Ng Joon Kiat at Osage

Osage presents the solo exhibition of Ng Joon Kiat, a painter who refers to archives of disciplines such as geography, microscopic science, history, cartography and city-planning to inform his practice. His works push painting in explorations of the imaginary and invisible complexities of maps of cities and earth spaces.

For the artist, maps are manifest with past and present political, cultural, social and economic negotiations. The solo exhibition will include works from his series “Green Series: Nature and Borders”. In these paintings, there are tensions between movement and stillness, control and chaos. While Ng’s earlier works in part functioned as critiques to moving images, in other words, the high speed production of multiple images, and aimed to interrogate a position for painting and for stillness, “Green Series: Nature and Borders” attempts to recuperate a sense of narrative and content back within the paintings. The notion of the “flat image” is a consistent topic of investigation for the artist; in particular, “flatness” as an analogy for monopolies that emerge in globalized cities. The artist aims to take a closer look at what exactly comprises this “flatness” or these cities. The use of maps in Ng’s works can therefore be seen as a questioning of a set of relations.

On view will also be “Border Series: the Unspoken and Nature” and “Memory of Surfaces”, stemming from a concern with materiality and the alchemy of paper and drawing materials.