Chun Kai Feng turns boredom into art with his solo exhibition “The Key to This Mystery Is to Rephrase the Question Slightly” at Singapore’s FOST Gallery.“For me, our contemporary atmosphere is both funny and sad, and appears colored with boredom, waiting, and now,” Chun said early in his career as an artist, and these themes are at the heart of the 11 works which make up his latest exhibition.The statement was made while Chun was still a student at the Glasgow School of Art. At the time, the artist described his work as “drawing on a modernist vernacular,” reconfiguring “the utilitarian order of the quotidian to become poetically realigned and evoking meditations on the temporal and spatial dissonances of the built environment.”Working mostly in sculpture and site-specific installation, the artist takes unremarkable objects from modern urban interiors — air diffusers, escalators, signs — and removes them from their original contexts, forcing viewers to question the items’ presence in their everyday lives.This can be seen in such works as “Falling Falling,” 2016: a stainless-steel reproduction of a “Wet Floor” sign stands precariously on one leg while the other three appear to fly up in the air as if the sign has not heeded its own warning. The piece makes strange and sculptural something we take for granted as part of life in modern cities, turning it into a comment on the boredom Chun believes is at the heart of contemporary urban living.“The Key to This Mystery Is to Rephrase the Question Slightly” is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition in Singapore, his home country. His work has also been exhibited in Europe and in Hong Kong, where he had a solo exhibition at Art HK 2012.“The Key to This Mystery Is to Rephrase the Question Slightly” runs March 12-April 30 at FOST Gallery.
↧