Through these thought-provoking images, Boo Sze Yang invites us to contemplate from an ironic distance the complex battle — physical and moral — between civilians and law enforcement figures, as each group tries to uphold what is right and safe for the society. As viewers processing these upheavals through our digital screens and devices, and rummaging within the simulacrum, to what degree can we trust the narratives that are constantly being framed and fed to us?

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Milenko Prvački – Abstraction for Beginners

Milenko Prvački’s ‘Abstraction for Beginners’ reflects the artist’s ongoing exploration of painting as a system of language and culture. Abstraction in Western painting permeated mainstream consciousness around the late 19th century and took shape as a lexicon of its own. As a formal language it encompasses recognisable structures, techniques and expressions, which are constantly adopted and transformed by artists through varying treatments. In these new works, Milenko Prvački interrogates the capacity of abstract painting to invent, bridge and transcend gaps of knowledge.

Milenko Prvački was born in Serbia and Serbian was his Mother Tongue. In his younger years, he studied in Romania and had arrived there without knowing the Romanian language. He subsequently came to Singapore in the early 1990s without knowing English. The artist had relied heavily on dictionaries to learn and function in the different cultural and linguistic spheres that he inhabited over the course of his life. In a dictionary, notions and words are compiled and organised in an alphabetical order. Meanings lie not just in the word itself, but also in other words that relate as similar (synonyms) or opposite (metonyms) to it. Meanings and interpretations shift along with differing syntax and context, and are at times completely

Milenko Prvački. Dictionary of Abstraction, 2018, Oil on linen, 300 x 472 cm

In his work, the artist deliberately combines different brush styles, geometric elements, and other evocative shapes and situations in a way that wittingly mirrors the structure of a dictionary. His painting synchronises geometric, expressionist and associative abstractions by juxtaposing their distinct visual qualities. On one surface bears the eclectic mix of different times and stiles, which according to the artist, is his “explorative way of expanding the boundaries of abstraction.” Perhaps the impossibility of exactitude in language is also its capacity to assimilate different ideas and values.

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Milenko Prvački’s work stirs us into questioning the existence and values of differences that surround us, including different civilisations and cultures. The artist maintains that his working method is “to bridge different working methods and historical movements, and engage them in one place to coexist peacefully.” Different ideas across different times communicate, argue and coexist in his painting; what shapes and gives it coherence is his ordering of the visual image and the meanings we choose to draw from it.

Wong Keen – Everything Is but Colour

Wong Keen’s ‘Everything Is but Colour’ invites us to pay close attention to how a painting essentially functions as an object and an ideological space. The canvas or paper, which is essentially a three-dimensional object, exists and relates to the viewer as a two-dimensional space through its interaction with the artist’s paint. Its materiality, function and form, what and how the image communicates, depends entirely on the artist’s success or failure in organising the system of colours that fills its space.

The exposure to Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field Painting during his years at the Art Students League of New York (1961-64) fostered in Wong Keen a lifelong interest in structuring pictorial space and atmosphere through complex colour relations. Whether in figuration or abstraction, his composition is masterfully embedded in the ‘push-and-pull’ interactions between different shades and hues to give rise to evocative forms and details. The selection of new works in this presentation charts the latest development in the artist’s dynamic and synthesised treatment of long-standing themes, including the flesh, the burger, the nude and the lotus.