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Art review: Parabola and Requiem (The Sea Can’t Reach You Now)

SINGAPORE — Public mourning and the history of the human pelvis.

SINGAPORE — Public mourning and the history of the human pelvis.

That’s what you get in two concurrent solo art shows by Jason Wee and Genevieve Chua, respectively, at Gillman Barracks.

So what’s in a bone? Lots, if Chua’s Parabola is anything to go by. The bones of the pelvis play a large part in your ability to walk upright, for one. Insofar as a group of bones could make us us, the pelvis ranks about as highly as the skull.

Reflecting this symbolic significance, Chua’s works emerge both from the complex topology of the pelvis and its role in our evolutionary history. The monumental serial forms of Parabola #1 rising above us with a sense of distant, ordered serenity, suggest both the spine’s emergence from the sacrum and the notion of evolution as progress — from “lower” to “higher” forms.

At the same time, the Swivel series’ apparent capacity for endless repositioning, coupled with the static-like patterns on each canvas, tends towards a model of change that isn’t saddled with such expectations of purposeful progress — instead of becoming backdrops to some future destination, they’re sufficient in themselves, means unburdened by ends.

On the other hand, Wee’s show, Requiem (The Sea Can’t Reach You Now), situates itself relative to a specific form of ending — of death — and what comes after for those left in their wake, who come to terms with it through grief and mourning. Where Chua’s Parabola show speculates and assigns no final destination to our species, Requiem focuses on the specific — the death of one — and looks at what begins when a person’s life ends.

Much of the gallery is given over to this theme, with several bodies of work tied together through the appropriately sombre blue of the gallery walls. It’s as if some grand parlour of a fine citizen’s estate was filtered through various layers of gnomic abstraction and conceptualisation, with an end of eliding, alluding to and exploring — rather than submitting to — grief.

The room is prefaced by We Rest Our Arms In Ash And Flames, a cardboard and vinyl fireplace mantel, distinctly European in flavour, yet featuring the sculptural forms of native mousedeer. Within this portion of the gallery, pride of place might go to the piece, Now That Everything Is Clear, Climb A Mountain, which subtly reflects and refracts its surroundings. While it might at first be taken for a mass of transparent shards — a freeze frame of exploding glass, dripping with the same blue of the walls — each piece slots neatly into others, suggesting that coherent order underlies the structure, which might function as a kind of spatial and conceptual hub.

As an exploration of grief and mourning, Requiem avoids rote sentimentality, for how can one do any proper exploring while misty-eyed and blubbering? And as for who is mourned, has been mourned, or may one day come to be mourned, the only hint may be Wee’s Self Portrait (Number One), a human-sized No 1 in glossy black granite, bearing the golden legend: “To the memory of my father, Mr Lee.” Bruce Quek

Parabola runs until Dec 21, noon to 7pm, Tomio Koyama Gallery, 47 Malan Road #01-26. Free admission.

Requiem (The Sea Can’t Reach You Now) runs until Jan 10, noon to 7pm, Michael Janssen Gallery, 9 Lock Road, #02-21. Free admission.

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