Mise en Place

Genevieve Leong

Observing the subject of shelves – devices that provide a surface for the storage or display of objects – Genevieve Leong’s sculptural assemblage Intricacies of Support (2021-2022) explores the possibility of shelves, or things that can potentially function as shelves. Shelves are necessary in homes, art exhibitions, and working spaces, yet somehow feel secondary to the objects they support. The shelf takes centre stage in the installation, holding nothing but themselves: a shelf holding a shelf, holding yet another shelf. Made from vastly different materials, some solid and others precarious, the shelves interact and interlace in a variety of ways – holding, propping, hovering, leaning, resting, pushing against; expanding their rigid functionality into a multiplicity of relationships.

Accompanying the installation is a list of relationships (2021), a text that reflects on the subtleties in relationships, connections and the many various ways that a person can relate to another. Alongside the shelves, it nudges the viewer to contemplate the distances that exist between our individual selves and others.

Genevieve Leong’s (b. 1992, Singapore/Switzerland) art practice attempts to visualise the intangible. Beginning with the immaterial, her work often combines text, image, found and made objects and the manipulation of space to create what she describes as “an almost physical image”. Her work seeks to shed new light onto her emotions, sensations, and realisations.

Leong completed her BA Fine Art (Photography & Digital Imaging) at Nanyang Technological University, School of Art, Design & Media, Singapore, in 2015, and her MA Contemporary Art Practice (Critical Practice) at the Royal College of Art, London, in 2019. Her works have been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including “Evaporation Studies” at so-da space, Zurich, Switzerland (2022) and “Configurations” at Supernormal, Singapore (2019) among others. Her work has been included in multiple group exhibitions internationally in Switzerland, Singapore, United Kingdom and China.

Mauricio Alejo

​​The works of Mauricio Alejo transform everyday objects by inserting them into unusual contexts. Usually constructed as sculptural assemblages and then photographed, they are brought into new narratives which defy their functionality and are displaced from their contexts. In Dinner Table (2012), an imaginative, precariously-balanced and temporary suspension seems destined to collapse at any moment, held in place by tension.

Mauricio Alejo’s (b. 1969, Mexico) practice gravitates around the relationship between the physical space where things happen; the representational space of photography where those things are depicted, and the mental space of the viewer who experiences the final outcome. While anchored in the factual world, his images and installations explore the evanescent constitution of reality and its interchanges with the notion of the world as an image.

Alejo has exhibited at numerous institutions globally, including: the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, USA, and Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, Mexico. He has also been a recipient of several grants awarded by the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las artes, among others.

Chen Wei (b. 1980, China) focuses on social themes such as urban landscape and disco culture, and works with photography and installation. Influenced by the 20th century’s cinematically staged photography, Chen introduces a layer of theatrical stage design and painterly sensibility to his photographic repertoire.

His works have been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including: “WHERE ARE YOU GOING TONIGHT”, Chi K11 Art Space, Guangzhou, China (2018); “Noon Club”, JNBY Foundation, Hangzhou, China (2016); “Tight Rope”, Yokohama Creative City Centre, Japan (2011), and more. Chen has been shown in various group exhibitions internationally, and his wors are in the collections of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Yuz Museum, K11 Art Foundation, the Rubell Family Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa and many others.

Lesley-Anne Cao

Playfully thinking about language, poetry and meaning, Lesley-Anne Cao’s Bonsai (2022/2018) takes the form of a small handbound book, consisting of carefully written and arranged text fragments. Scaled to fit in a palm (or a mouth), it invites the viewer to hold, sift through and reassemble its contents, patterned after the most basic structure of the language of recipes. What is needed? What must be done with it? And to make what?

The accompanying single-channel video presents one possible result of this aleatory language game. Uniquely encountered and assembled by the viewer, Bonsai (2022/2018) unfolds an infinite number of imaginative suggestions to interact with the everyday.

Lesley-Anne Cao (b. 1992, Philippines) describes her practice as a series of divergent processes that explore the interplay of materiality, exhibition-making, and fiction. Her works make use of recognizable materials such as books, plants, debris, precious metals, and money, towards the actualisation and presentation of fictional objects and environments.

Her works have been shown in international exhibitions, such as “Cast But One Shadow” at University of the Philippines Vargas Museum, Quezon City, Philippines (2021); “No More Mesmerizations”, Bangkok Biennial, Thailand (2020/1); “Courses of Action” at Goethe-Institut Hong Kong and Para Site, Hong Kong (2019), and “Of sampaguita, ilang-ilang” at c3 Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne, Australia (2019). Recent solo exhibitions include ‘A song plays from another room’, MO_Space, Taguig City (2021), ‘Hard and soft prayers’, The Drawing Room Gallery, Makati City (2021), and ‘The hand, the secretary, a landscape’ Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila (2018). She has been granted artist residencies in Taiwan and Finland and has also presented work in Australia, Seoul, Hong Kong, France, Thailand and Indonesia.

Chayanin Kwangkaew

The genre of still life painting has always tackled the illusionistic representation and the dedicated study of the everyday object. In Chayanin Kwangkaew’s paintings, the artist observes objects from his mundane surroundings as flashes of interruptions float past. In Continue No. 1 (2019), the surface of the floral still life is disrupted by energetic bursts of colour which flatten the subject and background. For the artist, these are interventions caused by interrupted thoughts within a shifting landscape of rapid communication and technology. At the same time, they speak to the transience and instability of memory – sometimes vivid, sometimes fading.

Still life has been the subject of many artists past and present, but Chayanin Kwangkaew (b. 1990, Thailand) injects his works with contemporary imagery, as if disrupting the solemnity of inert objects. Drawing from his own experience of living with loneliness, Kwangkaew imbues these feelings into his paintings.

Kwangkaew received his BFA in painting from Silpakorn University in 2013, and finished his MA in the same degree from the same university in 2016. Since 2009, he has exhibited with fellow artists in Thailand, Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia, and Australia. He has also had international solo exhibitions, having mounted his works in Malaysia and the Philippines.