Annabel Scanlen
Annie Areum Shin
Fei Gao
Jessie Nok Wai Hui
Jodie Sim
Karan Singh Shekhawat
Natalie Quan Yau Tso
Emotions engendered by the subconscious intertwine our waking and dreaming lives. Shekhawat's paintings are layered flashbacks of nightmares that illustrate the perpetration of fear from day to dreams and from dreams to light. Meanwhile, the inescapable state of 'self' against emotions is mirrored in Hui's intuitive ink drawings of cloudscapes. The clouds, as the subconscious, cycle on its own emotional states, while the character Hui, as the reaction, is constantly attempting to shape its unruly mass. The series articulates a narrative of the changing yet patterned subconscious.
Beyond emotions, the subconscious undermines decision making. Scanlen's nonfunctional sculptures challenge the dualism between humans and Things. She tests the notion of utility in relation to Thing by collaborating with it, enquiring human's disregard for Things' 'hidden' brains. The prioritisation of the 'hidden' brain is echoed in Shin's Qualia Series. She utilises an equation-like manner to collage her paintings that realise and translate the qualitative biases that limit her visual window. The aesthetic norms and preferences of her marks are alien and autonomic montages of the visual world by her subconscious.
The subconscious not only builds our present identities but conjures the past identities that are lost. Tso's video performance manifests the loss of her mother tongue as she escapes the facemask and chews on a new skin. She laments the trauma weighing on her relationship with her mother, mother tongue and motherland. In symmetry, Gao evokes the childhood yearning for his father in Is Dad Still Not Back? As one rolls the ball between wooden words, time is passed to endure the absence of a loved one. This time is stretched and embedded in Sim's Mending of Flesh. By inducing mnemonic qualities of mourning, the absence and presence of grief and loss that overpowers our subconscious begins healing.