The Order of Things

Savanhdary Vongpoothorn

Savanhdary Vongpoothorn’s family fled Laos for Australia when she was but a child. While there is some degree of estrangement from the culture of her country of origin, Vongpoothorn’s travels through Asia as well as the connections forged through her parents shaped her affinity with the region’s spiritual and aesthetic traditions. Her intricately patterned canvases draw on a variety of visual languages and aesthetic conventions reflective of her life and artistic journey, bringing together, for instance, elements from Western formalism and abstraction, Laotian textile design, diagrammatic representations of Buddhist concepts, and a repetitive, all-over perforation and patterning that recalls meditative practice as well as the sacred constellation of dots used in Aboriginal art.

Presented here are two recent works that express different poles of human experience and existence. In Sea of Fire, ribbons of vermillion dance across a pitch-black background, overlaid by broken, agitated calligraphic gestures as well as rhythmic wave-like patterns. The sense of disquiet here is palpable, even before one reads the artist’s statement about the motif being inspired by her family’s experience of the Black Summer bushfires of 2019 and 2020 in Australia – catastrophes further compounded by floods and the pandemic. The fire motif also references the Fire Sutra, or Fire Sermon, a Buddhist text in which the Buddha preaches about achieving liberation from suffering through detachment from the five senses and mind. The fragmented marks on Vongpoothorn’s canvas hint at the broken path we have to these Buddhist teachings of enlightenment; however, they remain constant, and unwaveringly illuminated even in moments of darkness.

Quincunx and Clouds I on the other hand, expresses a sense of harmony and repose. Clouds for Vongpoothorn are symbolic of the passing of time and the impermanence of life and all things that humanity values and ceaselessly strives for, while the quincunx – a motif commonly encountered in temple architecture – symbolises balance and wholeness: the interconnectedness of all things in an ordered universe. The glowing saffron hues of this painting recall Buddhist monks’ robes, but also represent, for the artist, the illumination of the mind. All these elements are united by Vongpoothorn’s rhythmic calligraphic strokes that dance across the surface of the canvas, enmeshing elements of the material and spiritual world in lyrical equilibrium.

Albert Yonathan Setyawan

Working primarily between ceramics and painting, Albert Yonathan Setyawan conjures intimations of other worlds and orders through the use of pattern, repetition, and the language of symbolism. There are two discernible strands of imagery in his practice, the first revolving around architectural structures or spaces – such as stupas, archways, windows and stairways – and the second comprising a vocabulary of symbolic forms created by the artist.
In the latter, we find enigmatic symbols that may be perceived as having some sacred quality, comprised as they are of images that are already invested with mystical associations across various cultures: fire, birds, the eye, serpents, flowers. Many of these symbols are often ambiguous, having auspicious connotations in some cultures and the opposite in others. Interestingly, they transcend time and geography, stirring in us an unconscious recognition of their power and enigma. Drawing on conventions of Hindu and Buddhist art, such as ideas of multiple emanation and the mandala, Yonathan often arranges his images in a repetitive and / or circular formation, instilling in viewers a meditative quality, and restoring us to a time when images were powerful and sacred, holding within them mysteries and worlds beyond the order of rational comprehension.

Yonathan’s Hypnagogia series was inspired by his experience during the pandemic, when he spent much of his time isolated at home. In this body of work, quotidian spaces within the home, such as windows, ceilings and staircases, are repeated to hypnotic effect. The intersection of spaces between each image in turn creates ambiguous and contradictory spaces, akin to a hallucination, or the transitional state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep referenced in the work’s title. The repetition invests these otherwise mundane vignettes with a symbolic and uncanny quality – uncanny in the truest sense of its original German term, unheimlich, meaning ‘unhomely’. The ensuing sense of dislocation and disquiet bears some similarity to the surreal stillness of de Chirico’s paintings, with their portentous cityscapes hinting at some impending rupture. In the words of psychologist Aniela Jaffé, these are “dreamlike transpositions of reality, which arise as visions from the unconscious”. The liminality of sleep/wakefulness is that sliver between one order of things, and another.

Udomsak Krisanamis

Several artists have, over the course of their career, developed particular visual motifs that grow to hold special symbolic significance. For Udomsak Krisanamis, this is clearly manifested in the repetition of the O shape in his works, and its evolution over time both as a visual element, as well as a signifier. Born in Thailand, Krisanamis moved to the United States to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, before settling in New York for a time. As an art student struggling to learn English, Krisanamis would tackle the newspapers with a marker, blacking out words he already recognised and circling those he did not, thus mapping out the gaps in his understanding, and imposing some kind of order in an unfamiliar environment. Over time, this exercise would extend to doodling, where the artist would black out all text, leaving only the empty centres of the letters O, 0, 9, and P, or what typographers refer to as the ‘counter’. These empty voids, loops, and black bars became distinctive elements in Krisanamis’s art, as he collaged and layered them to varying effect and rhythms, often combining newsprint with other everyday objects that reflected his life and environs, such as instant noodles, flyers, and packing tape. Notoriously reticent about his work, Krisanamis has insisted that ‘what you see is what you get’, leading critics to read these abstractions – born out of the artist’s quotidian exercise in ordering his world – as references ranging from twinkling cityscapes to satellite imagery and binary code. These circular voids, which lend themselves to more transcendental interpretations, are however, always grounded in the personal, and the immediacy of their maker’s environment, for instance with the incorporation of coffee paint in the making of the work Mind Drifting. Krisanamis’s works exemplify art writer and critic Jennifer Allen’s proposition that symbols in art are compelling because they present “the possibility of artworks being visible, intelligible yet somehow cryptic and personal.”

In Clear The Air, executed a decade later, Krisanamis’s signature motif has been simplified, the dense, repetitive layering of earlier works distilled into two circular shapes which look like they have each been rendered in a single stroke, a nod to the Ensō paintings of Zen art. An enduring symbol that has recurred throughout time and across cultures, the circle represents completion and wholeness. At the same time, it is also zero – nothingness, space, and void. The underpinnings of this image are however, rooted in the quotidian. The texture on the canvas comes from the artist’s layering of newspapers – a nod to the beginnings of his practice – and the spheres have in fact been traced from everyday objects: a bicycle wheel and an oval photo frame. Krisanamis’s enigmatic image, in its spareness, lends itself to a multitude of significations, shifting between the invocation of a cosmic order, and the order of everyday things.