Booth FC28
Workplace is pleased to participate in the focus section of the inaugural edition of ART SG in Singapore with a two-person booth with new works by Chinese-American artist Olivia Jia and London based Thai artist James Prapaithong. The artists have been paired as they share a common pictorial sensibility and a tendency to create composition which are suspended between the real and the imaginary. The use of photographic images taken and collected by the artists in disparate locations is the inception of both Jia and Prapaithong’s practices which through different modes of representation and painterly lexicons question the art historical legacy of the specific medium whilst exploring disparate themes of identity, longing and memory.
For Workplace’s presentation at Art SG, Jia and Prapaithong have decided to create two body of works whose source material will be put together in a collaborative effort. In anticipation to the fair, they will be in conversation with one another to share imagery that will become the starting point for the works that will be on view at the gallery’s booth. Through this process the artists hope to engage in a transnational exchange of ideas and references and create a presentation that will connect in a poetic and subtle way Prapaithong’s cinematic and hazy landscapes and Jia’s intimate and hyperreal still lifes.
The artists’ connection with non-Western heritages will also be a central theme within this presentation. Subtle references to the orient emerge in different and often unconscious way in the work of Jia and Prapaithong who are both of Asian identity, although they have grown up or spend a large part of their lives in Western countries. The artists’ heritage and backgrounds have moved them to question how certain symbols, artifacts and stereotypes assume different meanings across geographies and cultures and this personal investigation is reflected throughout their oeuvre.
In the space of Jia’s paintings, disparate images of family members, Chinese artefacts in Western museums, objects collected during her travels in Asia and the US amongst others, exist together, are pinned down and made tangible. Focusing on an image’s visual specificity and the metaphorical, narrative, and subtextual relationships that may be generated when two images are placed beside each other, the artist paints, sands, swaps, and repaints images in relation to one another until they hold an affect, a frisson, an allusion to something that cannot be named.
James Prapaithong explores memory, isolation and longing through his filmic paintings which deliberately use the aspect ratio of the screen and are devoid of people. Resembling enlarged photographs of familiar yet distant places and using high colour saturation with a particular attention to light, Prapaithong’s hazy, dream- like landscapes become vehicles to communicate the uncertainty of recall, the construction of memory and the space between connection and estrangement. In a similar way to some Eastern philosophies, elements of the natural world and their relation to human experience constitute a focal point of Prapaithong’s work.
