Art review: Tetraphilia | 4/5, Landscape Memories | 3.5/5

SINGAPORE — They are both held at fashion boutiques, but the ongoing exhibitions, Tetraphilia at Hermes and Landscape Memories at Espace Louis Vuitton, have more in common than just the space they’re in: Both offer up new ways of re-articulating longstanding definitions.

With artwork titles like Tetracycline, Tetrahydropholic and Tetragrammaton, it’s not difficult to guess Hong Kong-based artist Nadim Abbas’ curious fascination with the word “tetra”. In his first solo show in Singapore, he moves beyond the limitations of prescriptive meanings to map the many lives of the word using objects, images, tastes and sounds.

From a tropical freshwater fish to the number four to chemical compounds, the word “tetra” is laden with meaning. Tetraphilia expands beyond what words may provide us, offering an excessive collection that visually charts its possible forms, and finding expression in, among other things, multiple video loops of fish, a playful set up that includes marshmallows (it contains tetrasodium pyrophosphate, by the way) and Tetris games.

There’s another layer, too. Implicit in his use of mass-produced materials — Holy Mt II features a pyramid of Tetra Pak packet drinks — are the explorations of psychological patterns related to the kitsch and the generic, and points to constructed claims about quality. The collapse in distinctions between high and low art self-reflexively addresses certain pretensions of high culture.

The idea of landscape, meanwhile, is examined in the group show Landscape Memories. Curated by Khim Ong and featuring the works of Donna Ong, Genevieve Chua, Jane Lee and Ng Joon Kiat, landscapes here are seen through its relationship to human perception and memory, while drawing attention to what is often overlooked in nature.

In the works of Ng and Lee, it occurs through the materiality of the painted surface. The former suggests aerial views of imaginary landscapes that explore the futility of civilisation’s demarcation of nature; while the latter visually interprets sensorial experiences of space through profuse sections of paint, which are highly tactile.

For Chua, the wilderness is a potent terrain to examine fear and paranoia. In the subtly-coloured prints of flowers and ferns in her Nocturne Series, Chua hints at both nature’s splendour and its sinister side. Ong’s Landscape Portraits (In A Beautiful Place Nearby), in the meantime, is an assemblage of everyday objects, such as screws and pins, which resemble both astonishing views of cities and gardens. Her work bestows new life on everyday mundane objects and invites us to fulfill its imagined realm. Landscape Memories provides contemporary points of engagement and encounters with our environment — not just mere depiction of the real world.

Tetraphilia:

Landscape Memories: