The Spectral Faith of Our Minor Flirtations by fostgallery

The Spectral Faith of Our Minor Flirtations

11.11. 2023 22.12. 2023

The Spectral Faith of Our Minor Flirtations FOST Gallery

Bea Camacho Divaagar Adeline Kueh Hazel Lim Lim Zeharn Bernardo Pacquing Grace Tan Tan Shao Qi Curator Louis Ho

1 Bernardo Pacquing Termite Mound #1 2023 Found wood Dimensions variable 2 Tan Shao Qi In Memory Of II 2023 Hand-cut tracing paper Dimensions variable 3 Lim Zeharn A Running Pattern (Square) 2023 Painted wooden board, striped cotton twine, grooved pulley wheels, motor and electronics H54 x W54 x D5.7 cm 4 Tan Shao Qi In Memory Of I 2023 Hand-cut tracing paper Dimensions variable 5&6 Bea Camacho Extensions I and Extensions II 2005 Natural and synthetic yarn Dimensions variable

8&9 Bea Camacho Extensions I and Extensions II 2005 Print on aluminium Dibond H30 x W45 x D3.2 cm (each) (Photographer: Karl Hinojosa) 7 Hazel Lim Floating Cnidaria 2023 Paper H150 x W41 x D1.5 cm 10 Bernardo Pacquing Termite Mound #2 2023 Found wood Dimensions variable 11 Tan Shao Qi 5:16 p.m. 2023 Porcelain, Perspex, film photography H90 x W13 x D2 cm; H90 x W37 x D2 cm

12 Divaagar Human Touch 2023 CGI video 00:04:33 13 Divaagar Attempt 2023 Polypropylene fabric H73 x W45 x D8 cm 14 Adeline Kueh Minute diamonds of moisture 2023 Swiss voile and organdy rosettes, beads, acrylic paint Dimensions variable 5 Grace Tan Textile wall 2023 Cable ties in polypropylene, polyamide 6.6 and heat stabilised polyamide 6.6 H165 x W79 x D1cm

Spacecraft Louis Ho

The mental images called up by the label “craft” are immediate: the warp and weft of fabric; the tools of the carpenter and the metal worker; the shapes and forms of ceramic vessels; the beads and crystals of home-made accessories and the rough edges of hand-crafted paper, synecdoches for the entire panoply of utilitarian objects and cute trinkets and ornamental collectibles and keepsake souvenirs that typically get lumped into the broad range of things associated with makers, artisans and cottage industry. The implied definition behind the terms “maker” and “artisan”, of course, is decidedly negational – they are so called because they are not artists, the distinction lying somewhere between the artisan’s hand and the artist’s imagination and intellect. Or, at least, that has been the perception. These days, the cultural pendulum has definitively swung the other way, with craft practices looming large in the landscape of contemporary art. The international prominence of the likes of Sheila Hicks, Yika Shonibare, Edmund de Waal, Josiah McElheny and Sopheap Pich, among many others, is testament to the increasing porousness of the dividing line between otherwise distinct categories. Institutions are likewise paying heed to the new normal, and art historian Maria Buszek, writing of the blurring of boundaries, listed

Notes 1 Maria Elena Buszek, “Introduction: The Ordinary Made Extra/Ordinary” in Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, ed. Buszek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 1–19. See p. 8.

… groundbreaking shows such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Labor of Love” in 1996, and the South London Gallery’s “Lovecraft” in 1998; more recent exhibitions like “Extreme Crafts” at the Center for Contemporary Art in Vilnius, Lithuania, and the British Crafts Council’s traveling “Boys Who Sew”; the wildly popular “Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting” and “Pricked: Extreme Embroidery” exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design …1 7

Cross-fertilization in this case, of course, runs in both directions. Craft practitioners are grounding their stratagems in conceptually-informed notions, and artists are incorporating the methods and materials of artisans and craftsmen into their studio repertoire – if those distinctions even still hold water in the year 2023, given the shift in perceptions and practices. Louise Mazanti summed up the situation succinctly when she observed that “one can find a position for craft that is defined by its relation not to a specific material but rather to the role that it performs in the world of objects. In other words, the position shifts from the “making” to the “doing” of craft.” 2 Borrowing from that understanding, it seems to make sense, in the promiscuously heterogenous party that is contemporary art, to approach the ever diversifying category of “craft” less as a material- or process-grounded set of practices, but as a position within art’s discursive terrain. The “craft” designation is interesting less for the materiality it signifies, but for its categorization in relation to other categories of art-making – for its difference rather than essence, to put it simply. Mazanti coined the term “super-object” to refer to craft-inflected works that “grow out of design because they have a form-typological relation to functional objects, even as the objects’ artistic (aesthetic or conceptual) content is central.”3 The works in the present exhibition are hardly functional, so would seem to fail the “superobject” test, but Mazanti’s insight about craft’s primary interest lying in its difference from other genres of contemporary art is an useful one here. Perhaps craft practices are most compelling for the possibilities they hold for interbreeding with other modes and means of making art today; perhaps, in our postmodern zeitgeist, knitting and weaving and woodworking and clayNotes 2 Louise Mazanti, “Super-Objects: Craft as an Aesthetic Position” in Extra/Ordinary, pp. 59–82. See p. 60. 3

Ibid, p. 62.

moulding and folding and cutting, while deserving of socio-cultural value in themselves, seem to assume a new, urgent relevance when conjugated with painting and photography and performance and sculpture and drawing and the moving image – and, of course, installation. The Spectral Faith of Our Minor Flirtations has its origins in a personal 9

encounter several years ago, when an academic and curator, at the opening of a show he had put together, bemoaned the loss of “spatial craft” in contemporary exhibition-making.4 He was referring to the lack of critical attention given to considerations of space in displaying works, but the pithy, useful phrase took on a life of its own when its semantic multiplicity and potential for playful transformation became apparent. In that spirit, the exhibition is premised on genrebending, and, unsurprisingly, the genres being bent are craft and site-responsive installation – bringing together the priorities of craft and issues of space. Its conceptual premises are rooted in a series of questions and propositions, rather than a defined set of parameters: How do we interpret craft spatially? How might we consider the space of craft in ways that might be physical (the site of display), discursive (the position of craft practices in the broader terrain of art), even environmental (with regards to Singapore’s climate and ecologies)? What do craft-y objects look like when we bring their diverse ontologies into conversation with conceptually-informed modes of art-making that respond to the realities and contingencies of architecture, discourse, geographies? Spectral Faith is a tentative attempt at picturing the responses to these questions. It is a quiet affair, comprised chiefly of objects contained in both scale and ambition, carefully situated in

nooks and crannies around the gallery. Where one typically expects to find art in the space, the walls are instead left bare. The works, lingering or lurking in corners that flicker at the periphery of one’s vision, oblige the viewer to reorient his/her/their gaze around the site.5 The first piece that the viewer happens upon is located in the external corridor that leads up to the main door. Bernardo Pacquing’s Termite Mound #1, a vertically-aligned structure that approximates the appearance of the eponymous phenomenon, is positioned at the mouth of a mail slot in the wall, seeming as if organically growing from the opening, while a slightly larger twin, Termite Mound #2, is mounted indoors at the juncture where two walls meet, with one wall – a swivelling affair – turned at a slight angle. A life-long fascination with the engineering of domes, especially geodesic domes and insect dwellings, inspired the pieces, but a desire to elude the more prominent surfaces in the gallery, in the manner of the teeming entomological life of the Gillman Barracks compound that occurs unnoticed by most human visitors, prompted the artist’s response to the exhibition’s thematic framework. In like manner, Tan Shao Qi’s paper cuttings, In Memory Of I and II, and 5:16 p.m., cut renderings of the shape Notes 4 Louis Ho, “Singapore: In the Thick of the Pause” in ArtAsiaPacific Almanac, January 2022, pp. 80–1; see p. 81. Please refer to the map of the exhibition, which provides an exact layout. Information about individual works here is supplemented by full descriptions found elsewhere in this e-catalogue. 5

of a rain tree’s spreading crown, commemorating a green space in Tanjong Rhu where these specimens were cleared for development, and the latter boasts the image of the little ironweed, an ubiquitous native wildflower. In Memory Of II, the smaller piece, was adhered to a corner of the glass panel in the main door – a spectre of a tree looking out onto Pacquing’s termite mound in the passageway. Its counterpart is suspended from the ceiling in the gallery like a fragile, almost insubstantial apparition writ large, speaking to the equally ghostly images of the shadows of flowers in 5:16 p.m. As the viewer enters the gallery, a small recessed space to the right, evocative of an alcove for a shrine, houses Lim Zeharn’s A Running Pattern (Square). The work is a kinetic piece comprised of black and white strings running around a motorized belt system, producing an impression of the ‘marching ants effect’ of digital selection tools. The analogy that the artist draws between craft-based and digital technology is attested to by the historical connections between the development of modern computing and the textile loom. Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, believed to have been devised with input from Ada Lovelace in 1837, is considered the forerunner of the computer; it was inspired by the automated system of the Jacquard Loom, which utilizes a binary system on punched cards to create different weaving patterns.6 Here, the work was intended to

be experienced within the rectangular frame of the recessed alcove, which mimics, at an architectural scale, the format of a monitor or screen, emphasizing the analogue rendition of a digital mechanism. Bea Camacho’s pair of crocheted pieces, accompanied by photographic images, are laid on a rack at the other end of the gallery. At the opening of the exhibition, the artist staged a performative activation with the objects: for about five minutes, she stood perfectly still, facing the audience, with the fingerless gloves of Extensions I over both hands; she then removed them, slipped her arms into the ring of yarn that is Extensions II, and turned toward the nook where her photographs were hung, with only her side profile accessible to attendees. The complete lack of movement, Camacho notes, was intended to “compose the space around her body.” 7 Dressed in nondescript, darkcoloured apparel, sans shoes, her motionlessness simply served to amplify the sculptural quality of the performing body and its artificial appendages in a blank space – a reference to the “empty Notes 6 The Jacquard Loom was invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804. For a recounting of the tale of Babbage’s machine and the role played by automated textile production, see, for one, Scott W. Schwartz, “Programmed Materials” in The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology, vol. 43, no. 1/2 (2017), pp. 47–58. In conversation with the author. The activation occurred during the exhibition’s opening reception on November 11, 2023. 7

embrace” of II, and the outstretched arms of I that “never reach the object of their affection.” Next to her pieces is Hazel Lim’s Floating Cnidaria, a paper tapestry comprised of numerous interlocking units, that hangs in a loop from a slot-like opening punched into a beam overhead.8 The recent trajectory of Hazel’s practice is premised on her interest in the folding techniques of origami, but, here, she responded to the idea of craft-in-space by thinking through the architectural possibilities of display. The resulting verticality evokes Mother Nature’s prodigious ability to flourish even under the trickiest of conditions, but, crucially, obstructs access to the corridor behind, obliging the visitor to make an unanticipated U-turn to continue with the exhibition. The use of an otherwise ornamental object to functionally restrict spatial movement is a mischievous subverting of the aesthetic and process-oriented aspects of origami. Divaagar’s two-part work is located at the end of a parallel passageway. Human Touch, through its creation of a fictional fibre artist using CGI and AI, explores the discursive parameters of craft-based practices. Stitch, as she has been named, remarks in the video: “In this year of 2023, generative entities such as myself are disregarded as artists … I’m fascinated through my lack of physical existence, the ability to feel and understand softness, and rigidity and the allure of translated materials. But art is referential, and like everything in culture,

it builds upon itself.” The bridging of digitality and tactility in the piece – the moving image is complemented by a physical object of mesh netting, supposedly created by Stitch – is grounded in popular perceptions of craft. Acknowledging the limits of these ideas, the video projection is framed within the narrow confines of a doorway, not unlike Running Pattern, availing itself of the structural outline to physically embody a thematic concern. Within the smaller, inner gallery, running up the edge between two walls from floor to ceiling, is Adeline Kueh’s Minute diamonds of moisture, a site-specific work of fabric rosettes, beads and pearlescent paint. The rosettes, ranging in hue from grey to green, are meant to approximate the appearance of mould, and the traces of paint applied to the walls in trailing drips, the presence of moisture and mildew. It channels, of course, the tropical humidity of Southeast Asia, and the effects of such a climate on the material lives of artwork, but also, closer to home, obliquely suggests the infrastructural issues that plague the colonial-era buildings of Gillman Barracks, which have only intensified with large-scale excavation and construction works being undertaken around the compound; tenants in certain blocks have complained Notes 8 In the interest of full disclosure, the opening was not cut through the structural beam, but, rather, created with a false attachment fabricated from plywood. The artist and organizers thank Steven Lim and Bernardo Pacquing for their invaluable assistance in this regard.

of seepage of groundwater from below. Finally, Textile wall, a panel assembled by Grace Tan from more than a thousand cable ties, requiring upwards of a hundred hours of labour, is placed at the end of the corridor that is also home to Hazel’s work, with either piece bookending the stretch. The artist extended the floor by painting a portion of the adjoining wall in the same shade of grey, and laying out the panel at the floor line in a partial roll. Tan is referring to German architect Gottfried Semper’s notion that the origin of all built shapes was the practice of weaving: “… he not only emphasised the development of textiles as more important than a technique to cover the body, but also argued that the woven surface marked the very essence of architecture ...”9 The display of the piece, then, draws analogies between floor, wall and panel, between the craft of architecture and the structural basis of textile methods. There are quite a few flirtatious conversations happening in the exhibition: between genres, between works, between object and building, between space and place, between interior and exterior. The titular spectrality might suggest the visual mood of the exhibition, constituted as it is of decidedly isolated, un-spectacular objects tucked into various corners and intersections, the low lights engendering a feeling of slight otherworldliness – and not merely of the preternatural variety, but also the little-glimpsed worlds of our fellow earth-dwellers, from termites to trees to weeds to mould to cnidaria floating in mid-air, to the disembodied denizens of digital realms. The intended tenor of the proceedings, though, is perhaps best encapsulated in the designation “minor”; however manifested, however interpreted. Genre-bending, by definition, eludes established registers … and the faith in doing something minor can be very spectral, or insubstantial, indeed.

Louis Ho is a curator, critic and art historian based in Singapore

Notes 9 S. Yahya Islami, “Surficial Architecture: Gottfried Semper and Contemporary Surface Play” in Edinburgh Architecture Research, vol. 30 (2006), pp. 56–62. See p. 58.

Bea Camacho

Extensions I 2005 Print on aluminium Dibond H30 x W45 x D3.2 cm (each) (Photographer: Karl Hinojosa)

Extensions II 2005 Print on aluminium Dibond H30 x W45 x D3.2 cm (each) (Photographer: Karl Hinojosa)

The earliest phase of Camacho’s practice involved the craft of crochet, a textile method often denigrated as a woman’s hobby. She taught herself the skill, for her artworks, while attending college in Boston, and living many miles away from family in Manila. On plane rides home, she would use the time to crochet and to knit, embodying the geographical separation and temporal distance from loved ones in the labour of her hands. Extensions I, a pair of fingerless gloves that extend beyond the body, and Extensions II, a single, looped hand cover for both arms, were produced for the artist’s graduation show in 2005. They are crocheted objects that, while retaining the texture and aura of comforting, hand-crafted wearables, assume surreal shapes and questionable utility, their functional aspect largely jettisoned. The works speak to the tension between familiarity and destabilised form, Camacho notes, as well as the ultimate futility of the attempt to bridge interpersonal distance, and the Sisyphean effort of trying to connect, but never succeeding. She refers to the “empty embrace” of an ouroboric link that joins only the arms of one person (Extensions II) and arms that extend but never reach the object of their affection (Extensions I).

Divaagar

Attempt 2023 Polypropolyne fabric H73 x W45 x D8 cm

Human Touch 2023 CGI video 00:04:43

Craft-based art practices are often described through the entanglement of material, labour and the relationship to the human hand, and are often overlooked for their conceptual underpinnings. In contrast, Artificial Intelligence (AI) art has been scrutinised for its inherent lack of identity and connection to a sense of humanness. In the melding of the two, Human Touch looks at craft through the lens of digital media to rethink how craft is perceived. The work adopts the format of an artist interview. Through the conduit of a fictional, sentient AI artist named Stitch, the work confronts or possibly even further perpetuates existing tropes. The video is accompanied by an actualized instance of a work by Stitch, titled Attempt, which expresses the artist’s inability to touch and feel the works they create. Through the interview, the nonhuman artist offers a vignette into the desires and challenges faced within the genre of craft-making.

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Adeline Kueh

Minute diamonds of moisture 2023 Swiss voile and organdy rosettes, beads, threads, acrylic, Dimensions variable

Adeline Kueh’s practice pivots on the interstitial spaces between private memory and public remembrance – embodied in the fragility of small, intimate objects. An abiding concern for her are the ways in which particular sewing techniques may hold significance for acts of storytelling, for narratives heard, told and retold as a bulwark against the attritions of personal and communal amnesia. The chief motif in Minute diamonds of moisture – a phrase from Thomas Hardy’s Tess d’Urbervilles, which the artist had read in her teenage years – is the fabric rosette, commonly found in homes across Southeast Asia. She recalls them from her youth in Sarawak, Malaysia; they were crafted from bits of scrap cloth, and used as adornments on tablecloths, runners, blankets, and even sold for extra income. “My mom became a seamstress after she left school early”, she notes, “to let her brothers go to school, and nothing went to waste in our home.” Here, the rosette is incorporated into a site-sensitive installation with glass beads, and accented with marks that approximate the appearance of moisture and mildew. The latter is not merely a tongue-in-cheek response to the humid, tropical climate of Southeast Asia, and its depredations on the otherwise pristine environs of white cube spaces (including the present site), but also serves as a visual metaphor for the slow yet relentless decay of our mortal memories. Kueh observes that the work ultimately “speaks of excesses, resilience and the sheer impossibility of containment.”

Hazel Lim

Floating Cnidaria 2023 Paper L150 x W41 x D1.5 cm

Lim’s most recent work engages with the Japanese craft of origami, or paper folding. Floating Cnidaria is a modular paper tapestry comprised of numerous interlocking origami units – a square design with a 5-step fold that results in a windmill-like shape – not unlike the repeated patterns of colonies produced by certain species of the titular organism, which include corals and siphonophores. When joined into a single tapestry, the piece allows for physical malleability and flexibility of display, and may be adapted to specific sites in a space. Here, the work speaks to a particular feature of FOST Gallery interior architecture: an overhead beam. It inserts itself through a slot, mimicking how nature seeks out spatial opportunities to grow and expand even through the smallest openings. The slot reminds one of a letterbox, and Floating Cnidaria, in the manner of an enveloping entity, is suspended as, and woven into, a self-linking chain that seems to grow out of a structural groove.

Lim Zeharn

A Running Pattern (Square) 2023 Painted Wooden board, striped cotton twine, grooved pulley wheels, motor and electronics H54 x W54 x D5.7 cm

A Running Pattern (Square) features a rotating loop of black-and-white string delineating a square. Driven by a motor in a four-point belt system, the twisted twine moves constantly to enact tiny animated dashes, similar to the so-called marching ants effect produced by selection tools found in computer graphics programs. By translating it from the screen to a material form on a wall, the kinetic installation actively defines an area in actual space, weaving together the digital and physical. Inspired by the links between craft practices and digital creation, in terms of pixels, zeros and ones, light and dark, warp and weft, the piece – absent of any image – acts as an isolated frame for viewers to contemplate the building blocks that underlie the structures of our world at large. Lim remarks: “For me, I see both practices as image-making and thinking on a pixel level. Whether it be digital 8-bit graphics, photography, raster drawings or the patterns of mosaic tiles, cross-stitches, beading, and weave loom knots, they both fundamentally share the same backroom of a grid system, of calculated zeros and ones to represent images.”

Bernardo Pacquing

Termite Mound #1 2023 Found wood Dimensions variable

Termite Mound #2 2023 Found wood Dimensions variable

Termite Mound #1 and Termite Mound #2 draw upon Pacquing’s abiding interest in the structure of domes. The artist, whose practice is oriented around the idea of abstraction in painting and sculpture, has constructed public monuments in his native Philippines, inspired by the engineering of geodesic domes and insect mounds. The first such project, Earth Mounds (2018), stands on a small island, Kopiat, in the Davao Gulf, while the more recent Domes Village (2019) is situated in the New Clark City River Zone in Tarlac; Mounds was constructed from driftwood, and Domes from century-old, endemic hardwood. The works in the present show are likewise crafted with upcycled wood, scavenged from construction sites in and around Manila, and speak to Pacquing’s engagement with the aesthetic, materiality and history of wood as it circulates through our lives. The pieces are positioned in the nooks and crannies of the gallery space – one at the bend between two walls, the other at the mouth of the mail slot in the external corridor – reflecting the almost unnoticed lives and work of insects, ever-present in the lush, green environs of the Gillman Barracks compound.

Grace Tan

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Textile wall 2023 Cable ties in polypropylene, polyamide 6.6 and heat stabilised polyamide 6.6 L165 x W79 x D1 cm

In Gottfried Semper’s seminal book, The Four Elements of Architecture (1852), he proclaimed that the archetypal origin of all constructed forms began with the woven screens of primordial dwelling made from plant materials. His writing spotlighted weaving as the first gesture of architecture, and suggested that the wall is not merely an architectural element nor space divider, but a surface rich with meaning and symbolic imagery. The wall’s tectonic origin focuses on the wall as a textured surface codified with human gestures (craft techniques and traditions) and expressions (patterns/decorative elements). Tan’s Textile wall, constructed from thousands of interlocking, looped cable ties, is premised on the notion of craft; the pieces are repetitively locked in place following a design and an acquired technique to generate a textile-like construction. Presented as a partially rolledup object on the floor and tucked against a wall as a response to the site of display, the work draws on Semper’s foregrounding of the idea of the “textile wall”, while suggesting a surface in negotiation with space.

Tan Shao Qi

In Memory of I 2023 Hand-cut tracing paper Dimensions variable

In Memory of II 2023 Hand-cut tracing paper Dimensions variable

In Memory Of I and II are delicate paper cut-outs rendered by hand, and installed in site-responsive locales in the gallery space. Their arabesques of intertwining lines are intended to evoke a common botanical species in Singapore: the rain tree, or Samanea saman, with a spreading, distinctive umbrella-shaped crown that often results in a tracery-like patterning of its branches and foliage. As the titles suggest, the works channel personal memories for the artist – in this case, of a site in Tanjong Rhu, where mature rain trees in an otherwise unspoiled patch of green were felled for urban development. “To emulate the qualities of soft light filtering through the canopy of the rain tree”, Tan remarks, “the intricate openwork structures of the paper cuttings highlight the interplay of light and shadow. The translucent qualities of tracing paper, in interaction with light, produce a gentle and diffused effect.” The fragility of the material, particularly susceptible to damage and destruction, echoes both the contingent existence of the natural environment in land-scarce Singapore, as well as the fugacious character of memory itself.

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5:16 p.m. 2023 Porcelain, Perspex, film photography H90 x W13 x D2 cm; H90 x W37 x D2 cm

5:16 p.m. is comprised of a pair of photographic panels overlaid with porcelain sculptures. Both image and sculpture refer to anubiquitous local wildflower: the little ironweed (Cyanthillium cinereum), recognizable by its tiny purple or pink flower heads. The artist shot the shadows of these plants, cast on the surfaces of walls and windows – appropriating the translucency of the latter by framing the prints in Perspex. The abundant growth of native weeds, wildflowers and other plant species throughout the island during the first circuit breaker in 2020 represented a renaturalising of Singapore’s urban spaces, as maintenance work by the authorities were scaled back, and Tan was intrigued by the sight of these frail, diminutive entities “slowly creeping back” into our collective consciousness. The brittle porcelain shapes, solid yet vulnerable to breakage, reflects the ephemeral, yet continuing, presence of otherwise unnoticed plant-life in our midst.

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Photography - Lavender Chang 52

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