In just two days Art Stage Singapore is due to open, showcasing all that is great about Asian Contemporary Art. Attracting the world’s most influential private art collectors, corporate buyers and VIPs, the fair brings together professionals and art enthusiasts to discover emerging and established talent within the art industry. The event cooperates with Asian galleries, artists and collectors to create a distinctive matchmaking and networking platform, featuring a three to one ratio of Asian to western galleries. With so much to see we take a look at some of the best stands and exhibitions running during Art Stage Singapore week.
Art Plural Gallery
Flux is a collective exhibition featuring more than 20 artists at Art Plural Gallery until 17 February. All of the chosen artists work with a variety of media, such as painting, sculpture, drawings and photography. For Flux the practitioners are focusing on their most recent pieces, bridging East and West and fostering dialogue between cultures, temporalities and artistic expressions and mediums. The showcase includes works by Fabienne Verdier, Bernar Venet, Ian Davenport, Pablo Reinoso, Fu Lei, Chun Kwang Young, Doug and Mike Starn and many others. Flux also highlights a new selection of artists including American artist Jedd Novatt. The sculptor plays with gravity, weight and balance piling open-space squares and overlapping unequal edges.
Gajah Gallery
Art by renowned Chinese artists, Gu Wenda, will be on display at Gajah Gallery’s stand. Gu is celebrated for his groundbreaking experimental ink art practice and use of human genetic material. A significant player in the ’85 Movement in China, the artist had spent the early 1980s challenging the establishment with a series of provocative ink paintings that employed constructed fake Chinese characters. The artist is now concerned with ideas of culture and identity and how humanity is understood over ethnic and national boundaries, through the use of language, symbols, as well as hair and other bodily substances. A recent large-scale installation, The Yanhuang DNA Landscape, appears at this year’s event, uniting themes from Gu’s earlier creations with his art now.
Rossi & Rossi
For Art Stage Singapore’s fourth edition Rossi & Rossi present a stand of works by Heri Dono, one of Indonesia’s exciting contemporary artists. Producing installations inspired by experiments with wayang, the popular Javanese folk theatre, the artist has been involved in exhibitions and workshops in Asia, Australia, Europe and the United States. His paintings detail fantasies and deformations, spaces where characters from wayang stories emerge. Dono has an astonishing knowledge of children’s cartoons, animated films and comic, which serves as inspiration for his canvases that feature nightmarish characters with complex narratives. Although it might not seem so, the artist’s works are critical observations on the various sociopolitical issues in Indonesia as well as abroad.
Credits
1. Color Flows 4 – Fabienne Verdier, courtesy of Art Plural Gallery.
2. Gu Wenda – Metamorphosis, Chinese Series 2, 2000-2005, 197 x 122 cm, Human Hair, Glue, Rope.
3. Heri Dono, Riding a Scapegoat, 2013, Fibreglass, electronic and mechanical devices, cable, automatic timer 120 x 100 x 50 cm (47 ¼ x 39 ½ x 19 ¾ in). Courtesy of Rossi & Rossi.
