AN EXHIBITION BY JASON WEE
AUG 17 – SEPT 17, 2017
YAVUZ GALLERY, SINGAPORE
The exhibition Labyrinths takes its cues from the ways we navigate our varied physical and political geographies, and how the language and architecture of walls and fencing become signs of authority and power. Walls and fences offer security as well as entrapment, privacy but also control, navigation as well as punishment. In these works, Wee recalls the fence that shape the line on the Padang for Lee Kuan Yew’s wake, the cage that is the emergent sign of new regulations around Hong Lim Park, as well as the extensive fencing of Singapore’s beaches and shores against illegal landing.
The exhibition will be comprised of a sequence of eight mixed-media panels, and an installation that will direct the viewer through the gallery space. Wee’s panels rework the familiar municipal green fence as written pages filled with the signs and the affect of our current polarized polity. Simultaneously sculptures and paintings, these panels incorporate photographs, prints and paintings as well as text-based material, each panel forming a legible page that can be read. The artist is particularly interested in the signs of polarization as well as the poetics of powerlessness and impasse.