Desire is Dead
Through a playful juxtaposition of artworks, the exhibition seeked to tease out the erotic presences, complexities, and potentialities in Singapore’s midst, where a plenitude of desire surrounds us every day and everywhere, shaping the way we view the world and ourselves.
The exhibition was configured such that it is as much a visual showcase as it is a spatial exercise enacted bodily through artworks that engages audiences sensorially or require audience interaction. Watch a short video HERE to hear about the curator Adele Tan’s take and inspiration behind this.
Malay boy (posterior) (After Cheong Soo Pieng), 2016
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee is an artist-curator committed to a practice centred on Malayness and its social ontology. His reframing and queering of Cheong Soo Pieng’s 1953 painting, Malay Boy with Bird, leads one to ask about the desiring dynamics between the painter and the pictured. The present subject’s refusal to look back also raises uncharted questions about Cheong’s painting contrary to the viewer’s expected deference.
Artist:
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee
Courtesy of:
The Yan Collection
Lightbox With Fabric Print
122 x 87 cm
Edition 1 of 3
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee
Courtesy of:
The Yan Collection
Lightbox With Fabric Print
122 x 87 cm
Edition 1 of 3