Pascale Giorgi Worst Hits
Jon Chan, Un Cheng, Chris Huen Sin-Kan, Noor Mahnun, Tang Dixin Painting Itself / 绘画本身
Painting Itself/ 绘画本身 brings together five painters whose practices span Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Shanghai. Curated by Jonathan Nichols, the exhibition invites audiences to encounter painting as a global conversation, shaped by diverse contexts and histories. Painting Itself/ 绘画本身 foregrounds painting and painters as forming an interconnecting ‘horizontal culture’, where the principal encounter with painting and its history are made by artists themselves. Painting is treated as a living, adaptive form rather than a fixed language. Each artist leans into the mood and character of their work, allowing the painting to set its own terms. In doing so, they find what Jonathan Nichols calls “the face of the painting” – that moment when the work looks back at its maker. Jon Chan’s paintings explore Singapore’s civic spaces, layering fragments drawn from media and memory into terrains of green and fractured ground. His works hover between political gesture and quiet observation, asking what persists when rhetoric falls away. Un Cheng’s paintings, rooted in Hong Kong’s compressed urban life,
combine vibrant colour and layered textures with scenes drawn from everyday encounters. Through a process of scratching, layering and improvisation, she transforms ordinary moments into psychic landscapes, charged with movement and solitude. Noor Mahnun brings rigorous structure and cultural memory into dialogue with contemporary aesthetics; her works are marked by precision and poise. Tang Dixin’s paintings oscillate between figuration and abstraction and often carry a theatrical charge. Works such as Human Mountain evoke monuments and collective memory, yet remain deliberately ambiguous, holding intimacy and estrangement, permanence and flux in tension. Chris Huen Sin-Kan’s fluid compositions dissolve boundaries between figure and environment, often depicting moments of recognition between viewer and subject. As Huen reflects: ‘Painting is about living – it’s not something up in the air.’ This sense of painting as inseparable from life resonates with the exhibition’s premise: that paintings are not like everyday objects, they carry a vitality we more readily associate with people.
Many years ago, when I took my Northern English grandmother to PICA to see my work, she laughed. Not at my work, mind you, but at a video by Pascale Giorgi, where her father sings a Latin translation of Joe Dolce’s Shaddap You Face against a green-screened landscape of Italian architecture and iconography. My grandmother laughed, well, really, I should say that we both laughed, twice. First, at Pascale’s fine-tuned, at times acerbic but affable, sense of humour at play in the video. Then the second laugh came about due to a coincidence: my grandmother used to sing to my brother and me an abridged version of Shaddap You Face when we were much younger, in moments of angsty fussiness. This is a dear and fond memory and recalls the many works of British absurdism my grandmother introduced to us (and often performed for us): Monty Python, The Young Ones, Blackadder, The Mighty Boosh and so on. There was something so very Eric Idle about my Northern grandmother implementing Dolce’s song as a nursery rhyme.
This first encounter with Pascale’s work, a decade ago, at the 2016 Hatched graduate exhibition, of which we are both now alumni, demonstrates what is at once so clever and considered in her practice broadly: the way that humour and its associated props, icons and symbols cuts across cultural memory and time. Her solo exhibition, Worst Hits , applies this ethos to an act of self-remix. In this collection of new ceramic works, sketches, ideas relegated to the back burner, experiments and non-starters are dredged up into an auto-theoretical survey of her own interests, subjects and tendencies. This is itself a comedic effort of vainglorious ‘celebration’, but one built in with its own various foils and conceits, resulting in a self-effacing and communal body of work that invites a Duchenne smile and laughter stemming from the ancient veins of humour that undergird culture and history itself.
Paul Boyé, Goolugatup Gallery Curator
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Presented with Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in association with Drill Hallery Gallery, ANU
Presented with Goolugatup Heathcote
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