‘Woe, Woe, Woe’, in anticipation of the final catastrophic blows.

Bergman’s introspective film portrays a Teutonic knight, Antonius Block, returning from the Crusades to the plague-ravaged shores of his native Sweden in the early 14th century. It begins with the knight praying to God, only to be met with the ‘silence in heaven’ – the silence that immediately follows the breaking of the Seventh Seal on the Book of Revelation. ‘We live in ghost world’, concludes his atheistic squire, Jöns, following the knight’s unsuccessful quest to prove the existence of God, before Death finally claims him.

Bergman’s interpretation of the Apocalypse is in every respect a mid-twentieth century cinematic classic, but somehow I think Dürer would have been disappointed. When Death comes for the knight in Dürer’s film (at least as I imagine it), there would be no time for contemplation – and definitely no time-wasting chess games – just swords flying, buckets of blood, and a deafening heavy metal soundtrack.

The Apocalypse by Albrecht Dürer is on display in Gallery 2 at the Queensland Art Gallery, until 21 July 2013. The acquisition of five woodcuts, required to complete the series in the Gallery’s Collection, is the subject of the 2013 Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Appeal. More about the works.

Telephone (07) 3840 7262 for further information, or make a donation.

Albrecht Dürer, Germany 1471-1528 | The Opening of the Seventh Seal c.1496-97, from ‘The Apocalypse’, Latin edition, 1511 | Woodcut on paper | Purchased 2013 with funds from the Airey Family through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery

A new era for the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) began this week when incoming Director Chris Saines, CNZM was welcomed to the Gallery. This is an edited version of the Director’s welcome speech.

Thank you to the Traditional Owners of this land for their open-handed and powerful Welcome to Country. I could not have wished for a more heart-felt, appropriate and meaningful welcome than this.

I first acknowledge Uncle Des Sandy, Aunty Joan Collins and the Burragubba Dancers. Thank you for the generosity of your welcome to me and your acknowledgement of those who have come from Aotearoa to support me.

As the manager responsible for the appointment of this Gallery’s first curator of indigenous art, I feel immensely proud that my appointment coincides with the presentation of this ground-breaking contemporary exhibition My Country: I Still Call Australia Home, which takes over GOMA from 1 June.

This is an occasion that joins indigenous Australians to the indigenous peoples of Aotearoa, links my place of birth with an adopted land, and reminds me of the cultural obligations common to both.

I have, to this day, been supported by a remarkable group of Māori working for the interests of Māori, and I greatly look forward to strengthening the ties that bind this Gallery to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island community.

QAGOMA will remain a leading and a highly engaged partner in the delivery of outstanding visual arts programmes for and on behalf of Queenslanders.

I am honoured by this appointment and I truly can’t wait to get started!

To deliver on the collective aspirations for QAGOMA will require the commitment of a skilled and dedicated staff, and a focused and mobilised community of support, and in both respects this institution is fortunate indeed.

I come to a gallery with an established national and international reputation for its world-leading APT (The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art), its major exhibitions programme, its contemporary collection building and its Children’s Art Centre (CAC), and much else besides.

I come to a gallery with a distinguished 118-year history — one that has built a formative modern era into a remarkably successful period of contemporary achievement — one that is unquestionably a cornerstone of its community.

I recognise the transformational affect of GOMA, placing this gallery among the most visited in the world, but I also respect the history that preceded that development.

My task is to build on those foundations and to move QAGOMA to the next phase of its co-institutional life.

Contemporary art and contemporary artists are bound inextricably into our future, and I acknowledge the way in which those on whose shoulders I stand have created a unique space for connecting artists, art and people.

I look forward to meeting with the artists, local, regional, national and international whose work lies at the centre of that mission, and feel tremendously energised by the possibilities and the challenges that lie ahead.

Reflecting for a moment on the collection’s growth, I believe we need to make it work even harder, that there is capacity to be found among one of the country’s strongest contemporary collections.

The Gallery has a strong contemporary international and Asian and Pacific holding, without equal in Australia, much of which has been leveraged off its sustained investment in the APT — momentum which must not be lost.

The Gallery also has a deep well of institutional expertise and experience to draw on across many disciplines, including a curatorial team who I want to support to create more original research-focused exhibitions and publications.

Among the most rewarding exhibitions are those that we can develop through our own network of relationships and intellectual endeavour, exhibitions that we can then tour regionally, nationally and internationally.

At the same time, I want us to further excel at those very things we have already built a world-leading reputation for — such as the CAC and our work in touring and learning in regional Queensland.

This gallery has not spent the six years since the opening of GOMA, building an immensely distinctive and influential brand — in which the CAC and Cinémathèque have played pivotal roles — to see those gains diminished now.

Despite the economic constraints which all public art museums face worldwide, we must not allow our imaginations and our thinking to be constrained in reply.

I want this gallery to rise above the current challenges it faces in a way that inspires and engages our audiences, rather than simply reassures them we are working responsibly in their service — that much should be a given.

More than ever before, we need to work creatively, and take care not to confuse risk management with being risk averse. No one will thank us for lowering our ambitions and our horizons to meet a common denominator.

I feel tremendously excited about the possibilities of this new role, excited about what can be achieved together — working with artists and key cultural communities, with government, funders, patrons, our Board and staff.

I hope you will work with me, and with the Executive Management Team, as we begin to inexorably shape a new direction for the Gallery, one that brings its past with it in to its future.

Incoming Director (QAGOMA), Chris Saines, CNZM was welcomed to the Gallery this morning by staff, Trustees and Arts Minister Ian Walker MP.

Following a Welcome to Country from traditional elder Uncle Des Sandy and a performance by the Burragubba Dancers, Chris was farewelled by a contingent from the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki’s board of Maori advisors, Haerewa. 

Representatives Elizabeth Ellis, Mere Waihuka Lodge & Jonathan Mane-Wheoki travelled to Brisbane in honour of their longstanding friendship with Chris in his previous role of Director of the Auckland gallery, and warmly commended him to people of Queensland.

Hugh Knyvett was born in South Brisbane, Queensland on 15 September 1886. Shortly before World War One commenced he was a Home Missionary for the Presbyterian Church at Longreach. Enlisting as a private, he was an Intelligence Officer for the RAAF’s No.1 Squadron and the 15th Australian Infantry Battalion. Knyvett trained in Egypt, served at Gallipoli, then was badly wounded in France and sent home. After some months of treatment, he returned to active service and travelled via North America, intending to join the Royal Flying Corp. However, the United States Government employed him as a war lecturer, which involved recruiting drives and lecture tours across the country.

In 1918, his memoir, Over There with the Australians, was published in the States, where it became a rallying cry for Americans to join the war. Knyvett was befriended by presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. The latter wrote to his mother, stating how impressed he had been with Knyvett’s gentleness and courage.

Theodore Roosevelt wrote: I never came in contact with anyone who impressed me more with that combination of qualities so indispensable if humanity is to be saved — extreme gentleness and high idealism, with the loftiest and sternest courage and sense of duty.

Hugh Knyvett died in New York on the 15 April 1918, from the effects of shrapnel wounds he had received at Bapaume in France. He was honoured by the Chicago Club, who commissioned a bust in his memory from American sculptor Gilbert Riswold. Founded in 1869, the Chicago Club’s membership has included the city’s most prominent businessmen, politicians and families. A copy of the bust was sent to Knyvett’s mother, and this was donated to the Queensland Art Gallery in 1933.

Sculptor Gilbert Riswold was born in Baltic, South Dakota, in 1881. He was a pupil of Ada Caldwell, instructor of art at South Dakota State University, with whom he studied until he went on to the Chicago Art Institute. There he studied sculpture with Lorado Taft and Charles Mulligan. Riswold’s well-known works include the Mormon Battalion Memorial in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the Oak Park and River Forest Memorial (World War One) in Chicago. He lived most of his life in Chicago, moving to California in the 1930s. His sculptures were exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago between 1909 and 1920. Riswold died in Hollywood, California, on 15 March 1938.

Bust, Captain Hugh Knyvett is currently on display in the new Australian art collection display in the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries, Queensland Art Gallery (QAG).

This gold and pearl bracelet is a lovely example of work by the local firm Flavelle, Roberts & Sankey, and represents the jeweller’s skill as well as providing a glimpse of Queensland’s history.

This charming gold bracelet is the most significant piece of Queensland jewellery to come to the Gallery’s notice in recent years. The delicacy and refinement of the bracelet suggests that it may have been a special commission by a doting father for a favourite daughter. It consists of nine shells fashioned from Australian gold, each set with a small natural pearl, linked together with a larger detachable shell and pearl at the centre.

A newspaper advertisement in 1902 stated that Flavelle, Roberts & Sankey cut and polished gemstones and dealt in Queensland sapphires, opals and pearls; the pearls in this bracelet were probably harvested in north Queensland. Pearling was the largest industry in far north Queensland in the 1890s — in 1896, for instance, Thursday Island was home to 300 Japanese pearlers, a Japanese consul was based in Townsville, and pearling was the only industry ever exempted from the White Australia policy. The cast shell forms in this bracelet have a connection with Queensland: according to Dr John Healy, Curator Mollusca at the Queensland Museum, the shells are most likely from a Turbo snail (either Turbo brunneus or Turbo intercoastalis), as both have spirally grooved shells and a wide distribution, which takes in Queensland coastal waters.

Flavelle Bros. & Co was originally established in Brisbane in 1863. James Nash, the discoverer of the Gympie goldfields in 1868, brought the first consignment of 621 ounces of gold to Brisbane for Mr Flavelle to test and weigh. The resultant financial stimulus to the colonial economy put Queensland on the map. The firm later became Flavelle Bros. and Roberts before establishing itself as Flavelle, Roberts & Sankey in 1892, and opening a Rockhampton branch in December 1894. It moved to larger premises in the main street, East Street, within two years, and was still operating there more than 30 years later. Although largely a retail business, their silversmithing, watchmaking and optical work suggests that they were more than able to make jewellery as well as sell it, in Brisbane if not Rockhampton.

Indeed, by 1908, they described themselves as ‘manufacturing jewellers’. That year, for the Queensland Court of the Franco–British Exhibition in London, a promotional adjunct to their display of Queensland gemstones, titled ‘From Outer Darkness’, included reports of their exhibit at the ‘Melbourne Exhibition of Women’s Work’ in the previous year. This attracted the attention of Queen Alexandra. As a further mark of esteem, in 1909 the firm was appointed as gem merchant to Australia’s Governor General, the Earl of Dudley.

From the very beginning of the business, they had imported the finest English porcelains, and in later years, established a local reputation for Royal Worcester porcelain decorated with floral studies, after designs by Marian Ellis Rowan. Over the decades, Flavelle, Roberts & Sankey was a worthy competitor to rival businesses like Hardy Bros. and Wallace Bishop, but eventually closed in 1949.

This Queensland gold and pearl bracelet is currently on display in the new Australian art collection display in the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries, Queensland Art Gallery (QAG).

Malaysian artist Phuan Thai Meng’s photorealist paintings depict urban environments in unique and suggestive ways. He offers glimpses into the forgotten spaces of cities that lie between rapid construction and urban decay, relaying the relationship between these seldom-considered environments and local inhabitants. An educator and co-founder of the artist collective Rumah Air Panas (RAP), Phuan is an active member of the Kuala Lumpur art community whose practice extends beyond painting to include installations and multimedia projects that draw from daily life, local politics and urban development.

The Luring of [ ] . 流水不腐, 户枢不蠹 2012, a panoramic painting almost 10 metres long, presents a view through a number of freeway underpasses in Kuala Lumpur. A common sight in many cities around the world, these structures are so functional and ordinary that their visual effect is often overlooked; we can easily ignore their imposing scale, bleak ugliness and domination of public space. The work’s scale and perspective dwarfs us, capturing the massive bulk of these concrete giants. It also shows the quiet darkness and mildew-stained surfaces hidden underneath the roads on which modern society depends. In technically stunning photorealism, Phuan’s rendition of this urban environment is presented in a seamless fashion, but depicts a place rarely considered beautiful, contrasting the polish of the painting itself with the structural decay and grime of his subject.

Phuan further manipulates this seamless imagery by making unconventional modifications and adding details: a tear or cut, attaching a prop, or revealing a hidden support. Cutting into the canvas along the lines of the pylons, Phuan reveals the substrate of the work, destroying the illusion. The slashed canvas dangles limply in line with the concrete structures, accentuating their decay and neglect. The plywood visible beneath also evokes the structures of slums in urban Malaysia, contrasting the heavy concrete of mass development — a symbol of the country’s economic progress — with the cheap housing occupied by those who are yet to share in this success.

Specially commissioned for the Gallery’s Collection, the work is currently on display in ‘The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT7) until Sunday 14 April.

Tiffany Chung, a highly regarded South-East Asian artist has developed an ambitious work, specially commissioned for the Gallery’s Collection. The installation features in ‘The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT7) which closes Sunday 14 April.

Born in Vietnam, artist Tiffany Chung spent much of her youth in California, where she completed postgraduate studies before returning to her native country in 2000. Having rarely returned after migrating to the United States with her family, she experienced a curiosity for her motherland — in particular, regarding the thriving pop culture emanating from Asia — while many Asians were still looking to the West for inspiration (1).  Her early photographs and video works address economic and social development in Vietnam, her personal experiences of moving to the United States, and the influence of North American culture in Vietnam. Her recent installations and map works diverge from these themes, using the style and attributes of Pop abstraction and neo-Pop. Environmental change and imagined futures are explored through the tactility and repetition of consumer culture, providing her installations with a toy-like materiality.

Powerful in scale and enchanting in detail, roaming with the dawn – snow drifts, rain falls, desert wind blows 2012 consists of around 4000 glass animals on a 10-metre-long riverine plinth. Allegorically rendering an image of collective migration, it evokes the great forces that exist in the natural world. From golf ball-sized rabbits, cats and turtles to jaguars, rhinoceros, giraffes and elephants, the work features a menagerie of randomly grouped animals, displaying the diversity of the animal kingdom. Their transparency maintains a ghost-like lightness. Created in collaboration with a glassblower in Chung’s home town of Ho Chi Minh City, each animal is individually handmade, employing a craft that is ancient but now also largely used to make souvenirs for tourists. The sheer numbers of animals, their fragility, and their shiny, synthetic surfaces, provide an ethereal vision of an apocalyptic future. Balancing the natural and the surreal, the work recalls ideas of movement, and environmental and social change.

This installation is the second work by Tiffany Chung to enter the Gallery’s Collection. across the sea of dust and fluttering dragonflies 2008 has similar imagery of a migrating flock of animals. The artist has also worked closely with the gallery to develop this concept into an interactive project for Kids’ APT7, titled one day the bird flies across the sea.

Endnote
1. Steven Pettifor. ‘Living in limbo’, Asian Art News, vol.14, no.6, Nov–Dec 2004, pp.62–3.