Motions

Ota Fine Arts Singapore is delighted to present “Motions“, a group exhibition by 7 artists from different parts of Asia: China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea and Singapore. This exhibition relooks at the beauty of motion, familiar from our everyday life, and explores its meaning through diverse visual expressions including video, photography and installation work. A wide range of visual art generates new perspectives to our common knowledge towards the process of change.

Sound and motion are closely related and exist in our everyday life in the form of speech and body language, as well as in film. Singapore-based Indonesian artist Betty Susiarjo presents her installation work “Anemones” (2011), which resembles the sea creatures from depths of the ocean. Samson Young, an artist from Hong Kong, approaches the relationship between motion and sound in a different way. In his video work “Muted Situations #2: Lion Dance” (2014), he creates an unusual setting where the traditional Chinese lion dance is performed without any percussion music.  Similarly, Beijing-based artist Chen Wei‘s recent series of work “In the Waves” (2013) are still images void of sound. This body of work shows young people dancing in a club under spotlights. Instead of showing a frenzy, Chen shows the intoxicated faces of dancers. According to him, this reflects the current situation of young people in China: it brings relief and pleasure to be floating in the waves of society, but at the same time it makes them afraid of being washed away.

London-based Japanese artist Hiraki Sawa experiments with this notion of perception in his duo-channel video work “For Saya” (2011). In Sawa’s other video work, “Tracking” (2010), the entire scenery is presented in inversed monochrome – white birds flap gracefully against the black sky. Through the use of photography, Singaporean photographer Victor Gui manipulates perception of time and space in his work titled “Passing” (2015).

Shanghai-based artist Tang Dixin experiments with the movements of the human body in his performance “Mr. Hungry” (2015), performed at Hunter College of Art, New York. Korean artist Yeesookyung relates to the body in the form of dance. Her video work “Twin Dance” (2012) shows two women in identical clothing performing a traditional Korean dance in an almost exact same way, as if one is the mirrored image of the other.