Genevieve Chua: Moths

Moths is the solo exhibition by Singaporean artist Genevieve Chua (b. 1984, Singapore); part of the Unnatural History Drawings series, the artist uses aspects of natural history as metaphor and allegory to hark back to ongoing thematic concerns about fear, wilderness, control and the loss of control.

Moths is the second part of the Unnatural History Drawings series, whose approach is derived from the taxonomy of museum specimen classification systems. Presented as a series of paintings and objects, Moths draws upon the evolution of moths alongside the evolution of flowers it pollinates.

Chua‘s practice explores the fear of the unknown, focusing in particular on projections of things that remain unseen. Through an unfurling narrative, the artist mediates alternate realities, which present open-ended questions. In Moths, and future works to come, Chua looks into painting and its materials to formulate configurations for the way it is made and shown.

Focusing on the physiognomy of moths while making tangential relations to the artist’s previous explorations in the Parabola series, the shaped paintings are derivations from curves that have flips and folds. Moths have a sharpness. They also have vertices; a certain roundness; and loops in their wing pattern which will be emphasised in an audio narration of moth taxonomy.

The works’ formal qualities harks back from the artist’s interests making spatial possibilities with an all-over screenprint on paintings, as seen in the earlier Ultrasound series.