GUO-LIANG TAN IN CONVERSATION WITH TONY GODFREY
Recorded in his studio March 2023 and
Common Man Coffee Roasters – Joo Chiat Road March 2024
Artist’s studio, March 2023, Singapore. Image courtesy of the artist.
TG: Guo-Liang, what are you working on now?
GL: I’m currently working on a public artwork for Esplanade Theatres on the Bay. They regularly commission artists to make work for their concourse space.
TG: This is the stairwell in the entrance foyer. Papermoon Puppet Theatre has something up now.
GL: That’s right. They regularly invite artists to create work there. So what I have in the studio right now is not the work I would usually make or have been making. It’s a slight detour.
TG: So these are elements of an installation, not a painting.
GL: Not exactly… but you can question whether they are paintings or not. I’m using the same translucent aeronautical fabric for my paintings, but instead of my usual approach, I’m experimenting with simple folds so that the fabric retains a memory of certain physical actions or gestures. It then gets unfolded and stretched out over the frame before I layer colour pigments over the surface to reveal the fold and crease lines.
TG: So you’re just playing with textures rather than creating what you could call a colour orientated composition?
GL: Yes, I am using the traces of the folds to guide me in creating something that’s between surface and form. I’m trying to capture these areas of light and dark in the process. That’s what happens when you fold a piece of paper, you see different planes via tonal shifts.
TG: You did an installation at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS). Are they somehow connected to that?
GL: I guess they are similar in that they are both public commissions where I got to work in big open spaces, whereas my paintings tend to be seen in an intimate setting. Arrive, Arrive at NGS was the first time that I got to make and present work in such an enormous and public space. I still sometimes wonder how I did it.
TG: Did it work? Were you happy with it?
GL: I learnt a lot from working on it and I think it gave the visitors a very different experience of the space. There were a few things that I would have changed in hindsight but that’s the nature of public work. You can’t make changes after it’s up!
TG: I’ve only seen images. How many elements were there? Three or more?
GL: There were five pieces of these ‘painterly objects’… I’m not quite sure what to call them. The Padang atrium at NGS is between the two historical buildings – the former Supreme Court and City Hall, and it stretches from the roof to the basement so it is a very deep and vertical space. I knew I wanted to have one of the pieces going all the way down so that when you looked up, you could see right into it.
TG: It’s like looking up the wing of an aeroplane, being worked on both sides.
Arrive, Arrive (2021) Acrylic on aeronautical fabric, wood and wire. Dimensions variable. National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of Ota Fine Arts.
GL: That’s what I had in my mind. I thought it was fitting, not just because I wanted the forms to be aerodynamic and have them cut through all that deep space, but I also wanted the work to bring up certain associations between painting and early aviation. The first planes were made of wood and canvas of course, much like a painting, and the fabric I’m using is made for model planes so there’s a nice circularity, conceptually speaking.
TG: How did you plan it? On a computer?
GL: I did a little collage sketch to get a sense of how the idea would look like on paper. Then, I worked with the architect Yann Follian to plan the work out in greater detail on a computer. We varied not just the shape and size, but we also played with having some pieces covered on only one side so that the viewer could walk around and see the supporting structure, much like seeing the back of a painting. Two of the pieces were covered on both sides, so they looked much more sculptural but there were still entry points where you could peer into the structure from underneath or the sides.
TG: Were these fabrics painted or did they come with colours?
GL: I painted them even though I was told I could just print the colours because at that height, you couldn’t really see the materiality of paint. However, it was important for me to physically paint them somehow. Most of the pieces are dual tone, but the colour transitions are very subtle. For example, in this one piece, if you stand at one end, it has a slight purplish colour but as you walk over to the other end, it starts to turn a bit pinkish.
Arrive, Arrive (2021) Acrylic on aeronautical fabric, wood and wire. Dimensions variable. National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of Ota Fine Arts.
TG: My first reaction looking at these images, is that it reminds me a little bit of the Italian sculptor Ettore Spalletti. He’s often worked with cones, sometimes slightly misshapen, or square shapes that look like paintings, but are actually sculptural. And they’re normally covered with, rather pastel-y pigment, maybe a light blue or a light pink. His sculptures inhabit space in a way that’s not dissimilar to yours because the colour is very understated, but yet very important. His things likewise hover between painting and sculpture.
GL: I think I’ve always approached painting as an object in space. The idea of painting being simply a flat pictorial plane is less interesting to me. Another thing that struck me walking in NGS is how we are surrounded by all these amazing paintings and yet they are all kept inside the galleries such that you actually don’t see a lot of paintings walking along the corridors and atriums.
TG: Yes, an enormous portion of the space is taken up with landings, corridors and stairways. I don’t know whether that’s the fault of the architect or the history of the building. A bit of both I guess.
GL: The museum has commissioned various art works for these corridor and landing spaces, but I don’t think there have been any paintings other than Jane Lee’s. Maybe that was why I felt I had to paint the work because I wanted it to converse with all those existing paintings inside the galleries. I was so happy to have some viewers tell me that the work reminded them of a particular painting they had seen in other parts of the museum.
TG: How tall was the longest element, the bottom element, the one that looks like a glider’s wing? I haven’t quite got a sense of the scale. I suspect it’s bigger than I think.
GL: The longest piece was 9 metres! I had to be creative with the setup and rent a working space to paint at this size.
TG: How long was it up for? About three months?
GL: Thereabouts.
TG: In a way, one could say that your works are paintings pretending to be sculptures, and the Spallettis are sculptures pretending to be paintings.
GL: That’s a nice way of thinking about it!
TG: What happened to the five elements after the installation was taken down?
GL: The structures have been disposed of but I’ve kept the painted fabrics.
TG: So you could recycle the work?
GL: I could but I think I’m just keeping them as a form of archive. I could probably remake the work to some extent at some point down the road.
TG. So, extrapolating forward onto the project you’re doing for the steps at Esplanade… I’m looking at the computer printout and your sketches. You’re thinking of about seven elements?
GL: I’m probably going to scale it down to six. I often start off with a visualisation like this one but it serves only a guide. I don’t think any of the shapes will have the exact dimensions as planned now that I’ve started painting,
TG: These three are going to be just small painting-like objects? [Pointing]
Maquette for Esplanade Concourse, March 2023. Image courtesy of the artist
GL: No, these are just trial studies – maquettes. These rolls of fabric you see here will be sewed into the individual pieces. They will wrap around the stretcher and hang down vertically so they form cube and column shapes.
TG: How big will the biggest hanging box be?
GL: I think the biggest one will probably be about three metres long and two metres wide.
TG: How long will the installation be there for?
GL: About six months. It’s a smaller space compared to NGS but in some ways, it’s more complex.
TG: It’s a challenging space for two reasons. A lot of people enter and exit there. So it’s a space that’s compromised by people going in and out. And it’s one of these spaces that’s sort of inside and outside at the same time with very big windows. And also of course you’re hanging your work over a sort of unusable staircase and the viewer is not sure, was this meant to be a staircase or not?
GL: It’s like a part staircase, part a stage kind of space.
TG: It also ends up being the backdrop for a daily concert as well. Behind it, on a sort of foyer cum stage at the top of the stairs, there’s very often a concert happening.
GL: Because of all these considerations, I want a work that can be approached from all sides and unfold from different points of view. Initially, I worked with very simple square and rectangle frames, but eventually the shapes started to be skewed and stretched in order to create different spatial relations with each other and with the site. I ended up with some parallelograms, diamond and kite shapes. I’m hoping that as you walk around them, they will create an illusion of depth.
TG: So the paintings are pretending to be sculptures again?
GL: I’m not a sculptor but I do like working with space so I think it’s my way of doing that as a painter.
TG: They’re going to interact in strange ways. The Esplanade space is very affected by daylight and artificial light and people coming and going. So, the way the painting’s translucency works is going to vary according to the time of day.
GL: Yes, similar to NGS. I’m excited to see how the work will change with the environment.
TG: They also oddly remind me, probably because I saw a whole lot of them in Venice at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia last year, of Isamu Noguchi’s lampshades.[1]
GL: Yes, I saw that show too. The combination of Noguchi and the Korean painter, Park Seo-Bo worked really well. I like Park’s work for the way he plays with lines and grids as well as his use of colour to create an illusion of space. And then you have the Noguchi lamps: I didn’t realise there were so many variations, which made the whole series very sculptural when presented together. At that time, I was already experimenting with the folds and looking for a different way to hang the painted fabric, so when I saw that show, something just clicked. I originally planned to make this work on a smaller scale, but when the Esplanade approached me for the commission, it felt serendipitous.
TG: You can see yourself making these on a much smaller scale as something you put in a gallery or domestic space. Is this one of those cases where you’ll probably go down to Esplanade once it’s up and you’ve forgotten about the hassle of putting it up, and you will look at how it behaves periodically. Sometimes the giant thing ends up being a sketch for smaller things.
GL: Yes, that seems to be the case here.
TG: You’re going from a mockup, where the objects are maybe eight inches high, to one where they’re two or three metres high and then coming down to something domestic size. Could you see your painting moving this way where they’re made more by folding rather than pouring?
GL: I’m always trying to develop ways of making marks, textures and lines. I guess each body of work is asking the question, “what else can happen here?” I have this fantasy of bringing everything I’ve tried into one painting at some stage to see how they would function together. It’s about testing the limits of a surface maybe. Painting is literally a bit of pigment on this piece of cloth or a surface and yet, what possibilities it can have going through different hands!
TG: You’ve never painted on wood or aluminium?
GL: I had maybe a good half a year experimenting and trying to work my way out of the earlier flower paintings. I painted on quite a lot of different things, including wood, plaster and ceramic before settling on this fabric.
TG: Okay, so let’s head back to where you started. What sort of family did you come from?
GL: I come from a very working class family. My dad’s a driver and my mom’s a homemaker.
TG: Which bit of Singapore did you grow up in?
GL: Ang Mo Kio, what many would call the ‘heartlands’. My parents are still there and I have a place near them, so it’s still home. I don’t think there’s anything in my family background that was particularly artistic. Although I guess my mother’s very creative as a homemaker. I actually don’t know when I decided that I liked art, but I’ve always drawn. I like that I have something that I can give attention to and something that can draw attention from others. I kept at it because I was told that I was good at drawing in school.
TG: So what did you do your A levels in?[2]
GL: I did physics, mathematics and art. I wasn’t particularly good with English or the humanities when I was younger.
TG: So when you were in primary school, was it a Chinese school or an English school? Is that where you learned to speak English, at school?
GL: Most classes were taught in English but I also spoke English with my siblings, whereas I spoke either Mandarin or Cantonese with my parents.
TG: You were a natural drawer?
GL: When I was growing up, working class families like mine didn’t send their kids for any enrichment classes.[3] In my case, I could use all that time after school to make art. I didn’t even particularly think it was a skill that I had. It was just something I enjoyed, drawing, colouring etc.
TG: So, after A levels, you went to Goldsmiths in London?
GL: Yes. I took on a teaching scholarship that allowed me to study art abroad but it meant coming back to teach right after I finished my studies. I taught art to students in a high school and then at a junior college.
TG: Did you end up getting something out of the teaching?
GL: Yeah, I did.
TG: Were you a good teacher?
GL: I don’t know. You would have to ask my students about that! I’m uncomfortable with the role of a teacher but I enjoy the process of teaching, and learning from my students.
TG: That probably means you were. Had it been a shock to you when you went to Goldsmiths?
GL: No. It was very liberating to be able to have an education that was not necessarily about learning a particular set of skills or knowledge. But it meant that when I had to teach art, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do!
TG: Were there teachers that were particularly interesting in Goldsmiths when you were there?
GL: My first-year tutor was Margarita Gluzberg, who makes these very intricate drawings. In my final year, I had Sam Fisher, who was also the head of Fine Art at the time. I think he asked many difficult questions that made me question what painting was or could do. I also got to meet other artists like Elizabeth Price and Phillip Lai regularly.[4]
TG: Presumably at that point in Goldsmiths, there weren’t many painters there.
GL: No, not many.
TG: And those were in a sort of apologetic mode.
GL: When I was there, there seemed to be some preferred practices. One year, the whole degree show was just dark rooms, full of videos. Mind you, I also started out making videos and didn’t paint till my final year!
TG: So what did you put up in your concluding degree show at Goldsmiths?
GL: I showed paintings.
TG: Still life paintings like you did later?
GL: Yes, the initial ones were of objects, which developed to include flowers. I think they were strange to see in that context – a young artist from Singapore in London making references to these art historical genre paintings. Unfortunately, I lost all my paintings from my time in school. I have no idea where they are.
TG: Is that a tragedy?
GL: I don’t know. I have some really bad slides of my work as a student but I’m ok that they just exist in my mind.
TG: So, alas, the mists have descended on this period of your artistic career. Which year did you move back to Singapore?
GL: 2003 or 2004.
TG: And at what point did you start painting the still lives?
GL: I had already started working on these in my final year at Goldsmiths, and continued when I came back because I felt I had just scratched the surface. I decided that it was OK to continue making work in the direction I was already on, even if it seemed out of place for others.
When I first got back from the UK, I went around to meet some local artists and remember feeling quite displaced. At that time, many artists and curators were more interested in what they perceived as being “contemporary” or “conceptual”: performance, photography, video etc. Painting was largely seen as conventional and something of the past, so in this sense, it was not that different from what I had experienced in Goldsmiths. I remember meeting Ian Woo and seeing his paintings for the first time. I felt comforted that someone could still find a way to paint given such an environment.
TG: Do you think that in a way, your desire to make social art was being fulfilled by teaching anyway?
GL: Maybe. Also, I did a lot of curatorial projects. For a long time, anyone who saw me at an opening would refer me to as either a curator or a teacher. Nobody saw me as an artist, except the few who had visited my studio or were interested in painting. I think that invisibility was good for me. It wasn’t a problem. It gave me the time and space to work things out.
TG: So you were allowed to develop at your own speed?
GL: Yes, I could develop on my own terms and I could figure out who I was or wanted to be as an artist.
TG: And in a way, you had the advantages of a full time job, It was enough to live on, I presume?
GL: Yes, though I had limited time making art. The late-2000s was an interesting period. There was a growing amount of art activities, but the Singapore art scene was still relatively small. It was easy to know people, and do things. I didn’t feel like I was missing out by teaching full time.
TG: There weren’t many spaces. What spaces were there to show in?
GL: There was the Singapore Art Museum and Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore (ICAS). There were also independent art spaces like Plastic Kinetic Worms and The Substation where both established and young artists would show in.
I got a small studio at Perumal Road where there was a growing enclave of art studios and spaces, including p-10 which was run by a collective of artists/curators, many of whom became my peers. At that point, it was enough for me to have a space to paint and work on these curatorial projects that allowed me to either collaborate with other people or to think about art through other people’s work. This went on for quite a few years.
TG: In that period, did you just come to the studio at weekends or after work?
GL: Yes, after work, and on the weekends. Part of how I rationalised my practice and why I eventually exclusively painted flowers was partly because I was also taking on this performative role of a Sunday painter, which I kind of was. I wanted to acknowledge the conditions of my production and at the same time, try and make a proposition (or perhaps a provocation?) – “what if the Sunday painter took on a more conceptual position?”
TG: There is a delicious paradox in a Sunday painter becoming conceptual.
Infanta II (2011) Oil & acrylic on canvas. 55.8 x 66 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
GL: It was a kind of imaginary scenario where I had a role as an artist, and the role worked as a cover. If someone asked me what I was doing, I could say I paint flowers on weekends in both a truthful and ironic way. Part of the confusion people had about my work was those questions: “Am I meant to take this seriously? Is it being self-reflexive in an art historical way? Or is it just a badly painted version of older paintings?” So all those doubts that an audience would have, would then make sense in that context.
The situation is a little different now. Last year there was an exhibition featuring a selection of early works by Singapore artists curated by a young artist-curator called Ian Tee. He included two of the flower paintings and asked why I did them. For me, they were perhaps about an ambivalence towards a particular time. Ambivalence is not about having mixed feelings. It’s about having opposing feelings and holding onto their contradictions – being here and elsewhere, figuration and abstraction, the historical and the contemporary, painting and not painting etc.
TG: And how many years did you paint flower still-lives?
GL: Oh, gosh. Seven or eight?
TG: From 2004 to about 2012?
GL: Yes… I first showed them together informally in a squash court in 2011. An expanded version of the presentation was then staged as Play Dead at Space Cottonseed in 2012.[5]
TG: That’s really the end of that period.
Installation view of paintings at Outpost, Singapore, 2011. Image courtesy of the artist.
GL: I was very sure that once I had the show, I would move on. At that point, many people thought I should follow up with a second show of the same body of work, developing on the still lives. It was necessary for the paintings to be seen but I knew I was ready to be a different artist at that point.
TG: Straight after that show in 2012 that you went to Glasgow to do your MA. You knew that your work would change?
GL: Yes. People were starting to make strange demands on the flower paintings after the show. I remember one curator saying, “Put in a pitch for the Biennale, but make them bigger!” [laughs] For me, it was a body of work that had a very clear endpoint, whereas I think the current body of work is still growing and changing.
TG: How many paintings did you do in that period?
GL: Not that many, maybe twenty-ish.
TG: That’s only three or four a year.
GL: Yes, because there was no pressure for me to make more.
TG: So there was a lot of considering and thinking going into each of those paintings.
GL: They acted as loci for thought and experimentation, I suppose.
TG: OK. So what happened when you went to Glasgow? You were shocked by how cold it was?
GL: Of course! I was also shocked by how small Glasgow was, especially the city centre itself. But then I began to appreciate its scale as a city. You could get a handle on things quickly; get to know people very easily. And there was a kind of openness and kindness to the place. I found Glasgow School Of Art quite inclusive in terms of what art can be and how an artist could work.
TG: It has quite an international student grouping. The only time I taught there, I was staggered that there were almost no Scottish students at all.
GL: Yeah, they are a minority, There’s a lot of English students though.
TG: We always feel foreign in Scotland, though I don’t think Scots feel quite so foreign in England. What sort of work did you start doing in Glasgow?
GL: I continued painting, but I also did other things. I experimented with a bit of writing, some text-based videos, partly because there was a community of artists who had writing practices. Writing was always vital to my curatorial projects so it was nice to rethink its significance for my art making. It was like drawing, something that everyone can pick up and do. Sarah Tripp, who taught on the MFA encouraged many of us to think through writing. It was nice to have a complementary activity that I could do alongside painting. It opened up a different space for me.
TG: So it was very much going back abroad for two years to branch out and come back as a different artist.
GL. Yes.
TG. And at what point when you came back did you start to work with aeronautical fabric?
GL: That started in Glasgow. I was introduced to it by one of the technicians whose hobby was making these model planes. He understood that I was looking for something that was close to this material.
TG: Are there some Glasgow or post-Glasgow paintings we can look at images of? What was your first show after Glasgow? You are showing me three very different paintings…
Fathom Phase (2015) Acrylic on aeronautical fabric, wood. 76 x 68 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
GL: Here is a work I showed at an open studio in the Städelschule in Frankfurt where I was a guest student, post-Glasgow.
TG: The American painter Amy Sillman taught there. Was she interesting to work with?
GL: Yes, Amy was such a great artist to learn from. She’s so full of ideas and very giving as a mentor. I was in a class of painters with her and Monika Baer which they co-taught together. They were an amazing pairing and it was the first time I didn’t have to explain to someone ‘why’ I painted. We could go straight into the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. Monika and Amy appealed to different impulses I have as a painter and having opposing advice was very productive for me.
TG: In these early paintings it often looks as if there are tears or rips in the fabric, but, No! It’s an illusion.
GL: Yes, it’s an illusion. The tears, rips and holes are areas where the paint had stopped or didn’t get to or got removed. Sometimes I will put resistant, like in watercolour and screen printing. For me, the early works are like compositional puzzles. These gaps separate the different areas of the painting, but they are also what joins them together. I like the idea of having negative spaces as the thing that glues the picture.
TG: These had different pieces of fabric glued together?
GL: No, this is all one piece of fabric, a singular surface. The different patches of colour overlap and they start to look like pieces of fabric being joined together somehow. A lot of people get confused when they see these paintings for the first time.
TG: You’re pouring very small amounts of paint here.
GL: I’m very economical!
TG: Yes, very ecologically sound painting. Not much waste.
GL: In 2004, there was an exhibition called Painting As Process at ICAS[6]. It was perhaps a rare occasion in Singapore where painting was being considered critically as a contemporary art practice. It had works by Angela de la Cruz, Ian Davenport, Alexis Harding and Jason Martin, amongst others. I think the show had an impact on many painters here.
When I was making this body of work, I thought about the history of process based painting. How could I be interested in the idea of process without fetishising the materiality of paint in an excessive way?
TG: Ian literally has a great big trough underneath the painting so all the excess paint drops into it and can be reused again.
GL: I dislike how process based painting has this assumed authenticity. I find the idea of truth in the material process very problematic. One of the things that I want to do is to make you take a second look, to question this sense of authenticity.
TG: Actually, I can see these are very careful pours. They look tentative, hesitant, almost. And that becomes part of them. In these early works there are splotches and blotches.
GL: I think over time these splotches and blotches become more prominent. In the beginning, it was mostly just shapes, lines and holes, and then the blotches started to emerge as an element that was important.
TG: Can we look at one of the Ghost Screen paintings? Yes… This is when the painting started to get very beautiful. Which they proceeded to get even more beautiful, I think.
Perfume Cast (2017) Acrylic on aeronautical fabric, wood. 141.5 x 121 cm. Image courtesy of Ota Fine Arts.
GL: Some people say that the flower paintings are beautiful… but I’m not so sure.
TG: They are, but in a more personal way, because they look, as you said, like Sunday paintings. Then you realise they’re not, that they’re rather odd. As for these later works of yours, you can’t paint like this without the ghost of Turner’s watercolours floating around there. I guess that’s a given for an English viewer like myself.
GL: The paint appears like watercolour because I dilute it so much with medium and water.
TG: So how much medium are you putting in?
GL: Maybe half, or more sometimes. It depends on the paint. If it’s very concentrated, then I can add more medium and water. It depends on how much I want something to clunk up or to spread or to move. If I want the paint to move from one end of this surface to the other, it has to be quite watery because it’s not going to cover the whole area otherwise.
TG: You can’t add more water to the paint once it is flowing. You have to get the right mixture?
GL: Yes, I try not to break the flow of the paint.
TG: Do you use brushes or any other tool?
GL: The brushes are just for mixing, mostly.
TG: Is the fabric stretched before you started painting or after?
GL: Before.
TG: I remember this one being a very beautiful painting. Perfume Cast.
GL: There were actually a lot of mistakes in this one. The painting took a lot of turns and I wasn’t sure where it was going. Eventually I had to erase this bit…
TG: You literally wash the paint out.
GL: I use an acrylic remover.
TG: Is that something you have to do quite often?
GL: I try not to do it because it’s actually very time consuming and it’s very unpleasant. I do it when it’s absolutely necessary. However I do like to have an option in the process where I can undo something.
TG. Perfume Cast, Promises Lovers Make, Blue Nude. There was quite an erotic element to this show.
GL: Yes, they are quite bodily. They are about the traces of touch.
TG: The way that perfume floats in the air. The way that pigment is laid on gives it a slightly synaesthetic effect, doesn’t it?
GL: How do you paint the sensation of a smell or a graze on the skin? I think it’s more interesting than trying to make a category of painting. Some people describe them as “abstract expressionist”, which I don’t think they are.
TG: You could say they have “post-painting abstraction” in their history. But then you also look at that whole watercolour tradition… trying to do the sky with literally few very gentle washes. Turner was the expert.
GL: I think about colour as something that you can stretch, but in doing so it, you’re not necessarily diluting it. You can also intensify our experience of colour. It’s like slowing down its release and making us look at it more closely.
TG: You did a sidestep a few minutes ago when I said, they’re very beautiful. Do you see them as beautiful? Are you trying to make beautiful paintings?
GL: I feel like I’d rather someone else decide that.
TG: Artists will very often describe other artists’ work as beautiful, but very rarely their own. Maybe it isn’t a quality you can aim for. It is something that happens almost accidentally. It’s a byproduct.
GL: I think that’s a good way of talking about it. The kind of beauty I’m drawn to, if it’s ever in the world, is a byproduct of something else. In so many instances I’m on the verge of throwing something away and someone comes in and says “that is very beautiful. Don’t throw it away, please keep it or show it.” I feel I’m not the best person to know.
TG: If there’s a ghost floating here, maybe it’s not Turner but Whistler. He is the most aestheticising artist, and the first artist to be a serious curator. Putting drapes over the windows so the light was diffused and so on, using different wallpapers, etc.. Are you a fan of Whistler?
GL: The painter that I really grew to like a lot is Pierre Bonnard. There’s something about the way that colour floats in the space of his paintings…
TG: I think with Bonnard, colour is somehow connected to memory. I don’t see that in your work. Do you know what Picasso thought of Bonnard?
GL: What?
TG: The worst artist in France. If you think about Bonnard, there’s almost no drawing there. He’s all about floating colour. But it works, the drawing is very tremulous.
GL: I actually love looking at drawings, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to draw since I started painting.
TG: The only drawings I’ve seen by you are these preparatory drawings for the commissions where you’re working things out. You haven’t mentioned the horizontal paintings. Was that a one off?
1 & 3 Flat Things (2019) Acrylic on aeronautical fabric, tables. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of NTU ADM Gallery.
GL: The work was called 1 & 3 Flat Things. I made it for this group exhibition at NTU ADM Gallery called Post-2000s Painting in Singapore. I quickly realised that there wasn’t going to be a lot of wall space! So, I thought, let’s occupy a different space. And they turn into these tables. I think this is maybe the first step into thinking about getting paintings to behave like sculpture.
It was successful to me in the sense that my intention was to think of that exhibition as a situation. In a way, the painting is not as relevant as the fact it was horizontal and an exercise in occupying a different terrain. It was the first time that I thought about presenting work in a group, as units and in relation to each other in space.
Back to the whole drawing thing, I was thinking how to have line work in my paintings and happened to stumble upon this mesh fabric. I realised I could unravel the weave to create lines with the frays and loose threads so I started incorporating them into the paintings using monoprints of the mesh on top of the aeronautical fabric. This was from 2020 onwards.
TG: Is this just before the pandemic?
GL: Yes. During the pandemic, I lost my studio and could only work from home so I bought these IKEA containers, and made these smaller paintings that would fit inside these tubs. They have a more graphic feel, and an expected cinematic quality somehow, so I titled them using filmic language like “CrossFade” and “Montage”.
TG: And these obviously were obviously quite big. This is when you could get back into the studio.
Montage I, II (2020) Acrylic on aeronautical fabric, wood. 190 x 65 cm each. Image courtesy of STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery.
GL: Yes. I made this pair of paintings because I wanted to use this technique with the mesh to make something off the wall. They were almost like doors, or like mirrors leaning against the wall.
The monoprints added to the existing painterly language – the holes, the overlaps, the stains and now, lines. In almost every body of work, I’m extending this language. The recent paintings became more complex because I have more elements to play with.
TG: They’re getting more complex, but are still understated, reticent.
GL: I would like to keep that.
TG: Is reticence the right word? I don’t want to use the word “lyrical” because it’s so overused.
GL: Could be.
TG. At what point did you start to make paintings that can be seen from either side.
GL: After the initial attempts at occupying the floor and getting the paintings to come off the wall, I wondered “what if the paintings could stand?” I kept thinking of being able to view the paintings from both sides if they stood upright. Being able to use them as some kind of markers in space was another important aspect. I had this vision of the paintings being close to the viewer’s body so that we are not just looking at them but walking amongst them or sitting with them.
TG: Did anyone actually sit on the painting?
GL: A few of the pieces were made in such a way where you could kind of sit on the structure if you wanted to but the idea wasn’t really to get people to do that physically. I just wanted to give that sense of possibility so our body starts to settle into space with the work.
TG: It’s very indicative that the catalogue has a lot of installation shots. You wanted them to be seen in a group more than is normal.
Installation view of Soft Turnings at Ota Fine Arts Singapore, 27 Nov 2021 – 8 Jan 2022. Image courtesy of Ota Fine Arts.
GL: I guess these are also paintings that are pretending to be sculptures.
TG: Or furniture.
GL: I do look at furniture design. I like the idea of living with a painting like you would with a chair or table. For this body of work, I was also looking at these traditional Chinese room dividers.
TG: How did this show in 2021 go?
GL: With Soft Turnings, I was quite conscious of nudging my practice out of a pure painterly discourse so that you would think of these paintings in relation to furniture and even media screens. As a result, more people got interested in my work.
TG: How long would each painting like this have taken you?
GL: Somewhere between two to three months, depending. Time is slippery when I’m painting.
2024
TG: Of course, in the year since we made this interview your show at Esplanade happened. I liked it very much. Were you happy with it? What did you learn?
A Folding Scene (2023) Esplanade Concourse, Singapore. Image courtesy of The Esplanade.
GL: I had a lot of fun making this work. It worked well with the space and it was nice to see people moving around the pieces. I think the softness of these angular forms and the tonal shifts of the folds made sense in relation to the hard architectural lines of the steps and columns.
During the closing week, I invited three artists and writers to perform in the work. Arnont Nongyao from Changmai created a beautiful soundscape using field recordings from his rural home, Amelia Barratt wrote and performed a series of abstract prose and Darryl Qilin Yam read two of his short stories. They were all people I met in the past year with whom I felt a sort of shared sensibility. Instead of me explaining my process and ideas to the audience, this was an exercise in speaking to the work with others rather than speaking about it alone.
TG: Do you think you will make more three dimensional works?
GL: I would like to, especially if the opportunity to inhabit interesting spaces arises.
TG: And what else have you been working on the last year?
GL: I had a solo exhibition in Tokyo where I brought different bodies of paintings together which was something different for me because I tend to have a singular vision for solo presentations. I guess I’ve accumulated enough approaches over the years to be able to play with juxtapositions so it is nice to know that this is something I can do now. I also wrote a short text to accompany the show which I haven’t done for a while!
TG: And do you have a show coming up soon?
GL: I am currently adapting the Esplanade work for Sifang Satellite Space in Shanghai. It is an old emptied apartment so I am bringing the work down to a more intimate scale.
TG: Looking back. In the interview we did twelve years ago, we talked about intimacy and you said, “I like the contradiction of something being very intimate and distant at the same time. I try not to lose the tension when I paint.” Is that still true of how you work today?
GL: That’s an interesting question. I think there is still a kind of focus and touch in my paintings that draws the viewer to the surface, even though I’m increasingly also choreographing works in space which requires me to step back and observe. Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about attention – what and how we give attention, and what we might want from it. I’m fascinated by the artist and psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s idea of “narrow attention” and “wide attention”. The first being that which is obsessive, repetitive and desiring while the second involves taking in the whole picture without wanting. I don’t know if this has anything to do with intimacy but maybe it has something to do with wishing to create an encounter that can happen both up close and from afar.
A Folding Scene (2023) Esplanade Concourse, Singapore. Image courtesy of The Esplanade.
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The show was curated by and also included Danh Vo. ↑
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In the English system which Singapore uses for the more academic students this is normally what are studied in the last two years of school – when aged 16-18. ↑
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Singapore is a highly competitive society. Many parents send their children to extra lessons so as to pass exams and get higher grades. ↑
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His years at Goldsmiths are also discussed in his 2012 interview with this author. ↑
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A gallery in Gillman Barracks. The catalogue for this has an article by the author and an interview with the artist by the author. For a PDF of this interview Guo-Liang Tan interviewed by Tony Godfrey 2012 contact Tony Godfrey at [email protected]↑
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Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore, based at Lasalle College of Art ↑