Richard Koh Fine Art (RKFA) in collaboration with the Penang State Art Gallery (PSAG) is proud to present the homecoming exhibition of Penang-born artist; Chan Thean Chie. Titled, Chaos and Order, this exhibition is scheduled to run from 6 until 21 August 2022 at Penang State Art Gallery, 3rd Floor, Dewan Sri Pinang, 10200 Light Street, Penang, Malaysia. The exhibition will feature 40 recent works on paper.
Chan Thean Chie’s surreal tableaux are full of disembodied eyes, noses, ears and lips; heads and limbs that appear like inmates of collective captivity, and the gruesome remnants of a ritual ordeal; designs of radiating, swirling and looping lines, a series of webs, nets, vortices and abysses. The bodily fragments and abstract patterns of his visual world embody the reality of shifting cultural and psychic geographies, of migratory exigencies in the twentieth century, of the web of suffering, as Buddhist cosmology has it, that is existence in the human realm. His compositions are premised on the trauma of dissonance, expressed through signifiers of rupture, obsession, and imprisonment.
“As artists, we want to be free”, the artist declares, yet his visual world is very much ensnared in webs of illiberty. In his private pictorial realm, people are trapped in the snares of cyclic existence. In his vision of an unliberated cosmos, there subsist only the webs of karma, politics and the all too tangible reality of alienation–wherever one happens to be in the world, at home anywhere simply because not at home everywhere.
Chan Thean Chie (b.1972, Penang, Malaysia) works and lives in Austria. In 1999, he received his Masters from the MK Attersee, University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria. Chan has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Austria over the past 25 years, notably at the Museum of Modern Art and Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna, Austria. His last exhibition in Asia was in 2012 at NN Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Chan Thean Chie – Chaos and Order
6 - 21 August 2022
Penang State Art Gallery
Gallery 3rd floor / Ground Floor Office
Dewan Sri Pinang, 10200 Light Street,
Penang, Malaysia
Saturday - Thursday, 9am - 5pm
Closed on Fridays and Public Holidays
