A general view of Gan Siong King’s latest exhibition ‘Pictures of Things’ at The Back Room gallery in Kuala Lumpur. Photo: Kenta Chai
There is a certain gleeful whimsy to how Gan Siong King named one of his paintings in his current exhibition, Pictures Of Things, at The Back Room, Zhongshan building in Kuala Lumpur.
Everything in this show, which ends this weekend, is something you have likely seen before, because all the artworks are paintings of images sourced from the Internet.
In the gallery, you'll find an artwork titled Twinkle Twinkle Little S*** already playing with your mind - it winks and blinks at you - as you sit down for a viewing.
Gan has taken optical illusions, light effects and even the patterns of different types of graph paper, and faithfully reproduced them as paintings.
“This is a shift from treating painting only as an act of mark-making to one that considers the intertextual relationship between a group of images. I think we all copy, borrow or are inspired by what we have seen. No one creates in a vacuum. The difference is whether we remember where our references come from. Part of being creative is remixing references to make new connections,” says Gan, 48.
Gan Siong King's 'Signal From All The Noise' (oil on canvas, 2023). Photo: The Back Room
As part of a generation that has both lived with and without the Internet in daily life, he reflects on how the Internet as a platform for learning and sharing has had a positive impact on his creative practice.
Pictures Of Things, which is Gan's first showcase of new paintings since 2015, also offers a layout designed by him, in his exploration of exhibition-making itself as a medium.
His previous painting shows in Kuala Lumpur, include The Pleasure Of Odds And Ends (2014) and The Horror, The Horror (2015). Both those shows looked to push the boundaries a typical painting exhibition in Malaysia.
In working through the pandemic years, he had also been occupied with video essay projects, with last year's experimental works such as All the Time I Pray to Buddha, I Keep on Killing Mosquitoes at PJPAC and My Video Making Practice at SAM @Tanjong Pagar Distripark in Singapore gaining the artist a wider following.
'What is a painting?'
“Using ready-made images sourced from the Internet is my way of representing this impact, and to an extent, our present reality. My belief is there are enough images online to sustain my creative practice for several lifetimes. The challenge is to find new contexts, interpretations or uses for ready-made images,” says Gan.
Pictures Of Things is the first part of a larger painting project (called El_ph_nt) that explores possibilities around making paintings and painting exhibitions. It is an ongoing series with a target of six painting exhibitions.
Gan Siong King's 'Twinkle Twinkle Little S***' (oil on canvas, 2022). Photo: The Back Room
Although it is obvious that Gan relishes the open-ended rabbit hole exploration this project entails, one of the main questions here is no doubt, “What is painting, and what else can it be?” Gan doesn’t believe there is a definitive answer. It merely serves as a framework for him to generate paintings and discover new perspectives on how to view and make paintings.
“What is a painting? There are simple answers that suffice, but they are banal and obvious. For instance, I could say that a painting is made with a brush, or is an artwork that is hung on walls. But as with most things, it is at the limits of any definition that things become interesting and where definition becomes fuzzy and imprecise. It is at this juncture that unspoken truths or the status quo can be unraveled to reveal our values and biases,” he says.
The Kuala Lumpur-based artist adds that there is often an expectation for paintings to be pedantic or didactic, where appreciation of a piece of art weighs heavily on deciphering the information or messages that the artist has gathered and encoded into a painting.
'This exhibition is the first of a larger painting project titled 'El_ph_nt. El_ph_nt is my long-term project exploring possibilities around making paintings and painting exhibitions. Particularly through conversations with others about images and the language we use to describe them,' says Gan. Photo: Deni Fedinillah
But he isn’t interested in doing this with his paintings.
As a painting project, El_ph_nt is about sharing different ways of looking and thinking.
“What a painting is and what it can be, will always be contingent on the context we choose to talk about it, but I now believe an understanding of what it is can only come from figuring out how paintings are used, and how and why they are made. The answer will never be definitive. And thank goodness for that, because it is around this ambiguity that different interpretations, connections, and meanings can be made. I think the best examples of poetry operate in a similar fashion,” he says.
Pictures Of Things was conceived in the early months of the pandemic lockdown in 2020. During this time, Gan spent most of his days thinking about art and art-making, even as everything around him “slowly folded into itself”.
The exhibition seeks to capture the mood of that experience through visual representation, creating a space that is visually vibrant but at the same time conducive to rest.
Gan Siong King's 'This Listlessness' (oil on canvas, 2020). Photo: The Back Room
"I want to create a mood that is both bright and dark all at once. It is a memory of an exhibition I had wanted to make in those early months of the pandemic in 2020. Quiet, not loud. It should feel like a crisp blank piece of A4 paper. A space that the audience can use as a mirror and project whatever is in their heads. A bright comfortable place to stay, stare, read, and rest," says Gan about this first installment of El_ph_nt in an excerpt from the exhibition's accompanying essay A Sequence of Words Describing A Group of Pictures.
The artist wrote the exhibition essay himself (edited by contemporary artist Wong Hoy Cheong), a method to help him explore different ways of making meaning with images, one that is less didactic and leaves plenty of room for visitors to make their own connections. The painting’s titles are mainly pulled or are informed by passages from the exhibition text.
“I hope at least one aspect of Pictures Of Things will resonate with the visitors. There’s the technicalities of handling paint to render straight lines or hazy gradients; or the conceptual framework behind this exhibition, where I hope they will think about the relationship between how we look at paintings and the language we use to describe them. But most of all, I hope they can take their time to look and read, and use the space to be with their own thoughts. To just stay still for a moment and rest,” he concludes.
Pictures Of Things is on at The Back Room, Zhongshan Building, off Jalan Kampung Attap in Kuala Lumpur till April 9.
