The Storytelling Wardrobe - Inheritance, Death, Absurdity I, Pause I, Absurdity II, Pause II- Ink on paper with audio, 2018

The wardrobe, which stores things. For this exhibition, some ‘things’ got to be retold. These are stories of a few wardrobes that were situated in different spaces. 

I incorporate the qualities of precision and rigor inherent to architectural drawing and the flamboyance of Chinese calligraphy, to manifest contexts for the stories. They coexist with the audio segments, a recorded voice is telling stories about inheritance, death and absurdity amongst others. 


The Storytelling Wardrobe

This series of abstract paintings disseminates a hidden message from the tropical garden.

There are more than usual the dried leaves and flowers in the garden. A line in a Chinese verse: 花无百日红, it means any blossom would not last more than a hundred days; however, climate change at the present days had significantly shorten life span of each blossoms. I hope that this series of abstract paintings would rise awareness of the climate emergency.

Hypermorphing

Bloom

A group of roses with China blue outline and a group of China blue peonies with gold cores. These flowers present a fake garden. They stay on the wall. They seem to be immortal. They seem to be the portrait of the future garden.

Hypermorph Garden 3.0

Hypermorph Garden 4.0 is a series of paintings featuring the flora, fauna and historical speculations of the mangrove forest at Jetty Semeling, Kedah State in Malaysia. The forest has splendid salt-tolerant trees. It provides a buffer zone to protect the land from wind and wave damage.

The series has 15 pieces of mixed media paintings, which the content on each canvas is interconnected to each other, to elaborate a comprehensive scene around the mangrove forest. Each canvas is W122 x H152.5cm. The 15 pieces make the interconnected width to become1,830cm.

Hypermorph Garden 4.0

I initiated this project from upcycling fabric waste, yarn ends from landfill. 

In Muller’s morphs terms: Hypermorph, which it means a mutation that causes an increase in normal gene function. In 2019, I made a speculation of the consequence shapes of flowers and plants in a tropical garden in the aftermath of mutated gene. I made an abstract painting to elaborate the ‘shapes’ in the garden and named the painting as: Hypermorph Garden. Instead of presenting the proven scientific images, I presented a series of surreal, metaphorical mixed-media paintings.

Hypermorph Garden

I bought a box of 35mm slides and a projector from an antique shop in Georgetown, Penang. The shopkeeper said that the slide and the projector are both from the 60s. We were having too much fun watching the images. Those images are in monotone. We could not tell colours of the roses. So, I used black ink to depict the blooms. 

Images of flowers in the slides inspired me. Then, I made a few paintings of roses on different canvas.

Roses

In this series of paintings, I elaborated the golden hour of spring, full of blossoms, fertilities, refreshing and energetic through twiddling the brushes and dominating the black fluids by bronze dips. I chose to paint on ecru colour; it is a fundamental, natural, crude and warm base to bring up the motionless, seasonless, tropical scene to continue glowing in domestic context.

Golden Hour

This is a series of paintings depicting the blooming Chrysanthemums at one of the flower market in Malaysia. Chrysanthemums is highly demanded for the Chinese tomb sweeping season;  usually end of March till beginning of April. I saw a variety of Chrysanthemums in the market.

Fuen Chin's Art Collections