REACH

REACH

ANDY DEWANTORO, MUHAMAD IRFAN, FUNG MING CHIP, PUTU SUTAWIJAYA, RICK LEWIS, S. TEDDY DARMAWAN, TILO KAISER, VINCENT CAZENEUVE

OPENING RECEPTION
23 MAY 2013, 7 - 9PM
AN ART BASEL HK VIP EVENT, OPEN TO PUBLIC

EXHIBITION DURATION
23 MAY - 23 JUN, 2013

EXHIBITION ADDRESS
SIN SIN FINE ART
52 - 54 SAI STREET,
CENTRAL, HONG KONG

Sin Sin Fine Art proudly announces “REACH”, a specially curated exhibition that comprises of a duet show featuring recent works by emerging Indonesian artists Andy Dewantoro and M. Irfan at the Art Basel Hong Kong venue in Convention Centre Wanchai, and a group show featuring works by Fung Ming Chip (Hong Kong), Putu Sutawijaya (Indonesia), Rick Lewis (USA), S. Teddy Darmawan (Indonesia), Tilo Kaiser (Germany) and Vincent Cazeneuve (France) at Sin Sin Fine Art gallery spaces in Sai Street.
The group show will be opened with a special performance by acclaimed sound artist Akio Suzuki and emerging dancer/choreographer Hiromi Miyakita.
Throughout the works shown in “REACH”, one can sense a blending of cultural and national identities; a blurring of boundaries that results in works in which cultural origins cannot be neatly defined or confined. Instead, one can perceive a kind of internalized cross-cultural dialogue - a reaching out to embrace various aspects from the many different cultures they have been exposed to, integrating them into their very own visual languages.
Andy Dewantoro, (b. 1973, Tanjung Karang, South Sumatera, Indonesia) graduated from the Bandung Institute of Technology in 2000, focusing on architectural design. While his early work as a painter tended towards abstraction, during a residency in Europe Dewantoro was deeply impacted by the landscape paintings of 19th-century visionaries William Turner and John Constable, leading to a breakthrough in the development of his own, deeply auratic works. Dewantoro creates shadowy, almost cinematic worlds where seemingly abandoned houses, churches , and bridges are viewed at a psychological as well as physical distance, shimmering in twilight atmospheres coloured by light-infused yet monochromatic palettes of black, purple, white and grey, like fading memories.
Muhamad Irfan (b. 1972 in Bukit Tinggi, West Sumatra, Indonesia), studied painting at the Indonesia Institute of Fine Arts in the 1990s where he was a founding member of the influential Jendela Art Group. Since that time, Irfan has worked independently in a variety of media, including painting, sculptures and constructions. Yet in every work, the artist seeks — and almost always attains — a kind of technical perfection in which one discerns a level of deliberation and meticulous calculation that borders on engineering and craft. What gives Irfan’s art its unique power is the fusion of this technical virtuosity with a kind of visual framing that imparts a particular, philosophical point of view.

A self-taught artist who has been active as a sculptor, photographer, playwright, poet, and seal carver as well as calligrapher, Fung Ming Chip (b. 1951 in Guangdong, China) has excavated new layers of conceptual and structural freedom within seal carving and calligraphy’s organic terrain of word and form. Fung concluded that calligraphy is an art of time and space, and therefore is closer to music and dance than to Chinese literature. Using his original compositions, key words or Buddhist scripture as the text, the structure of the character became the choreography for the brush.
Putu Sutawijaya (b. 1971 in Tabanan, Bali, Indonesia) studied art at Indonesia Institute of Fine Art (ISI) Yogyakarta. His “Warrior” series of paintings are inspired by traditional Potehi puppets in Java. The origins of Potehi puppets in Indonesia can be traced back to Chinese immigrants who came to trade and settle in Indonesia between the 16th and 19th centuries. The word Potehi is derived from Chinese words Poo (cloth) + Tay (bag/pocket) + Hie (doll); meaning ‘dolls made from cloth’. Putu perceives an acute awareness of how the Potehi dolls metamorphose from real life into illusions in the shape of the dolls. He senses a new kind of consciousness to re-examine life through the rhythmical movements of the Potehi dolls to achieve a better understanding.
Rick Lewis studied painting and sculpture at the University of North Texas, receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1992. His work is born out of relationships to or qualities within nature that connect with his psyche. Imagery seems to make itself known through perception of "a thing" or through remembered experience. Inspiration for the work is found in the curve of a path, a smell that recalls a specific memory, a texture on a tree, a peculiar sound, and so on. Lewis states that "The natural environment is the only source that provides the metaphors for the way that abstract paintings are (color, surface, texture.) The paintings in and of themselves are nature. We don’t have language to help us deal with abstract images. Paintings should take you way beyond any singular subject matter. I like the sense that everything is available."
S. Teddy Darmawan’s explosive energy finds expression in a range of media, from paintings, drawings, installations, sculptures to performance art. He studied painting at the Indonesia Institute of the Arts (Institut Seni Indonesia) in Yogyakarta and has been a fixture on the Yogyakarta arts scene ever since. In his energetic, passionate and often humorously ironical work, S. Teddy D. (b. 1970 in Padang, West Sumatera, Indonesia) also creates a kind of mythological world: a mythology of the everyday. Recently, S. Teddy has been fascinated with the spontaneity and irrevocability of painting with Chinese ink-and-brush on paper, and the resulting artworks reveal the masterful way the artist has infused the lightning quick strokes with a sense of his own vulnerable humanity.
Tilo Kaiser (b. 1965 in Frankfurt, Germany) is a collagist, a multi-media artist and a collector of images with an inherent love to the drawn live. Born and raised in post-war Germany, Tilo’s art has been influenced as much by German art movements as by Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, Pattern Painting, Computer Games, Comic Drawing and Graffiti. Surrounded by the universal icons of popular culture from MAD to Mickey Mouse, advertising illustrations of all sorts and Hollywood movies, he has adopted these fast and ever changing influences of colours, images, contents and styles, and combined them with painterly traditions to his series of ‘painted drawings’ and multimedia collages. What seems random is meticulously planned. Kaiser currently lives and works in London.
Vincent Cazeneuve (b. 1977 in Toulouse, France) studied at Ecole des Metiers d’Art in Revel with an expertise in wood cabinet making, marquetry and gilding. Lacquer painting, one of the most ancient art in China, acted like a strong magnet to him. So Vincent committed himself to live in China and with his own language deciphering the work of lacquer, learning and drawing lessons from traditional Chinese lacquer paintings. Simultaneously he put his own creativity into Chinese traditions, mixing elements of the Western modern art. Vincent is deeply touched by natural objects, natural beauty that contains endless stories and mysteries that he would like to recount through his lacquer paintings. Besides Chinese lacquer, he makes extensive use of various natural elements such as mud, linen, silver, gold, tin, lead, shells, stone, wood, and so on. Vincent also adopts various texture effects, including lithography, engraving, relief piling, mosaic collage and incrustations, lending his artworks abundant tactile feelings.
Akio Suzuki is well known as a pioneer of sound art, but the breadth of his activities and the form of his works far exceeds the normal boundaries of sound art. It is perhaps more as a "quester after sound and space" that he has received the most attention from artists in many fields. Suzuki's journey as an artist began in 1963 with a performance at Nagoya station, in which he threw a bucket full of junk down a staircase. The inspiration behind this performance - the idea that if one were to hurl an object down a well-balanced stairway, a pleasant rhythm might be the result - took the desire to "listen" as its subject. That desire to hear, to listen has remained the one constant in Suzuki's stance as an artist.
Hiromi Miyakita is a dancer and choreographer from Itami city, Hyogo Prefecture. After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Dance, she started her dance career in Japan in the latter half of the 1990s. In dancing and choreographing, she emphasizes not only the body but also the place surrounding the performance. On the basis of the most fundamental human movements related to space such as sitting, standing and walking, she creates delicate yet bold movements capturing sensitively the surrounding light, sound, air and landscape.