Departures | New Releases: Yanyun Chen, Hong Zhu An, Prabhavathi Meppayil 13.04.2024 — 09.06.2024

About The Exhibition

This exhibition presents works by Yanyun Chen, Hong Zhu An and Prabhavathi Meppayil who collaborated with STPI’s Creative Workshop between 2019 to 2022, translating their usual practices into the realm of print and paper. This produced a space for possibilities and experimentations, given that the artists are made to work with materials, techniques and collaborators that they are foreign to. The end results of their projects are presented in this show, and they demonstrate the artistic innovations that happen during the fertile period of an STPI residency.

For Chen, her unfamiliarity with print and papermaking enacted a series of experiments where the artist aimed to push each piece further and further in a generative process, with each being a departure from her previous practice, the previous test prints, and even the previous copy within the same series of work. This conferred an ephemeral-like quality onto her STPI works in obvious contrast to her usually-dense charcoal drawings due to her chosen materials and methods, thus rearticulating her familiar motifs in new forms.  

Hong has taken part in two residencies with STPI, with the first having culminated in his solo exhibition at the Gallery, Ascetic Serenity (2012). The layers of paint in his usual practice traded itself for layers of pulp in the paper mill, imparting on his paintings a wholly different texture for both residencies at STPI. Rather than washing layers of ink and paint to create his depth-filled planar backgrounds, paper becomes the main actor in manifesting the art object, conferring upon the final works a subtle sturdiness that metaphorically and literally jumps out beyond the two-dimensional surface. 

Meppayil brings over her material sensibilities and sensitivities to her collaboration with the workshop. Two practices stand out: imagery produced by thinnam, a traditional tool used by goldsmiths to incise patterns into metal, and the use of copper wires. In her usual practice, the renewed use of these materials converges the artist’s lived experience, tradition, craft and modernist abstraction onto the same field. They journey from her studio to the realm of print and papermaking here at STPI, and are thus further abstracted to breed new ways of seeing these motifs.