Starting off from an existing body of work titled Landscapes and Paradise—a painting series inspired by tourist postcards and posters depicting Singapore in the 1980s and 1990s—Hilmi Johandi intends to frame his long-term enquiry into the relation between the constructedness of images, memory, and the creation of meaning from different angles.
Hilmi Johandi
4 April - 31 August 2022
Informed by art historical and philosophical discourses on the subject/object dichotomy and propelled by a growing interest in stage design, theatricality, and the phenomenology of perception, the artist intends to expand his own image-making process beyond painting, questioning his intuitive relation to the medium at the same time. This experimentation will potentially result into multimedia installations wherein formal and contextual aspects are merged and narratives unfold in space through a combination of visual layers and material components that elicit different modes of spectatorship in the viewer.
This episode features a conversation between two artists who work primarily with painting: our Artist-in-Residence Hilmi Johandi and Singaporean artist and educator Ian Woo. In this peer-to-peer exchange between thoughtful image-makers, Hilmi and Ian ponder over the significance of the studio in Hilmi’s practice revealing how walls, and spaces, can shape artistic mindsets and generate different patterns of thought. Throughout the conversation, they address the potential of a local residency to shift the perception of the familiar, open up new ways of seeing and refresh routines and rituals. They also touch upon the artist-audience relation and other core aspects in Hilmi’s practice such as the role of emptiness in the painted surface, the process of reframing, and the inspiration that comes from old films and photographs.
Drawing on archival footage, old films, and other imagery produced for mass consumption, the artistic practice of Hilmi Johandi refigures the iconography of Singapore and our relation with images. His body of work is deeply rooted in painting but it also harnesses other mediums to mobilise symbols and sites where memory and nostalgia, leisure and desire become deeply entangled.
Ian Woo is an artist influenced by modernist abstractions, the phenomenology of perception, and the sound structures of music improvisation. His paintings, painted objects, and drawings are traversed by a sense of gravitational change that makes the image function as a diagram of states of consciousness. The distinct use of frames, axis, and invisible grids is expressive of his “compartments and systems” approach, a methodology the artist has developed in his exploration of the painted space as activated time.
Contributors: Hilmi Johandi, Ian Woo
Editor: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Nadia Amalina
Sound Engineer: Ashwin Menon
Intro & Outro Music: Yuen Chee Wai
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan
