Coalescing Cadence looks at points of intersection across artistic practices and methods of visual construction within the socio-cultural and historical ties between the two countries. The exhibition proposes that certain facets of everyday experience materialise as images and objects marked by a shared sense of cadence. While cadence suggests rhythm, movement and flow, the works on view are equally shaped by grit and tension, negotiated through the relation between tradition and contemporary life in Southeast Asia. Spanning painting, sculpture, collage, mixed media and video, the exhibition continues a broader regional effort over the past decade to foster cross-cultural connections among artists from Southeast Asia.
Several of the works consider found and everyday objects as systems of meaning. Poklong Anading presents a video iteration of his ongoing photographic series contemplating the single-use plastic bag, whose resistance to degradation speaks to its persistent presence throughout our lives and its capacity to shape and blur our identities. Pik Chaichit’s new series of paintings combines unrelated objects and elements within a single picture plane, producing absurd, often eerie images that resist fixed meaning and remain open to interpretation.
Others translate their physical environments into abstraction. MM Yu’s Measures and Measures II allow paint to travel towards the edges of the canvas under the pull of gravity, an exercise in controlled chance that registers her surroundings as an amalgamation of bright colours. Her video untitled landscape presents scenes from across the Philippines marked by disarray and the unexpected, scored ironically with the sound of birdsong. Imhathai Suwatthanasilp’s mixed-media drawings, incorporating monoprint, graphite, acrylic and human hair, draw on her observations in Lamphun Province during the turn from the hot season to the rains, when termites begin to swarm. In an accompanying set of collages, she arranges termite wings into floral patterns within Petri dishes, reflecting on the rhythms and repetitions found in nature and the promise of renewal that the rain brings.
Kanokpon Somchua constructs near-abstract landscapes from impressions gathered across Thailand, directing attention to overlooked fragments of nature such as branches and twigs, and to what is preserved in memory through these minute encounters. Francis Commeyne’s triptych of striped tarpaulin paintings, part of a body of work developed over fifteen years, closely replicates the ubiquitous coverings found on the streets of Metro Manila, probing the tensions between the handmade and the machine-produced, and the values attached to originality, labour and production.
Thanatcha Chairin applies gold leaf and copper powder to cardboard and shipping packages to render iconic Thai architectural structures, referencing Le Tour du Monde, an 1863 publication recording how Western visitors viewed Siam. Her pairing of a material tied to consumerism with one traditionally reserved for Thai craftsmanship and religious objects reveals the workings of tourism and advertising within the capitalist system. Jonathan Ching, born to Chinese-Filipino parents, draws on the everyday life of Binondo in Manila, one of the oldest Chinatowns in the world. His impasto paintings of wilted offertory flowers, offerings made by his mother, a practising Buddhist, are paired with sculptures of oranges and presented as an altar installation, capturing the passage of time and the qualities that surface through gradual decay.
Coalescing Cadence evidences the artists’ capacity to reimagine their contemporary realities and the landscapes in which their practices circulate. Through image- and object-making, they transform their relationships with their ever-changing environments, reflecting on how land, belief, ecology and technology inform lived experience, while producing works rooted in local traditions, craft practices and conceptualism.
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