Stolen Moment revisits an earlier series of paintings from 2013 that took Wong an extended period of time to complete; the artist suffered from anxieties of choosing career in the arts, and after months of soul searching to rediscover his artistic voice. These works offer an almost diaristic glimpse of the artist’s mental universe at that stage in his life while reflecting on how his stylistic language has developed and evolved from his first solo exhibition in the early days ‘Now You See Me’ in 2009. This pictorial style reminiscent of Pop Art and comic books continue to inform his practice today, as one is able to draw resonances between the works here and his most recent paintings at Yeo Workshop’s main gallery in Gillman Barracks.
Singaporean artist Wong Lip Chin is unflinching when it comes to the unconventional. One might recall his repurposed vintage bus stop Exquisite Paradox (2013) on the front lawn of Singapore Art Museum, which brought the concept of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade to a sentiment much closer to home. Informed by the ethos of relational aesthetics, a postmodernist concept where an artist replicates an environment for people to participate in, he has staged numerous art encounters/ interventions in Singapore for the public to engage with over the years. From an homage to Joseph Beuys in Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat (2020)—a live performance where he read excerpts from an animal rights text before a cow, to his most recent installation The Gathering: 千岁宫 qiānsuì gōng (2022) at Chinatown, which invited audiences to sit down for a tea ceremony and enjoy the tranquillity as ancient Chinese scholars did some 1600 years ago; Wong seeks out novel ways to bring East Asian culture and heritage, as well as Western art historical canon, to contemporary and local relevance. His paintings can be said to exude a similar attitude in bridging such dualities (past and present, East and West, highbrow and philistine), perhaps with a greater sense of humour and irreverence.
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