A Sea of Despair and Delight is the ninth solo exhibition by Malaysian visual artist chi too, presented jointly by the artist and The Back Room at The Godown Arts Centre, Kuala Lumpur. The exhibition features a suite of 21 paintings in an interesting size: 167 × 170 cm, the height and wingspan of the artist (yes, he is wider than he is tall).
This exhibition is representative of chi too’s art practice of the past decade, which has seen the artist setting himself predetermined boundaries for the making of each new work. In Like Someone in Love (2015) and Sometimes When We Touch (2018), he created rigidly structured paintings using, respectively, paint injected into bubble wrap and bitumen on canvas. Lately, these boundaries that he sets for himself have taken a turn towards the calculative and mathematical, in the minimalist tradition of Sol LeWitt. In the exhibition 95 (2020), he created 95 combinations and permutations for a series of straight lines drawn on paper.
In the paintings of A Sea of Despair and Delight, straight white lines are painted atop dark backgrounds that get lighter through incremental mixes of white paint. The first painting in the series has a black background with white lines and as the series progresses, an equal amount of white paint is added to the original batch of black paint, so that the background of each painting becomes progressively greyer until the paintings are almost completely white. The paintings are done in monotone, featuring only straight lines, in accordance with chi too’s practice of only dealing with the most basic units of a property: black and white, lines and space.
In this, as in all of chi too’s works that seem simple and straightforward on the surface, the rigid simplicity belies a sentimental logic. There is significance in the fact that a small part of the original black paint travels through the series; no matter how much it appears to diminish, a fraction of it prevails. The paintings will be displayed in chronological order around the exhibition space, presenting a visually striking and emotionally affecting experience using minimalist actions.
About the Artist
chi too (b. 1981, Kuala Lumpur) is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist whose practice demonstrates a confident exploration of humour, satire, and visual poetics. His practice vacillates between the high-minded and the frivolous, the social and the personal, the solid and the abstract. chi too was also a member of the disbanded art collective The Best Art Show in the Univers.
He has exhibited and performed locally and internationally. In 2017, he was an artist-in-residence at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore, and in 2011, he was selected as a Nippon Foundation Asian Public Intellectual (API) fellow. chi too has had eight solo exhibitions to date: It Will Be Noisy, Messy, and Very Touchy-Feely, The Back Room (2022); 95, The Zhongshan Building (2020); Sometimes When We Touch, OUR ArtProjects (2018); Like Someone In Love, Lostgens' Contemporary Art Space (2015); The Artist chi too Looks at Artworks as He Contemplates the State of the Nation’s Institutions a.k.a. How Can You Be Sure, Art Row @ Publika (2013); Longing, Black Box, MAP @ Publika (2011), all in Kuala Lumpur, and State of Doubt: Seven Actions Towards Dilemma, Art Lab AKIBA in Tokyo, Japan (2012). He has participated in group exhibitions in Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Japan, and Singapore.
In 2022, he was featured in the publication, Prime - Art's Next Generation by Phaidon, a compilation of “the most exciting rising stars in contemporary art” featuring 107 artists born since 1980.