The exhibition features Liew Kwai Fei’s latest series of paintings exploring the game of form and colour in painting. Fei is one of the rare formalist painters in Malaysia, and this exhibition considers the full gamut of his appreciation for the medium and its expressive potential.

For almost twenty years, Fei has explored the potential for order and play - two seemingly opposing partners - to synthesise in the painting process. At the heart of this system was a humorous yet rigorous investigation into colour, shape, quantity, and scale. In series such as Light & Space (2018), shaped paintings were riotously broken down into single units of colours and rearranged in endless configurations, bringing forth the rhythmic bliss that surfaces from such an experimental approach to the medium’s essential elements.    

Building from these investigations, here, Fei offers us his latest set of rules or what he terms the ‘game’ of painting. This game occurs on a board of four principles - expanding, grouping, layering, and comparing - onto which the artist rearranges his pawns to strategise new alliances: deep blues and blacks entering into conversation; tactile veins of paint diluting cool wintry strips relieved by a warm blush. These are articulated in a vocabulary of bands that fill from edge-to-edge and therefore seem capable of repeating themselves beyond the frame into infinity. Everything is relentlessly the same, and yet within this repetition emerge deliberate breaks that showcase how painterly surprises and the formal decrees of geometry can indeed co-exist.

In this way, the modernist tradition is undeniably present, and Fei’s paintings resuscitate a period during which artists sought to distinguish painting from everyday experience, or anything else. Yet the artist is much less theatrical and self-consciously profound; these paintings are in some ways more humane: they are intimate in scale, indifferent to sublimity, and most of all uninterested in telling grand mythologies. 

This apparently reticent materiality may be demanding to consume, since they deliberately dodge the burden of representation and association. Rather than searching for hidden meanings, however, Fei’s chief suggestion in 靠譜，離譜。In Order (To Play) is that forms are there for us all to see. We simply need to play the game. 

Liew Kwai Fei is recognised today as one of the most exciting new generation of contemporary painters in Malaysia. Spanning over a decade, his practice explores the hybridity of the painting medium and its capacity to communicate ideas spanning class, race, and language to the humbling experience of the unspeakable when we encounter art. Liew has had ten solo exhibitions to date and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Malaysia and Singapore. His work has also been collected by institutions such as the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur and the Singapore Art Museum.