FEATURES
A series of online presentations showcasing works by artists from Asia Pacific region highlighting their artistic practices & current trends
Ruth Marbun
27 November - 11 December 2021
Continuing with our edition of FEATURES – a series of online presentations showcasing works by artists from the Asia Pacific region – I am pleased to present the fourth edition of the programme, this time in a hybrid format, available on view online and offline.
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FEATURES 4 brings together a new series of paintings and videos by Jakarta-based artist, Ruth Marbun (b. 1985) in Once Upon No Time. The ideas and approach for the artworks started and shifted through different phases and intentions that eventually boiled down to honour the courage of (to continue) creating itself, a result of the artist’s negotiation with herself as a person, time and space.
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27 November - 11 December 2021
Wijaya Grand Center, Unit G9-10
14.00 – 18.00 WIB
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Marbun’s practice demonstrate her profound interest towards human behaviours in relation to society and the inner self. She embraces details and subtleness from the patterns in life such as imperfection, contradiction, resistance, and honours it as part of growth and developments. She works with acrylic, textile, watercolour and found-objects often depicting deconstructed figures in her paintings, prints, soft sculptures and installations. Marbun believes acceptance of flaws, instead of rejecting imperfections, opens us up to more trajectories of possibility and chance.
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Marbun graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fashion Design from Raffles Design Institute, Singapore (2008) and Fashion Foundation from London College of Fashion, London (2004). She has presented her works in Indonesia, Australia and Japan, and has recently concluded her residency with AGA Lab in Amsterdam in April 2020 and Rimbun Dahan in Selangor, Malaysia, in 2019. View Marbun’s Resume here.​
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Kemalezedine
24 April - 12 May 2021
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We are proud to present Bali-based artist, Kemalezedine (b. 1978, Yogyakarta) in our third FEATURES. Kemalezedine is a multidisciplinary Bali-based artist who works in paintings, drawings, prints and objects. His practice investigates the complex narratives and history of Balinese paintings and its complicated relationship to Indonesian art.
This latest body of works in Draw Distance continues his exploration with non-figurative paintings that are based on drawings of repetitive lines and ornamentations of various deconstructed Balinese visual iconography, arranged in individual and multi-panel layouts. In this series, the artist further experiments with darker monochromatic colours of the Batuan style painting of Bali and introduces water-based ink into his oil paintings, representing the artist’s idea of ‘conservation’ and ‘exploration’, where ‘tradition’ and ‘change’ come together to create something new.
Kemalezedine has exhibited locally and internationally, including Sixty Percent Around the Sun, Black Hand Gang, Artsphere Gallery, Jakarta, Indonesia (2021), Drawing Bali Today, Sika Gallery Ubud, Bali, Indonesia (2019), Contemporary Art from Bali, Langgeng Art Foundation, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2016), Crossing: Beyond Bali Seering, 45downstairs, Melbourne, Australia (2016), ENCOUNTER: Art from Different Lands – Southeast Asia Plus (SEA+) Triennal 2016, National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia (2016), Balinese Graphic Art: Painting and Drawing, Langgeng Art Foundation, Yogyakarta (2016), and Toyama International Art Camp, Toyama, Japan (2015). View Kemalezedine's Resume.
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This solo presentation is in collaboration with CGartspace
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Tintin Wulia
14 - 28 November 2020
Video Still from Ketok (Tintin Wulia, 2002)
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We are proud to present Indonesian-Australian artist, Tintin Wulia (b.1972, Denpasar, Indonesia) in our second FEATURES. Wulia completed her art PhD (RMIT University, 2014) after almost fifteen years of exhibiting internationally. Initially trained as a film composer (BMus, Berklee College of Music, 1997) and architectural engineer (BEng, Universitas Katolik Parahyangan, 1998), she works with video, installation, drawings, painting, sound, dance, text, performance and public interventions. Her interdisciplinary works – particularly on the sociopolitics of mobility and border crossing – are often participatory.
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Wulia has participated in major shows like Istanbul Biennale (2005), Yokohama Triennale (2005), Jakarta Biennale (2006), Jakarta Biennale (2009), Moscow Biennale (2011), Gwangju Biennale (2012), Asia Pacific Triennale (2012), Jogja Biennale (2013), Sharjah Biennale (2013) and survey exhibitions such as ZKM/Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe’s The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds after 1989 (also as one of the residency artists, 2011-12). Her work has also been selected and featured in curated sections of major international art fairs including Encounters, Art Basel Hong Kong 2016 and is part of significant public and private collections worldwide including at Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Singapore Art Museum, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, and He Xiangning Art Gallery. Wulia is an Australia Council for the Arts’ Creative Australia Fellow 2014-16, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow 2018, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Crafts, Design and Society at Centre on Global Migration, University of Gothenburg (2018-20) where she is now a Research Project Leader (2021-23).
Now living and working in Brisbane, Australia and Gothenburg, Sweden, Wulia never stops challenging the ideas of borders and identity all throughout her career. She was recently nominated for International Award for Public Art 2019 and Visible Award 2019, and in 2017 represented Indonesia with solo pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. Download Resume here.
We will showcase 4 (four) of her video works: Violence Against Fruits (2000), Ketok (2002), Everything's OK (2003) and her Venice Biennale's video installation, A Thousand and One Martian Nights (2017). All of them are available to view online from 14-28 November 2020. These videos are Wulia's works about Indonesia, her country of birth, where she grew up and spent almost half of her adult life before migrating to Australia. By selecting these works we are connecting the dots of where Wulia came from in her works, as well as looking at the entanglement of her personal history as an artist with a nation-state's political history.
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Zulkifli LEE
15 - 29 September 2020
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TRACE – Fades and Dissolves in Zulkifli Lee’s Artistic Practice
by Josef Ng
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An investigator of visual and material perceptions, Malaysian artist Zulkifli Lee captivates with his gestural orchestrations from assemblies of found, and recovered elements in the natural: soil, sand, limestone, turmeric, to name a few. While firmly grounded in the materials and structural format of painting – canvas, jute, stretcher bars, stencils, and palette knife – the artist constructs singular, non-figurative paintings-objects. He values thingness, in this case, nature, over imagery; textural quality of solidity, mass, volume, and patterns over pictures.
Artworks feature in this online presentation share basic rectangular/squarish dimensions and mainly often muted, subdued tones, but each has its own highly distinct character and is rather unlike from each other.
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Over the past years, Lee has cultivated a formalistic idiom linking nature, space, and colour to the physics and procedures of painting. Very much influenced by the Islamic aesthetic philosophy of Nazzariyah(1), the artist attempts to harmonize his artistic practice with a visceral approach to the mapping of the natural, translated into visual imagery. The artist’s compelling and often abstract works are the result of various complex procedures, combining minimalist rigour with the mellow atmospherics of a lived-in quality that underscores the natural materials he uses.
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Lee collects found minerals, such as soil, limestone, stones and so on, and creates astonishing constructions with these natural elements, presenting facets of his undeniable skill with finesse, particularly in terms of the calculated and methodical way he handles his materials by engaging with their physical and phenomenological properties. From grinding and sifting through to stencilling and layering, Lee produces geometric motifs that are repeatedly applied across the highly-textured surfaces of his works. The repetition implies an infinite continuation and becomes points of symmetrical illumination.
To the potential meaning of form manifesting cultural and personal implications, the raw enigma of abstracted surfaces and what they communicated have also long been of interest to the artist. His emphasis is not only on rationality but also on elements of chance that occur during production and the interpretations his artworks induce, prompting one to seek and see mystery in the familiar.
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