A+ is pleased to announce Part I of Swallow & Spit, a two-part exhibition of landscapes by Southeast Asian contemporary artists. In collaboration with Silverlens (@silverlensgallery) and Ace House Collective (@acehousecollective).
To represent a landscape, an artist should do two things: swallow and spit. At least, so said Karel van Mander in his Schilder-Boeck (Book of Painters; 1604), where he describes the painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder as having “swallowed all those mountains and rocks which, upon returning home, he spat out again onto canvas and panels”. And in so doing, Bruegel was able to “so faithfully… follow Nature”.
Van Mander’s description examples a familiar understanding of landscape art, one that involves explaining an artist’s agency over nature through their devouring of all its epiphanic qualities. Today, generative Al models provide us with new and easier ways to satiate this churning impulse, allowing users to generate fictional landscapes and expand existing ones with natural language descriptions. Upon ingestion, these quaaludic images serve to ease our anxieties about the otherwise industrial exploitation of nature that proceed around us.
But how can we speak about landscapes in different terms?
The need for new registers of co-existing with our non-human others is growing restless. Swallow & Spit introduces a breadth of practices that actively wrestle with landscape art’s complicit history with stories and ideas surrounding control and consumption, to restore an already fraught relationship with stories beyond extraction.
Swallow & Spit: Part I
5 – 28 October 2023
A+ Works of Art
Alvin Lau, Amin Taasha, bani haykal, Chong Yan Chuah, Condro Priyoaji, Dang Thy Anh, Danot, Jao San Pedro, Kentaro Hiroki, Paka & Yee I-Lann.
6 – 8 October 2023
CIMB Artober Art & Soul
Ahmad Fuad Osman, Amin Tasha, Ampannee Satoh, Arie Dyanto, Chong Kim Chiew, Gan Chin Lee, Hà Ninh Pham, Isola Tong, Izat Arif, Mary Pakinee, Phornphop Sittiruk, Phuan Thai Meng, Than Sok, Trinh Câm Nhi, Ugo Untoro, Vertical Submarine, Yee I-Lann & Yudha Kusuma Putera.
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