My first solo exhibition Boats & Bridges held at Reka Art Space, Petaling Jaya. The exhibition featured two installations, a series of objects, and a series of collaged drawings.
In ‘Bridges’, lengths of barricade tape are wrapped around a pillar and weighed down by plaster casts. These were made by pouring plaster into different sized plastic bags, their round shapes and flat surfaces formed by filling a once empty space with volume and mass.
(After the exhibition, a friend and I drove around Kuala Lumpur at 4am, dropping the casts in random places such as under bridges, roadsides, shopping malls, and the National Art Gallery. Did you ever come across one of them? I would love to hear from you.)
‘Boats’ is a word search stenciled on the floor of the main gallery space. The letters and lines were drawn on with plaster — the same material used to make the heavy plaster casts has now become ethereal and weightless. Visitors were provided with a list of categories and invited to search for the words as they walked on the work.
‘Benua Dalam/Inner Continents’ is a series of plaster casts, in shades of pale pink, made by pouring plaster into different sized plastic bags. Each piece has a text or body organ printed on its flat top surface. I thought of the words as floating continents within the body, mingling among internal organs. View the whole series here.
I also developed a series of collages and drawings, using shapes traced from the tops of the plaster casts. The collages were made with coloured crepe paper, and held out in the rain during a tropical storm. You can view all the drawings here.
Lydia Chai wrote an essay titled ‘Gloop Gloop’ which was published in the exhibition catalogue, and you can read it here.