Sunday December 16, 2007

Building on the transient

By VIVIENNE PAL
Photos courtesy of WEI-LING

Choy Chun Wei’s landscapes get more interesting with the inclusion of new materials and colours.  

FOR THE last six or seven years, Choy Chun Wei has been busy building and assembling. Not from the ground up, but on canvas, with his choice materials being layers of paint, paper, bits of discarded items, resin and sawdust.  

For one so deeply interested in architecture, Choy seems to have gone a different route – art – albeit with no feeling of loss or regret, for all that artistic building has finally culminated in the monumental Kaleidoscopic Landscapes.  

Kaleidoscopic Landscapes is significant and not just because it is Choy's first solo show ever. It is, to date, his most pivotal milestone in terms of artistic direction since his early works in 2001 and 2002.  

Passages shows Choy's growing preoccupation with colour, as well as a sense of movement.

Denser and more monochromatic then, Choy's works began taking discernible turns over the years, the differences evident through the inclusion of new material and colour, as well as overall effect.  

It is a known fact that the artist has always had a fascination for building and stacking in his works, as well as a penchant for transient material, but of late, the works have begun featuring cigarette butts, drinking straws, and strips of pages from discarded magazines found in beauty salons, etc. 

Such a development can be traced back to the Feed Me! An Exploration of Appetites show with WWF (2006) when he was hunting for new symbolism following his residency with Rimbun Dahan in 2005. 

In Kaleidoscopic Landscapes, the usage of straws – a powerful symbol of functional simplicity for Choy – together with cigarette packs and butts, and plastic disposable cup covers create, once again, a organic and deliberately chaotic mishmash of layers which render a visually textured surface from an aerial perspective.  

Speed Builder I conveys a certain rhythm.

When quizzed about the usage of found materials in general, Choy attributes the practice to his lecturers back in his student days at Central Saint Martins, London, where he studied Graphic Design. 

“I love the element of using found things; things very much related to existence and which traces subtle meaning to humanised spaces.  

“There is, after all, a sense of accessibility through the information gleaned from discarded items. Art need not be so high-brow,” he says. 

To him, art, at its very core is primitive, and parallels his love for mark making and delivering something different, “bizarre” even, to the art appreciative community.  

“I don't want to lock the audience into any kind of perspective. The images can be any pictorial in one's mind. It’s actually transient stuff, really, and I like it that people have different interpretations when they look at my work,” he explains.  

Like the works in 2004, the Kaleidoscopic Landscapes series is paralleled by personal developments and experiences over recent years, such as the birth of Choy's son, and the opportunity for residency at Rimbun Dahan.  

The works are more colourful (following the seminal Living Mementos: Speed Passages in 2006) and have a greater emotive impetus, and inspirea personal appreciation of the space on which he works.  

“Being able to make something and having the space to make it, is a luxury,” he reflects. 

He also admits that the works this time are also an artistic reaction to his fear of the human race losing its identity in the face of fast-paced development, a fear that became more real after the birth of his son.  

“I felt very locked up when I was working fulltime as a lecturer. That put a constraint on my works in 2003 and 2004,” he recalls.  

There are other delicate changes; for instance, a more discernible freedom of expression through more subtle painterly elements, which engage the viewer to look beyond the limitation of the canvas surface. 

Organic Tracks, for example, conveys a sense of liberty with its wider and more horizontal mapping of space, although ironically, it was also one of Choy's most difficult pieces in the series.  

There is now more rhythm and a sense of movement , too, such as in Passages or Build and Illuminate with its three-dimensional effect.  

Ultimately, Kaleidoscopic Landscapes is a realisation of Choy's search for his own artistic language thus far. The journey has left him more confident, no doubt, but it’s far from over.