For the third edition of Frieze Seoul, Yeo Workshop gallery will be participating in the main Galleries section for the first time, showcasing a selection of new and recent works by artists from and based in Southeast Asia.
We spotlight two of Singapore’s rising artists, whose varied practices explore the notions of materiality in relation to our techno culture. Fyerool Darma repurposes salvaged scrap material and data waste to examine and question contemporary markers of identity, class, and Southeast Asian material culture. Returning to Frieze Seoul for a second time, he will make new works that continue his ongoing research into modernist forms and Southeast Asian vocabularies, evoking the complex history and reverbs of colonialism, postwar techno-military-industrialisation, and contemporary climate crisis.
Also highly attuned to our tropical post-apocalyptic and post-Internet landscape, Brandon Tay complicates distinctions between the tangible and incorporeal. He engages 3D project mapping, new media, and generative AI to seek peculiarities between modalities like artefact and artificial; ancient and neoteric. His resultant sculptures are manifestations of itinerant and computational factors tied to Eastern traditions and cultural history.
Contrasting the cutting-edge works of Darma and Tay, are artists who employ more classical painterly techniques and methods, drawing references from their personal experiences and social histories to create inimitable resonances with the onlooker. Singapore painter Ng Joon Kiat’s series of paintings ‘Plastic Remains’ take cues from Abstract Expressionism to distil the constitutive visual elements of our global cities today. Having long endeavoured to dismantle the confines of geographical boundaries and identity politics, Ng constantly strives to liberate his mediums and aesthetics at the same time. Snarly lines are drawn against bright, thick impastos in these works, signalling the widespread use of plastics and the abstract imaging of human desires and demands through financial charts.
Ng’s gestural compositions form a distinct duality with the still life paintings of Noor Mahnum Anum. Formally trained in architecture, Anum’s works often feature intricate geometric patterns that also reflect her ongoing interest with architecture of her more immediate surroundings in her hometown Malaysia and the region, as well as from Europe. For Frieze Seoul, she presents a series of diptychs in which she configures and pairs the everyday, unremarkable object alongside a decorative element as an attempt to suggest subliminal connotations in its juxtaposition.
Alongside artists from Singapore and Malaysia, our presentation will include works by three artists from Indonesia. With his evocative monochromatic paintings made by scratching, Maryanto addresses geo-political and environmental issues of rapidly disappearing Southeast Asian landscapes that remind viewers of underlying power hierarchies that invisibly demarcate our lands. His intense monochromatic paintings draw attention to the relentless pillaging of land in Indonesia, a crucial issue affecting Indonesia's topography over the years but is often overlooked or brushed aside despite their urgency. Weaving local narratives and mythologies, these works are a culmination of his extensive treks to Mount Merapi and other mountains in Jakarta that capture a precarious future.
In similar gusto, Citra Sasmita reimagines traditional Balinese narratives and ancient iconography into an empowered mythology for a post-patriarchal future. Her Kamasan paintings, an Indonesian technique dating from the fifteenth century traditionally used to narrate Hindu epics and exclusively practised by men, sheds critical light on the important but often overlooked role of women in Indonesian history, challenging existing post-colonial narratives that perpetuate gender stereotypes and inequality. Rooted in the notions of genealogy, hair is a manifestation of memory, karma, and reincarnation in Balinese tradition. Sasmita’s works inevitably pull you into her own expansive, prophetic universe of divine heroines to resist what she regards as the overweening patriarchalism of a conservative society.
Concerned with social evolution from prehistoric times to present day, Filippo Sciascia uses light as a grounding conceptual element throughout his works. From the incorporation of volcanic sand to synthetic fur to realistic oil paintings to works with neon light within, he skillfully manipulates materiality beyond mere representation of light itself, in turn, drawing observations and truth about society and our subconscious. In Primitive Mornings and Phylogenetic, foliage is illuminated by LED, replacing the representation of light with the actual phenomenon.