Malaysian artist Dhavinder Singh spent 6 months at Rimbun Dahan in mid-2022; his residency concluded with the studio exhibition “Please Do Not Sit — A Show About Chairs”, in September 2022.
About the Artist
Dhavinder Singh (b. 1983) is a Kuala Lumpur-based artist whose art practice, in essence, deals with the repurposing and reconfiguring of materials, through paintings, animation, assemblage and site-specific installations.
Trained at the Malaysian Institute of Art (MIA) and later, the Cardiff School of Art & Design in Fine Art, Dhavinder finds himself still testing the parameters of his practice and the mediums he engages with. “On an emotional standpoint, my creative process is based on intuition,” he has said. “In my body of work, I tend to express and share a visual metaphor of my reaction based on a particular space and subject matter.”
Bearing witness to the overdevelopment of Kuala Lumpur in the last few decades, Dhavinder’s deep affinity for the industrial area of Kuala Lumpur in which he grew up — Chan Sow Lin — features prominently in his work. This was evident in his most recent solo exhibition “Tagistan” (2020), where elements of these interests, sense of aesthetics, and manipulation of space culminated in the series’ engaging multidisciplinary nature.
Other solo exhibitions include “Test Tanah” (2019), “Recollectus” (2017) and “MO: Formal(and)scapes“ (2014).
Website: www.dhavindersingh.com
Instagram: @dhavindersingh
About the Residency
“Currently, I am working on a series of self-portraits using chairs – which is meant to be a playful reflection on different aspects of my personality. I did not plan to consciously work on this in my time at Rimbun Dahan. However, the woodworking aspect of that project is something I plan to take further during my residency, with the resources found in the surrounding areas of Kuang.”
About the Exhibition
From 27 August to 11 September 2022, Dhavinder opened his studio at Rimbun Dahan to the public, to show the works he had created during his residency, in a small exhibition. See below for images of some of the works, and download the exhibition catalogue.
