Ian Woo b. 1967
"The mind is constantly looking at these marks, and that to me is the essence of abstraction. It is the distance between the real situation and memory."
– Ian Woo
Artist Biography
Ian Woo (1967, born and based in Singapore) is an artist and musician who works in abstraction to explore spatial, formal and temporal relationships within his compositions. Approaching painting as an active, visual event that unfolds and changes as shape, colour and mark interact with each other, he improvises across the pictorial surface until he achieves visual coherence.
Encountering Woo's abstract works, viewers are invited to draw their own relations between his marks, the painting, and their body. In earlier works such as We Have Crossed The Lake (2009), lively clusters of coloured forms and gestural lines suggest a spatial logic of ground, object and focal point. Since the early 2010s, Woo has moved away from this compositional density to explore lighter, more fluid impressions of space. In his Emotional Things (2018–2020) series, the artist painted tilted reliefs of various sizes and shapes in colour fields, with colours appearing to retreat, collide and merge based on the position of the viewer.
Woo obtained his BFA in Painting from Kent Institute of Art and Design, Canterbury in 1994, his MFA in European Fine Art, Painting from Winchester School of Art and his PhD in Fine Art from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2006. His works are held in numerous collections including the Singapore Art Museum; National Gallery Singapore; and the Mint Museum of Craft and Design, Charlotte.
Notable exhibitions include Haven’t seen you lately (2024), Esplanade, Singapore; Impermanent Durations (2019), Ohio State University; Siapa Nama Kamu (2015), National Gallery Singapore; After Utopia (2015), Singapore Art Museum; The Origin of Beauty (2014), Busan Museum of Art; and Ian Woo: A Review (2011), Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore.
The artist had his residency at the STPI Workshop in 2021, resulting in the group exhibition On Time: Adeline Kueh, Jason Lim, Ian Woo and Zul Mahmod (2021), curated by Marc Gloede.
