Genevieve Chua: grrrraaanularrrrrrr 14.01.2023 — 19.03.2023

About The Exhibition

ggg>>>rrrrranularrrrr brings together experiments with materials, language and space undertaken by Singapore-based artist Genevieve Chua during the artist’s residency with STPI. The exhibition consolidates several bodies of work produced since 2021 that draw on painting, printmaking, sculpture and concrete poetry, playfully blurring the boundaries between them by using abstraction—or ‘near-abstraction’—as a tactic to ‘veer away from the obvious’.

Through previous experiments with shaped canvases and layered, transparent surfaces, Chua has arrived at a conception of the pictorial plane as physical object, which the artist describes as working in ‘two and a half dimensions’. Consequently, grrr,,,.aanuular,,,,,,,] seeks to draw out the connections between Chua’s surface-driven, planar works—textured, tangible constructions with a concreteness so pronounced that cement now figures among the artist’s media—and the more volumetric forays into sculpture.

In developing this body of work alongside STPI’s print team, Chua set up a dialogue between a drafting process that is essentially screen-based, and a manual, studio-based production process. Dialogue in this sense means communication back and forth, rather than a linear progression from screen to studio; screen work is always carried out with the studio in mind, while the studio work is informed by and refers back to the screen. In a way, this process mimics the seamless facility with which younger generations negotiate the relationship between information technology and their material existence. There is, in this selection of works, a kind of dual strategy – an immersion in the digital world and its unintentional aesthetic cues, and an affirmation of the seductiveness of the physical object. Just as it moves between planes and volumes, Chua’s work embodies a certain rhythmic oscillation between these spaces of human experience, while remaining sensual, sensible art that exists in the highly particular space of ‘two-and-a-half-dimensions’.

As its title suggests, grrrraaanularrrrrrr—a word offered up in multiple unconventional configurations—reveals a commitment to materials, textures and actualities. Chua creates objects whose visual appearance gives a sense of what the physical encounter with them would feel like. Across the presentation, sight is regularly called upon to anticipate the responses of other senses, to stimulate recollections of depth, of touch, of sound, of the bodily registers of speech. At the same time, Chua draws upon distortions of language, sensation and identity introduced by the digital realm, from the unsentimental orthography of passwords and CAPTCHA codes to the onomatopoeic performativity of internet slang. In Chua’s work, there is both an ease and a wariness toward intersections of material and screen worlds in contemporary life.

As the rhythms of our days become ever more synchronised and homogenised, managed by mechanistic, technological systems of incomprehensible scale, Chua proposes playfully subversive irregularities, interruptions and complexities at that most fundamental of levels: the granular.