Review Exhibition XEM – Meta Far-East

Written by Dr Bridget Tracy Tan
Director, Institute of Southeast Asia Arts – Art Galleries
Academic Advisor (Southeast Asian Arts)
Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts

“Quang Lam’s style is unquestioningly about play, but also about accountability. He wants the viewer to know how we experience what we experience, through what we enact and the thoughts we think, the ways in which we move. His contribution to the exhibition is a series of installations demonstratng the state of the world.

Some of it through aspects of history, with cross continental ocean travel and the advent of early carte postal as souvenirs and documents; some of it through a simulated form of gaming, in environmental concerns, such as deforestation and rising sea levels. The concept somehow capitulates to a version of doomsday survival. Pittng humans against their own wits. For who else is responsible for our fate but ourselves, as we tear down our trees, accumulate waste, adjust the geopolitical margins of our earth and doggedly annihilate natural resources.

He plays around with time and space, unfurling a narrative of how we have mapped ourselves into history and how modern methodologies easily show us the interconnectedness of our world, past and present, nature and artifice, real and imagined, one hemisphere to another. His institution of tessellation is not a mathematical legacy as such, but a mirror to the basis of life: cellular mitosis. Forms of tessellation can be seen in all parts of life, from the veins of a leaf to the scales of a reptile, from fractal crack paterns on cement and bark to cirrocumulus cloud layers.”

The fundamental premise that links Quang Lam’s myriad of work in this exhibition is one of the simultaneous. From the idea of time, time zones, movement by post and by vessel across meridians, to a gaming segment with algorithms that move in tandem. The algorithms correlate data of tall concrete construction, destruction of trees or the planting of trees, rising sea levels and population density. Tessellation when applied simulates geomorphic processes, there is no overlap, only up, down, in, out, backward, forward, centrifugal, centripetal.

Likewise, sea lanes like flight paths are navigable routes that cannot overlap, or risk collision and other catastrophes. Quang Lam’s installation and masterplan wants to visually articulate the burden of human sentience when something other than materialistic concerns are at stake.

What that is, is a question that the viewer needs to discover as he or she investigates the collection of found objects, games and projections inside the space.