There’s a word I’m trying to remember, for a feeling I’m about to have
Titled after a video-essay by artist Korakrit Arunanondchai – one of the most adroit chroniclers of our zeitgeist – this exhibition explores the contemporary condition through the eyes of a younger generation of artists.
Their searching works convey a sense of vague disquiet, distractedness, fleeting intimacies and estrangement: fragments of an age and hyper-digitalised consciousness where signs are often unmoored from their referents; where the speed at which information is written and overwritten results in a collective amnesia.
By turns surreal, tender, and unsettling, these interior worlds attempt to evoke and remember relationships, identity, history and meaning, even as these slip from our grasp.
Open to public from 29 April – 29 June 2025.
Ain (b. 2000, Thailand) was born in Bangkok, and has lived in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Her upbringing has contributed to her diasporic identity and a longing for belonging; as such, much of her work explores memory, notions of home, as well as national and cultural identity.
Ain’s practice spans several mediums, and she has become recognized for her miniature ash portraits which combine painting with the ephemeral by-products of the ceramic firing process. Often based on fading photographs from family albums, these portraits have barely distinct features, and the ash – as a fragile and transient medium – becomes a metaphor for the fleeting nature of intimacy and memory, a poignant realization that something or someone we once held close is gradually slipping away. “Dinda Yang Jauh (The Distant Little One)” focuses on a chapter of Ain’s family history that she only uncovered very recently: the rift caused in her family when Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965, when some of her relatives chose to become Singapore citizens while others remained Malaysian. Viewed through a lens clouded by distance and time, Ain’s reimagined portraits bring these individuals together again in a shared space, while also quietly honoring this untold history of separation and rupture.
Ain
Dinda Yang Jauh (The Distant Little One)
2025
Ash, paper, magnets
6cm (diameter) each
Aisha Rosli (b. 1997, Singapore) is known for her psychologically charged figurative paintings, in the tradition of artists such as Francis Bacon, Egon Schiele and Marlene Dumas. Her figures inhabit environments that are at once familiar yet uncanny, and express various emotional states such as solitude, concealment and desire. Rosli’s process of layering her artistic mediums – acrylic, oil sticks and colour pencils – is akin to the veiling and revealing of inner selves – a means for the artist to explore the subconscious in visual form. The enigmatic “Epitaph” series for instance, was created by first staining the paper surface with ink, allowing it to diffuse and settle into an amorphous shape, which Rosli then develops into an image through various marks and glazes of colour. As she shares, “my art is an extension of myself. It’s like writing diary entries in visual form – I let my emotions guide me.”
Apichaya Wannakit (b. 2000, Thailand) explores notions of identity and how it is shaped by an interweaving of forces, including memory, geography, as well as cultural and societal norms. Guided by a belief that everything is interconnected across time and space, Wannakit’s dream-like paintings are composed from fragments of diverse realities, including her personal memories, experiences, folklore and narratives. Her recent work edges towards self-portraiture, with the artist surrounded by various emblems or portals that hint at other realities, conjuring a magical and elusive threshold between worlds.
With a practice spanning painting, image-making and installation, Dylan Chan (b. 1997, Singapore) abstracts fragments from everyday life and memories to explore narratives centered on intimacy and solitude. His works from the “Uncanny Landscapes” series revisit the recurring motif of parquet – a material that features prominently in Chan’s practice – as a means of evoking the poetics of domesticity and intimacy. At the heart of this exploration is an interest in how we navigate thresholds – physical as well as emotional – and the relationships between private spaces and the surfaces that bear the traces of our presence, and that of our familiars.
Esmond Loh (b. 1995, Singapore) is a painter who draws on memory and imagination to create arresting tableaus combining abstract as well as figurative elements. At the age of 17, he won the prestigious UOB Painting of the Year Award for his first foray into oil painting, and went on to win awards in the same competition in 2018 and 2020.
“Quarter Past” and “Departure” are Loh’s attempt at capturing a certain emotional resonance in pictorial form. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Edward Hopper and Singaporean photographer Nguan – who adroitly captured scenes of urban alienation, solitude and tenderness – Loh’s paintings speak of an introvert’s desire to escape the ‘noise’ and hyper-activity of a fast-paced city like Singapore. The stilled, cinematic quality of these paintings express what the artist describes as “an inevitable longing to be in a different place or time”, while simultaneously suggesting a subtle connection between people, time and space. The blurred, translucent figures of these tableaus evoke a certain ambiguity and surrealism within their settings, suggesting a fleeting collapse of temporalities: they are like ghosts or traces of a prior presence in a particular space and time.
Mengju Lin (b. 1996, Taiwan) works with found materials such as images, text and objects to create paintings, music, and zines. Included in this exhibition are a number of works from a series exhibited under the title “Private Cinema”. Through her evocative brushwork and palette, Lin creates intimate vignettes that layer memory, symbolism and emotion. The works share a genealogy, as marks, colours, and permeable shapes are carried over from one canvas to the next, much like how memory and longing seep asynchronously through linear, measured blocks of time. In this way, her paintings are translucent skins where rich, inner worlds meet the outer – a gentle invitation to contemplation and connection.
Suliswanto Urubingwaru (b. 2000, Indonesia) is an artist as well as a writer, and the co-founder of two artist collectives based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. His paintings which explore history, myth and identity, are very much informed by science and literature, in particular the genre of magic realism as exemplified by the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Eka Kurniawan, both of whom the artist cites as references and inspirations.
Urubingwaru’s works are often informed by his readings, combining elements from various narratives into searching, enigmatic paintings that express a sense of vague disquiet. The titles of his works are similarly composed from snippets of text, collected by the artist from book titles, songs, media clippings and so on. Unmoored from their original referents and contexts, these words and images coalesce into new narratives, speaking to the fragmentary nature of contemporary consciousness while invoking a magical realism where quotidian reality collides with a sense of fantastical possibility.
For a full dossier of available works, please contact siuli@appetitesg.com
Curated by:
Tan Siuli
With thanks to:
All participating artists
Ara Contemporary
Cuturi Gallery
Haridas Contemporary
Richard Koh Fine Art
