Anthony Chin
Tokyo Trial - The American Cover-up, 2023
Replicated Academy Award Statuettes, acrylic paint, aluminium, digital prints, acrylic & mirror
42 x 20 x 20cm x 13 pieces

“Always about the future. What happened then, will always rhyme.”

The Tokyo Trial in 1946 prosecuted Japanese leaders for wartime crimes, resulting in varied sentences. Yet, key figures behind Unit 731, responsible for heinous biological and chemical warfare in areas like Singapore's OKA9240, remained unpunished. US motivations to shield these criminals emerged from strategic Cold War politics: wanting exclusive access to Japan's bioweapon expertise and benefiting from the unit's illicit human experimentation data, thereby gaining an edge over the USSR. For the delivery of a stunning show on the global stage, the artist confers awards on the key players involved.


Dusadee Huntrakul
From dreaming nitrogen to 12 Sea Shells, 2023
Stoneware and Porcelain
12 pieces, dimensions variable

“Imagining life altogether through the representation of things.”

A smorgasbord of sculptural pieces prompts a consideration of the interconnectedness of being. The individual objects, spanning the representational to the abstract, find rootedness and meaning in the plethora of associations we can conjure for them. Emerging from the fundamental impulse to create, and to make-sense-of through their making, they are simultaneously generous invitations from the artist to “dream together”.


Ng Joon Kiat
Cosmeticised Corpse Paintings series (2015) and Autopsy Paintings series (2017)

“But abstraction has a violent and cruel side. I have a deep desire to critique and decolonise the language I use in a way that can also open new painting directions in my practice.”

Amidst recurrent interjections of the sentiment that “painting is dead”, Ng Joon Kiat reinvigorates abstraction, challenging its historical confines. The selection of largely monochromatic paintings diverts gazes towards edges or beneath surfaces. Physical alterations like cutting highlight their depth more than just literally – dissection runs parallel to discovery, and the autopsy is the forerunner to re-animation of a corpus of works. Can there be introspection without an intervention? Are exercises in historicization – to an extent – attempts at zombification?


Ong Kian Peng
Sky River, 2023
Single-channel video installation
15m 30s

“Water is everywhere.”  

Between 1995 and 2003, China spent US$266 million on weather modification. Amongst various other endeavours, the ambitious Sky River Project was proposed to divert water vapour northwards from the Yangtze River basin to the Yellow River basin, where it would become rainfall. Entailing the employment of drones, planes, and of thousands of fuel-burning chambers installed across the Tibetan mountains, the massive geoengineering project is viewed as a critical innovation to solving China's water shortage problem. In this respect, the moisture in the sky is reframed as yet another resource that can be controlled, harnessed, and exploited through technological means.


Pratchaya Phinthong
The Apogee of Human Tolerance, 2023
Animated screen

“I guess, to find “Sehnsucht,” one has to begin with “Hintergedanken””

A desktop screensaver serves as an allegory that transcends traditional narratives, delving into the evolving paradigms of value and exchange in a world without manual labour. The animated banknotes, once symbols of tangible wealth, represent an economic flow increasingly overshadowed by the rise of digital currencies. Where hyperinflation once led to heaps of paper money, today it spawns endless voided digital codes. As the screen remains dormant without human interaction, it poignantly underscores the inexorable shift from tangible assets to ethereal digital worth.


Miti Ruangkritya
BLISS 02_Landscape series, 2022
Ilford Smooth Pearl mounted on 3mm dilite

“…the preoccupation of shooting, finding the 'decisive moment', the photograph in BLISS”

Drawing inspiration from the ubiquitous Windows XP desktop wallpaper, Ruangkritya embarks on a profound exploration of the (im)mortality of images in an age where digital mediation and intervention is abound. Through the repetitive act of shooting the same landscape at different times in a day, Ruangkritya responds to Henri Cartier-Bresson's concept of the 'decisive moment'. In doing so, he challenges our perceptions of timelessness and transient beauty in the digital age. The work, in turn, becomes a bridge between the generation of iconic imageries and contemporary photographic philosophy.