Haffendi Anuar presented an installation at the Future Section of Art Taipei 2015, Taipei, Taiwan extending from his recent solo exhibition in April 2015 at Richard Koh Fine Art titled M13, further exploring his continued interest in portraying the façades of Kuala Lumpur’s built environment and the mass-construction of low-cost housing through geometric abstraction, making commentary on architectural constructions and its relationship to societal perceptions of progress and development in Malaysia. Mining the language of Western geometric abstraction as well as Islamic art while making references to everyday reality, the piece, which is composed of smaller ‘replicated’ ‘components’ of painted shapes, applying the approach to art making influenced by the division of labor and mechanical reproduction. Elephant Utopia, simultaneously a painting and a sculpture, calls to mind the city skyline and characterizes present-day structures as the ‘white elephants’ of modernity; visually appealing yet devoid of any real cultural nor progressive significance.
