Chi Ming, the third generation in a family line of artists, inherited an artist’s mantle from another era. His grandfather painted portraits of Mao, in his day plastered over every factory and home across China. Ming’s father went on to the more autonomous, but no less prescribed niche of creating cinematic posters from the 70’s, and it was to the backdrop of this world that Chi Ming grew up. It was a largely monotone one, where “art” was meant to imitate life, yet life had nothing to do with art. However all of this was about to change:- Mao was dead and rampant capitalism was soon to be born; an idealist like Chi Ming needed to turn inwards, both metaphorically and literally, to find beauty and escape from the outside world’s ensuing chaos and ‘orderlessness’ as he calls it. Unlike his father and grandfather before him, Chi Ming is fortunate to be able to fully indulge his artistic freedom and is keen to find beauty and theatricality, a seed planted by his father, in everything around him. J S Tan, on the other hand, was born into a family with no artist precedent. In this context, his choice of artist career was certainly exotic, and possibly contra to expectations, particularly for this outwardly practical, multi-talented character who may have pursued many a more ‘mainstream’ career. Tan’s earlier works reveal his negotiation of this circumstance, in works rife with the sinister side to external power structures, and social hierarchies’ entitlement and inequality. Ambivalence, and the tart taste of conscious choice over un-navigated terrain, have been all too familiar to both as men and artists.
While Chi Ming finds release through the fractious nature of existence in his highly expressionistic oil paintings, J S Tan conversely sifts chaos through stabilized, logical forms and finds release through their inherent stability. Chi Ming’s world is erotic, voyeuristic and highly corporeal, one that he conjures through a multitude of small, tangential brushstrokes and density of a range of colours combined to give primacy to feeling. It is obvious that he takes pleasure in applying his painterly skills to explore textures, to uncover the female form in particular, and applies his refined sense of palette to romanticize interior, private spaces, the place of exploration for alter egos and sexual fantasies. Chi Ming savors a cache of open-ended questions through ambiguous references, for instance the knife, an instrument of threat and attack in a lover’s hand in Midsummer, or his young niece made up as a grown woman in Playing Adult or, conversely, his muse infantilized and clutching a teddy bear in Longing for Childhood. He delves into the clandestine world of S & M in Chain, depicts figures as headless or only partially rendered, sometimes retaining on the canvas a ream of tape over the heads of his subjects in works such as A Chinese Book, Off the Wooden Floor and Lovers. For Chi Ming, it is as if his embrace of absolute freedom, however anarchic, is an antidote to the trivial, commonplace strains of contemporary living - and moreover, affirmation of life. In this exhibition, J S Tan has taken the pole opposite approach through his body of ink and charcoal works, relinquishing power to logical, pre-determined directives and irrefutable forms. In contrast to Chi Ming, Tan is thereby revealing beauty in, and through the process of, order. While, as Michelle Ho has observed, Tan’s earlier images “imposed psychological and emotional control over the viewer”, his most recent body of charcoal and ink works conversely “liberate into the purity of shapes and lines, the order and security of unchanging geometrical laws”. Tan goes on:- “space eats into space... leading to autonomy”. Tan’s enormous discipline in creating a highly sensitive gradation of shading through a monochromatic palette reveals both skill and moreover, resolve. That is not to say he has also not had fun with these works, describing Study of Bricks in Space V as reminding him of a “big bow tie”. Observing Chi Ming and Tan’s works in conjunction with each other also reveals the cross-over cultural approaches of the two. Just as J S enters an Eastern, and moreover Confucian realm of self-cultivation and discipline, espousing tenets that one must first govern oneself before one can govern others, through technical mastery over his chosen materiality, Chi Ming exudes Western, and specifically Descartian, models of both individualism and dualism of mind over matter.
It is Atkins and Ai's great privilege to showcase the joint exhibition of Chi Ming and J S Tan, Testing Freedom’s Temperature, in cooperation with Nikolaus Ellrodt. We are fortunate indeed to have Michelle Ho, recently double Emmy award winning documentary producer, as writer and interviewer for this exhibition. For enquiries, or to request a copy of the hardback bilingual catalogue featuring Michelle Ho's essay and interviews with the artists, please email us at our contact information below.
- Emily de Wolfe Pettit