FOREST

Wong Keen


artcommune is pleased to present Wong Keen’s latest exhibition, Forest, in which the artist’s first major installation work and a new series of acrylic on rice paper-collage paintings will make its debut. The show officially opens at artcommune gallery on 8 October 2022, 3-6pm, with the artist in attendance.


One of Singapore’s leading painters, New York-trained artist Wong Keen is best known for his stylised expressions of visual themes including the flesh, the burger, the lotus and the nude. His prolific oeuvre, which encompasses oil, ink, acrylic, collage, and mixed media since the 1960s to the present, is a powerful embodiment of the delicate expressivity of Chinese ink wash aesthetics and Western inventive approach towards form and colour. From series to series, whether venturing anew or revisiting familiar techniques and imagery, Wong Keen’s relentless pursuit of compositional innovation, together with the enigmatic quality of his language, has given rise to a unique body of work that defies traditions and categorisation.


This forthcoming exhibition, Forest, is titled after the immense three-dimensional installation that anchors Wong Keen’s latest presentation. Measuring approximately 6m (length) x 3m (height) x 1.2m (depth), Forest comprises almost one hundred original rice paper paintings that are suspended at a height from choreographed wooden structures hand built by the artist. These hanging rice paper objects consist of varied sizes and are mostly two-sided, sculptural and meat-like; they alternate between forms that are variously flesh-hued and visceral, or pastel and velvety in flourishes. Under lights from a distance, some appear particularly jagged and sun worn like taut hides with rough-hewn stitches, while others evoke patterns of ribs at a butcher’s display.


Forest charts the latest development in Wong Keen’s continual interrogation into the subject and form of his flesh series. Wong Keen first embarked on the visual discourse of flesh and meat during an artist residency at Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing in the summer of 2012. He innovated on new paint handling techniques to convey the structural expression of meat - colour, texture, density - and the composition often aims at a liberation of objects and meanings from familiar contexts. Over the years, the series grew to be anchored by a few main visual themes, mainly the burger, the butcher stall, and the nude.


On both visual and conceptual level, his recurring imagery of human flesh as synonymous with animal flesh evokes the idea of ‘nude as meat’ and expresses the parallels between different forms of “flesh trade” that are driven by man’s ubiquitous commodification and consumption of flesh. Just as the pigs and cows raised, trapped and butchered for products at large-scale industrial meat farms, a similar cycle of violence, oppression and consumption marks the particular fate of humans ensnared in the economy of flesh (such as those trafficked for slave or sex trade).


Over the past decade, Wong Keen's formal and philosophical exploration of this discourse through different materials and strategies has given rise to an expansive series that encompasses oil, ink, acrylic, collage and mixed media works. It has now culminated to this major installation that leverages the spatial qualities of both painting and sculpture. Wong Keen specifically refers to these rice paper paintings that constitute Forest as his ‘flesh sculptures’, expressly situating them in a liminal space that negotiates between the abstract two-dimensional form of a painting and the concrete three-dimensional formulation of a sculpture. 


artcommune gallery

Singapore

8–31 October 2022

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Partial views of the prototype to the installation 

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Partial views of the prototype to the installation 

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Meeting

2022

Acrylic on rice paper mounted on canvas

146 x 202 cm

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Meeting

2022

Acrylic on rice paper mounted on canvas

146 x 202 cm

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The Abstraction of a Figure 

2022

Acrylic on rice paper mounted on canvas

191 x 113 cm

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The Abstraction of a Figure 

2022

Acrylic on rice paper mounted on canvas

191 x 113 cm

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McIntosh

2022

Acrylic on rice paper mounted on canvas

113 x 147 cm

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McIntosh

2022

Acrylic on rice paper mounted on canvas

113 x 147 cm

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Blossom

2022

Acrylic on canvas

Left panel: 81 x 107 cm

Right panel: 97cm x 92 cm
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Blossom

2022

Acrylic on canvas

Left panel: 81 x 107 cm

Right panel: 97cm x 92 cm
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My Kind of Burger

2022

Acrylic on rice paper mounted on canvas

150 x 118 cm

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My Kind of Burger

2022

Acrylic on rice paper mounted on canvas

150 x 118 cm

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