Art Fair 2024: Highlighting Noteworthy Exhibitors for the Events
Art Fair 2024 had a great smorgasbord of interesting exhibits this year, for everyone to look at and admire. Our coverage already discussed the ways the fair’s been made accessible to local artists and the international artists featured. But the Art Fair is also about the other galleries and exhibitors who showcased their best and brightest works to the public. With that in mind, here are the standout distributors and the great art they contributed.
Questioning the Aesthetics of Art Itself
The Columns Gallery, based in Singapore, showed some of their past and current exhibitions during the Art Fair. Exhibited were some works from Lee Hyun Joung’s Silence exhibit and Kim Kang Yong’s Boundaries Between Reality and Image.
Lee’s Silence exhibit uses traditional Hanji paper as a canvas in creating her waves of composition. She creates the images of mountains through these traditional means, and it creates these visions of natural existence that feel intimidatingly large. It’s provincial and godlike with its depiction of nature, portraying epic landscapes in a still serenity. And yet, it’s also isolating in its portrayal of nature: there are no humans, no living creatures, only the towering natural structures from a sky-like perspective alien to the typical human viewpoint.
Kim’s Boundaries Between Reality and Image has a more experimental route. His work featured in the Art Fair depicts bricks made from sand. It plays with perspective a lot; the sand structures creating the illusion of a variety of jutting bricks coming loose. The three-dimensional look toys with your expectations, and the work makes you question what you’re looking at: is it a brick, or is it the treachery of an image? Ceci n’est pas une brique.
You can catch Silence at The Columns Gallery in Singapore until March 16.
Creating Our Own Vision of the World
Gallery Shukado by Scena featured artwork by Kakinuma Hiroki, many of which depict decaying buildings in the midst of destruction. The artwork has a surrealistic bent that creates a dreamlike scenario in the viewer’s head.
The centerpiece of his works is Cage, which showcases a deconstructed apartment building in the circular shape of a coliseum. People in the windows and doors are in motion, as if the building is being destroyed in front of them. It’s a very visceral sight, especially at the scale Hiroki depicts them.
Secret Fresh Gallery showcases the more merchandising part of the art world. Many of the paintings and sculptures have an action-figure sheen to it, and appears inspired by anime of the past. From the Evangelion-like chibi paintings to the cyberpunk aesthetics, it is a very neon-soaked series of artworks that are eye-popping and family-friendly.
Depicting the World As Is
Tarzeer Pictures’ exhibit for Art Fair 2024, When Comets Land, is a series of photographs that depict the natural world, so to speak. Much of the work comes from the paradox of our conception of the world, which is that the world is “an apparent mystery” for the most part.
Many of these are photographs were taken around the world, from the Maharlika Highway to a town close to the Mayon Volcano, to areas in Spain and Switzerland. It shows sunrises and sunsets, forests and moons, and even sea foam.
It depicts the unpredictability of the world at large. The photographers adapt to the surroundings of their world as they attempt to depict it. Because of that, whatever unexpected changes happen are captured on film.
Pintô Art Museum and Arboretum, meanwhile, has a much more impressionistic depiction of the natural world. The works featured contained a lot of scenery and picturesque backgrounds, showing a provincial beauty that contrasts with the cityscapes that many are used to.
One of the central paintings for the exhibit is Maria Pureza Escaño characterizing birds like peacocks in nature. One of them has a woman in white seemingly dazzled by this perched white bird, as if she’s looking at a spirit. The paintings have a strange, ethereal quality to it, especially in the way the birds shine in the light of the forest.
Art Fair 2024: Long Live Art!
With another Art Fair in the books, it reminds us of the importance of platforms to show and curate art. Art’s in the eye of the beholder, but galleries and exhibits allow us to experience with the best light possible.
Art Fair 2024 presents us with the idea that the best art isn’t just great in a vacuum, but chosen and created with purpose. Artworks, whether from the same artist or the same movements, have conversations with the world around it, and curation highlights those conversations in a way that matters.
