Kevin Chua

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  print September 2020

  “Latiff Mohidin: Pago Pago (1960–1969)”

  NEAR THE EXHIBITION ENTRANCE is a drawing, barely the span of one’s hand, in which two spiky objects conjure up alternate lives as plants or shrines. The composition is split down the middle, with the object on the left done in black on white, and the one on the right in white on black. The drawing seems to have been done in a hurry, ink dashed onto paper. Rushing back to his room after an encounter with several Thai and Khmer artifacts at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin in 1961, Malaysia-born Latiff

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  print April 2018

  “Between Worlds: Raden Saleh and Juan Luna”

  THERE WAS A BRIEF MOMENT during the making of his painting The Arrest of Prince Diponegoro, 1857, when Raden Saleh almost seemed to awaken from his long, captive slumber.

  The painting has Diponegoro, the Javanese prince who led his people against the colonizing Dutch in the third decade of the nineteenth century, facing off against the Dutch lieutenant general Hendrik Merkus de Kock. No doubt De Kock was simply guiding the prince into the nearby carriage that would take him into exile, but—as many have pointed out—Diponegoro’s upper torso is arched slightly backward, his chin up, his

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  previews January 2017

  “Native Revisions: Chua Chye Teck, Noh Suntag, Anup Mathew Thomas and Tomoko Yoneda”

  The familiar wager of many an exhibition in this corner of the world is to represent place as an abstraction—whether “Singapore,” “Southeast Asia,” or “Asia.” If this promise is kept, the visitor will know how to situate herself, root herself in identity, be. “Native Revisions” hopes to upend such a mind-set, gathering the work of four artists who adopt, yet transcend, a documentary and ethnographic approach to place: On view will be Chua Chye Teck’s febrile photographs of a forest in Singapore; Noh Suntag’s strange tale of radar in South Korea; Anup Mathew Thomas’s