Curator’s Note
Steve Wong is a collector who has always been interested in what artists are doing now, and in supporting current practice.
Built over a period of three decades, and including over a thousand artworks by more than 350 artists, his collection offers an extraordinary overview of contemporary art-making, and contemporary painting in particular, in Malaysia from the 1990s to the current day, alongside regional practices from the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore. It holds a body of artworks that can tell us a great deal about the changing contemporary; about shifting formal, material and conceptual concerns in painting; about an evolving art market and its role and influence within a growing art community. The process of documenting the collection over the past three years has created an opportunity to begin opening up its inherent stories and readings to a public audience. This exhibition and its accompanying publication serve as an introduction and invitation to the collection.
Happy Birthday Steve, 2001, 68 × 68 cm, gift from artist. Image courtesy of the artist
—Beverly Yong, RogueArt
Based on the collector’s selection of almost entirely monochrome works, it begins as a visual proposition — what and how do we see in black and white? In picture-making, “black-and-white” evokes the bare bones of visual form. Without the comfort and distraction of colour, an image is somehow naked, either especially vulnerable or especially audacious.
In our minds we may associate “black and white” with a theory of opposites — positive and negative, substance and absence, darkness and light. We may see these in tension with, or in complement to one another. In the English language, something presented “in black and white” is to be taken as clear, plain, fixed, incontrovertible.
An exhibition in black and white prompts a shift in viewers’ aesthetic register, and invites a special way of looking at and thinking about the artworks it brings together, and how they may relate.
Diaphanous B-CXIII, 1994, oil on canvas, 152.5 × 244 cm (Diptych). Photo: Adaptus Design System
The 76 artworks here in oil, acrylic, charcoal, ink, pencil, watercolour, gauze, soil, sand, thread, dye, cement, insulation foil, pixels, drawn, painted, scratched, eroded, pressed, printed, sewn, on paper and canvas, aluminium and steel, plastic, wood and fabric, present many textures of black and white. A few are inflected by a brief intrusion of colour. We can pin them to different ends of the collection’s spectrum of works in their concerns, imagery, subject matter and visual form. We see figuration and abstraction, man and nature, boys and girls, order and chaos, anger and joy, creating a set of assumptions and categories to be interrogated. In our increasingly polarised contemporary world, we need artists to help us make those interrogations, through how they navigate and understand their experience of the “now”, recalibrating ways of looking.
We would be hard-pressed to find anything clear, plain, fixed or incontrovertible in any of the works set before us. Together they present a challenge to us to see and see beyond the black and white, embracing, like the collection itself, the richness, ambiguity and complexity of the worlds they inhabit, respond to, and create.
Beverly Yong, RogueArt
June, 2024