For our gallery’s debut presentation in S.E.A. Focus 2025, we are thrilled to be presenting new works by Ain and Hoo Fan Chon.
The Back Room @ S.E.A. Focus 2025
Tanjong Pagar Distripark
39 Keppel Road #01–05
Singapore 089065
18–26 January 2025
Vernissage (by RSVP only):
Friday, 17 January | 6pm – 9pm
General admission:
18–26 January 2025 | 1pm – 8pm
For a pdf copy of our sales catalogues, please click the links below.
Installation shots
Coming soon.
Artworks
AIN
Installation view of Ciplak Retellings (2022) in SBK Young Sprouts Talent 2022 Show, SBK Kunstuitleen & Galerie, Amsterdam
Ain, an emerging artist currently based in Putrajaya, will be showing new works from her Ciplak Retellings series. Ciplak Retellings began during her studies in the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Netherlands, and has expanded for the S.E.A. Focus presentation.
Ciplak Retellings is an installation featuring multiple small works crafted out of air-dry clay and made to resemble familiar cultural artefacts in Malaysia, with slight modifications. The inspiration for this artwork stems from a reflection on Malaysian identity and cultural phenomena, particularly the prevalent practice of “ciplak” — a Malaysian slang term used to describe counterfeit goods. Drawing upon this concept, Ciplak Retellings serves as a commentary on authenticity, ownership, and the evolving nature of artistic expression within a cultural context.
At its core, Ciplak Retellings explores the tension between authenticity, replication, and reinterpretation, inviting viewers to contemplate the complexities of artistic ownership and authorship. In addition, it also partakes in discourse around cultural appropriation and the commodification of cultural heritage.
The creation of Ciplak Retellings involves a meticulous process of replication and distortion, echoing the evolution of the phenomenon of “ciplak” goods. Each edition of the artwork undergoes deliberate modifications, resulting in subtle variations that challenge traditional notions of originality and artistic ownership.
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Nurul Ain Binti Nor Halim (b. 2000), “Ain” for short, is an artist born in Bangkok, Thailand and raised in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Japan, which makes her have a diasporic identity and longing for belonging. Her practice includes videos, audio, and installations that focus on themes such as belonging, language, memories, and national and cultural identity. Her work reflects her interest in post-colonial discourses, such as cultural preservation, exoticism, craftsmanship, and archives.
Besides that, she questions the position and role of artists in decolonization, with references to Aimé Césaire’s concept of the “Man of Culture”, and how one embraces a post-colonial history and reconstructs itself through culture and arts.
Ain has participated in group exhibitions in Malaysia, the Netherlands, and Belgium, the most recent of which was ⏊IWE, curated by Christina Li, at Blank Canvas in George Town, Penang (MY) in 2024
HOO FAN CHON
‘Familiar Strangers’ is a series of watercolour paintings based on found photographs collected from around antique shops and flea markets in George Town, Penang. I have a habit of visiting these markets and collecting old photographs, particularly photographs where I don’t always immediately understand the content or context, or photographs that look slightly odd.
Since its designation as a joint UNESCO World Heritage site, both the state of Penang and local businesses have promoted George Town as a popular destination for cultural tourism. This branding exercise has stimulated a trade in nostalgia, particularly manifested in the recycling of found objects as novel souvenirs for tourists or interior decoration for business owners.
Other than looking at the typical photographs we see in antique stores that feature social rites (such as weddings, birthdays, funerals, etc.) or the prized Peranakan family studio portraits, I am more interested in the anonymous, amateur everyday candids that are sometimes awkwardly posed, performative, blown out, underexposed, or in soft focus. I am intrigued by how these time-eroded personal keepsakes, nibbled away by silverfish, ended up being recirculated. Reading these photographs is an act of narrating everyday histories, even if they have to be excavated from other people’s staged realities, through lenses both voyeuristic and literal.
If photographing is an act of appropriating the subject being photographed, then painting a photograph is to look at a photograph intently, like studying a map of unfamiliar routes, to familiarise oneself with a foreign image. I blow up these photographs by tracing the original image through layers of watercolour paintings. Painting can sometimes be described as photographic and photography as painterly; this series of works intends to combine both the representational function of a painting and the mimetic nature of a camera to put together an album of anonymous and discarded memories.
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Hoo Fan Chon (b. Pulau Ketam, Selangor; based in George Town, Penang) is a Malaysian visual arts practitioner working across the mediums of painting, sculpture, photography, and film. His research-driven projects reframe everyday life with irony and wry humour, examining how our value systems fluctuate between cultures while interrogating notions of cultural authenticity. Growing up in Pulau Ketam, a fishing village off the coast of Klang, Hoo has an affinity with fish, which has become a recurring motif in his artwork.
Hoo graduated with a BA in photography from the London College of Communication, University of Arts London (2010) and co-founded the Run Amok art collective (2012–17) in George Town. He was one of the recipients of the first cycle of the Studio Residencies for Southeast Asian Artists in the European Union (SEA AiR), organised by the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2022, which allowed him to pursue his research in Finland. Notable recent group exhibitions include The Ocean and the Interpreters at Britto Arts Trust (Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2022); Myth Makers: Spectrosynthesis III at Tai Kwun (Hong Kong, 2022); The Ocean and the Interpreters at Hong Gah Museum and Solid Art (Taipei, Taiwan, 2022); and the ILHAM Art Show 2022 at ILHAM Gallery (Kuala Lumpur, 2022). His solo exhibitions include Let Them Eat Salmon (NTU CCA, Singapore, 2023) and The World is Your Restaurant (The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur, 2021).
He is currently a fellow at the apexart Fellowship programme in New York City, from November–December 2024.