SINGAPORE — Billed as an atelier-style exhibition, Denise Jillian Tan’s second solo show Therefore I Am: The Making of a Portrait offers a fairly broad survey of the young artist’s practice.

As the title suggests, the focus is on the practice of portraiture, as well as Tan’s own ascent as an emerging artist (it includes a short video documenting the artist and her work, accompanied by a stirring brass soundtrack). And there’s a parallel to be found, apparently, between the collaboration between an artist and a sitter to produce a portrait, and between an artist and her audience to produce the artist’s significance.

The subjects she has chosen to portray are varied indeed, and include such familiar pop-culture figures as Mr Bean and Marilyn Manson, whose portraits come with humorously inaccurate quotations, in the online tradition of “troll quotes”. Seedier icons are on show as well, like Adrian Lim, who was part of the Toa Payoh ritual murders in 1981.

The show spans a range of approaches in portraiture; abstract renditions and faithful representations are both on show, as are highly stylised images and brooding, dark-and-edgy studies.

Considered as a whole, though, they tend not to stray far from maintaining the likeness of visual fidelity. Perhaps the farthest departure might be found in the portrait of Lim — the mottled black-and-white of his newspaper mugshot transformed into an energetic mass of greased brass that somehow fails to hold itself together.

On the other hand, the portraits of Mr. Bean and Manson indulge in the flatness of their source photographs, yielding disorienting oddities of form that don’t mesh well with the stark, simple mis-attribution of quotes carved into their surfaces.

These oddities of form are more pronounced — and more refined — in the fairytale series of Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Snow White, where they seem like more deliberate attempts to confront and destabilise the viewer, coupled with a rather out-of-place cross-cultural reference in Cinderella’s allusion to foot-binding. Similarly, the odd bodily form in Ring-A-Round A Rosie is paired, to some effect, with the light grotesquery of the subject’s apparent maiming.

The show, if you haven’t realised, borrows part of its title from the triumphant-sounding second half of philosopher Rene Descartes’ declaration of self-existence, “I think, therefore I am”. Unfortunately, it seems to have rather side-stepped the first — and crucial — half, where self-doubt allows Descartes to overcome deception.

Therefore I Am: The Making of a Portrait runs until June 5, 11am to 7pm, Artesan Gallery, Raffles Hotel Arcade. Free admission.