Summer Residency:

Christine Chua

9th July - 15th July 2024

Open Studio: Saturday 13th July, 5 - 7pm.

Invitational Residency in the Front Gallery from Christine Chua.

In “Alive Matters with a Lust for fiction”, the gallery will substantively become a stage: championing in-between sites of construction, demolition and constant rebirth.

Over the week, I will be tending to the space like a trusty gardener: carefully lining the gallery floor with protective layers of polyester sheets, indulging in child’s play by pouring ‘wet slip’ on the protected floor and periodically inducing rust on found metal with a water-vinegar solution. In these volatile conditions, I hope to rediscover the joy of seeing a space evolve from various processes. I will also be re-staging works that I have made in the past year, including a life-sized clay sculpture ‘Arnold’, which has been left to rust and coagulate into new matter overtime. Thus, the gallery will function as a laboratory to observe and reflect on how raw materials behave and activate one another.

As I seek refuge in this temporary space, I will be introducing furniture from my room into the space, which will be repurposed into totems of memorabilia. The miscellaneous objects arranged within each furniture are echoes of myself, articulating a romanticised memory and a nostalgia for urban sites that I have once visited and documented. These places include the river thames and a construction site in Singapore in 2018. The furniture will be arranged to give semblance to an interior space, possibly alluding to a childhood den, ancient cave dwelling, or makeshift work site.

What is being presented articulates the dichotomy of holding onto an imaginative freedom within a space of claustrophobia. This artistic environment will further enable me to re-enact our ancestors in the priest arts of cave-painting through a series of body prints out of local pigments. Our ancient practitioners would have utilised these enclosed spaces as modes of expression and means of freed communication. As I transform the gallery into an eventful site of bodily presence, I will harken back to the past, and build on a shared impulse, a longing for secured home life and a desire to reciprocate with the landscape.

By reintroducing elements found amongst precarious urban sites and merging old works with the new, I hope to lead the audience towards a more investigative role, looking around for clues, meanings and new ways to navigate the art gallery (the white cube). Or alternatively, a more primordial invocation, to search in hopes of survival: resultant in the aftermath of a wreckage.

Ultimately, I hope to challenge peoples conception of the world by bringing attention to its essential transience, and I think that by bringing together a variety of materials and techniques, I will turn the gallery space into something wholly ephemeral. “Alive Matters with a Lust for fiction” runs from 9th July to 15th July, 11am to 6pm, culminating in an open studio and event on 13th July, Saturday, 5pm to 7pm. Throughout the week, the public may enter and immerse therein, or simply watch the space evolve from the outside.