Yeoh Choo Kuan (b. 1988, Malaysia) is a young artist working in the veins of Abstract Expressionism though he installs narratives and hints of figuration to the formal language of his paintings. He graduated from Dasein Academy of Art, Kuala Lumpur with a Diploma in Fine Arts in 2010. Solo exhibitions include: 50/50, Taksu, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Private+ Sentiment, House of Matahati, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Recent group exhibitions include: Configuration, G13 Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Connection, Orange Gallery, Philippines; and No+ Random+ Nonsense, Boston Gallery, Bacolod City, Philippines. He lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Yeoh Choo Kuan will be at Rimbun Dahan as a resident artist for the month of June 2015, via a collaboration with Richard Koh Fine Art.
Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, 2015, Oil and lacquer on canvas with custom wooden frames, 160 x 134 cm
He Took off His Skin for Her, 2015, Oil and lacquer on canvas with custom wooden frames, 160 x 134 cm
I’m Gonna Make Him an Offer He Can’t Refuse, 2015, Oil and lacquer on canvas with custom wooden frames, 160 x 134 cm
Remisniscences of a Deceased Me, 2015, Oil and lacquer on canvas with custom wooden frames, 160 x 134 cm
You May Live Through This Tragic Affair, 2015, Oil and lacquer on canvas with custom wooden frames, 160 x 134 cm
Hasanul Isyraf Idris (b. 1978, Malaysia) was trained at Mara University of Technology, UiTM, in Perak. He has received a number of awards, including the Young Contemporary Arts Award in 2007 at the National Visual Arts Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, the Incentive Award at the Open Show held at the Shah Alam Gallery and the Consolation Prize for the Young Talent Art Exhibition at the Penang Art Gallery. A highly elusive artist, Hasanul shuns attending openings and attempts to work anonymously in the art scene. He produces works in a variety of media, from paintings and meticulously crafted drawings to painted oven-baked clay sculptures. Mining inspiration from within, he articulates his personal struggles as an artist by personifying them as strange characters that inhabit his invented universes. Influenced by the graphics of underground comic books, 1960s science fiction, fast food, and street art and fashion, he juggles pop-culture references with a personal viewpoint. Recurring topics in his practice are the meaning of life and death, memories and fantasies and sin and reward.
Hasanul will be at Rimbun Dahan as a resident artist for the month of June 2015, via a collaboration with Richard Koh Fine Art.
Flower Fairies of The Summer, 2012, Mixed media on paper, 122x158cm
Luring Hue, 2011, Acrylic and aerosol paint on canvas, 213 x 195 cm
Parasin, 2014, Acrylic, enamel, rhinestones, semi-precious stones, glitter, pearls and PVA glue on paper, 152.4 x 152.4 cm
Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury is an emerging artist from London. Since the inception of her career her work has been exhibited across Europe and the US (London, Rome, New York, Los Angeles). The Artist was awarded The Rome Art Program Scholarship, The Art Academy Mixed Media Prize, and won The “Picture the Heath” painting prize.
The artist’s work recalls Alan Moore’s assertions that; “The one place gods and demons inarguably exist is in the human mind where they are real in all their grandeur and monstrosity. Much of magic as I understand it in the Western Occult tradition is the search for the self with a capital S. This is being understood as being the great work the gold that alchemist sort.”
I have a formal approach to painting that is guided by aesthetic intuition. For me painting is an enabling medium that opens up a liminal space to access memories from the subconscious.
My influences range from the Surrealists concerns with the unconscious, through to contemporary practices concerned with memory and magic. My practise is one of recall and expulsion, it is a process of storytelling and self mythologising.
In order to produce an image the first thing I do is recall an experience. I focus on the emotions that my memory of the experience evokes and try to intensify them. Once I have brought the experiential feelings to the forefront of my mind, I begin the technique of visualisation. Many things rush through my minds eye, I allow these to settle and try to consolidate the whirling forms, colours and flash backs into a single image that will embody them.
Rhiannon will be in Rimbun Dahan from the start of April to the start of May 2015. Find more of her work on her website and blog. She is also on Twitter and Facebook.
Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury
Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury
Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury
Ink Blot Clouds, acrylic, spray paint, & oil, 135 x 135 x 2.5 cm, 2014
Evocation 1, Acrylic Paint and Spray Paint on Cotton Stretched Canvas, 76 x 102 x 4 cm, 2014
R2, Spray Paint, Acrylic Paint, Ink & Charcoal on Linen Streched Canvas, 25 x 50 x 3 cm, 2015
Working on his two pieces for the Bricolage exhibition (March 2015)
Working on his two pieces for the Bricolage exhibition (March 2015)
Tran Dan studied architecture in university, but his artistic career is built on self-taught painting and sculpture. His primal medium is lacquer, which is widely represented and used in Vietnamese traditional and modern arts. Tran is keen to further develop its form and use in art: lacquer with/as mix-material paintings/sculptures or (video) installations. He has made full use of Rimbun Dahan’s gardens and surroundings for materials to make into lacquers and paints. His collaborations with foreign cultural institutions in Vietnam, such as British Council, Embassy of Denmark, L’espace French Cultural Centre, and The Japan Foundation Center for Cultural Exchange have resulted in experimental videos and performances about human consciousness, dreams, Vietnamese culture, and food. Tran has also opened an independent art space in Hanoi where he organizes and directs programs for local and international artists. His recent lacquer paintings are inspired by the relationship between humans and animals, and by the power of humans and nature. Tran’s work explores the dreamlike rhythm of life, stories that are repeated every night; this also speaks to existentialism, a theme he consistently returns to.
Nina Rupena is a Bosnian born project-based artist currently located in Melbourne. She works across mediums and practices using both visual art and design as tools for communicating ideas. Painting and drawing are her passion and she has a great interest in collaborative work. Since 2008, Nina worked on numerous collaborative projects with artists, designers, filmmakers, organisations and communities.
We wrap ourselves in cotton wool and try to iron, bleach and polish our emotions. We constantly try to predict the future and ignore the uncertain and fleeting nature of our existence. But isn’t the intensity of human experience what makes that very existence beautiful? Pain is intrinsic to the human experience. Without it something of our humanity, dignity and beauty of human life is trivialized. Life without experiencing pain breeds complacency, ignorance and passivity. Beauty is all around us I look for it in human experiences such as disability, old age, displacement and tragedy.
Nina is currently in residency at Hotel Penaga in Penang from February to April 2015. While in Penang, she started a project FACE IT:
“What do you wish you had known when you were younger? For the duration of my art residency I posed this question to the guests and staff at Hotel Penaga, trishaw drivers, backpackers, food vendors, people I met on the streets and bars. Then I drew their portraits, often on the spot or later from a photo. FACE IT is an ongoing project. The aim is to create a meaningful interaction and a space where people let their guards down and show their vulnerabilities.
Portraits and answers are uploaded daily at http://ninarupena.com.au/faceit/ or follow on Facebook and Instagram. You can find out more about her and her work at her website.
Anthony and Kaylene, Graphite, synthetic polymer paint, oil paint, sealer, Arches paper, 193x114cm, 2013
Sarajevo Rose, Ink and oil on canvas, 112×122 cm, 2012
Vestige, Ink, colour pencil and watercolour on old doily mounted on canvas-backed wallpaper, 46x51cm, 2011
Yuwatee Jehko (b. 1984) is a Thai painter and educator based in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
She derives inspiration from process, believing that the paint palette is an integral part of each painting, because without this tool and experimental space, the work would not exist. Yuwatee finds in the paint palette purity, a struggle between the colours, the residue, choices, mistakes, and ultimately, the journey of the resulting painting hidden in a blob of paint. Her works often depict every day objects, which she hopes will evoke memories, both good and bad, within the viewer and remind them both of who they are today and who they will be tomorrow.
Yuwatee studied at the College of Fine Arts in Bangkok before getting both her Bachelors and Masters of Fine Art in Chiang Mai University. During that time, she was a part of an artist apprentice-training programme at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in 2011. Yuwatee has also taught basic drawing in multimedia technology and animation in Mae Fah Luang University in Chiang Mai.
In 2009, she mounted her first solo exhibit, “Mindscape” at Galerie N in Bangkok. Her most recent exhibit titled “Paints Palette” was held in 2014 at The Meeting Room Art Café in Chiang Mai.
Jennifer Tyers has been a resident artist at Rimbun Dahan for three months. She works with watercolour and paints landscapes. Sometimes she works in printmaking and book making. She has been based in Asia for several years, working on landscapes at the Singapore Botanic Gardens and was also an artist in resident at AIRY in Kofu, Japan, in 2014. She has an exhibition at Cast Gallery in Hobart, Tasmania in May.
At Rimbun Dahan Jennifer is painting the grounds with particular interest in the various plants and trees on Rimbun Dahan.
Joanna Gambotto, of Sydney, Australia, was in residence at Hotel Penaga in George Town, Penang, from November 2014 to January 2015, and was inspired by all the colours and textures of Georgetown. She gave an informal showing of Oriented, her new body of work, on 30 January 2015 at Hotel Penaga.
Malaysian artist and astrologer Melissa Lin was in residence at Rimbun Dahan in 2014, where her work ventured into new degrees of scale.
Bio
Melissa Lin is an artist and astrologer who loves how both disciplines deepen, teach about and reveal the mystery and richness of life and living. Art for her is a process of becoming and of encouraging the intrepid traveler on the way to wholeness and experience, not only for the individual self, but also for the health of the community and collective. Art can be the voice that returns us to our best selves and to the world.
Artist’s Statement
The gift of time and of spaciousness by the Rimbun Dahan residency has opened up new possibilities of exploration for my drawing and painting practice.
The process of exploration for me has been one of allowing and observing visual narratives, characters, expressive impulses that want to emerge from a sea of stories of the world, drawn from experience, the psyche, history, culture, magic, myth and wisdom.
This organic emergence to me is a way to return to feeling, sensing, drawing out pleasure from slowness, from savouring, and creates wholeness while living in a world where it is easy to lose and to drown oneself too much information and stimuli that leads to being dislocated from the self.
My drawings and paintings also reflect my interest in natural yet otherworldly environments that are like an interface or in between dimension where the personal internal world and the external world, the realm of imagination and of reality can come together and are a meditation on my physical travels, as well as traveling through ones own internal landscape and life.
My work extends many of the ideas of portraiture and psychological exploration. The power of the portrait image always fascinates me. But rather than create anachronisms for their own sake, I choose to use such imagery and technique as a point of departure for exploring a world that is idiosyncratic, personal, and capable of transcending time and place. The surfaces of the paintings are varied, but they are always alive. The multiple layers of consciousness are explored as I create, construct, reveal and expose areas of the work. I see myself not just as a portrait painter but rather as a commentator of the histories and experiences of people I know and the community in which I live. I see myself as a contemporary history painter.
During recent years my work has focused not just on portraiture but also on nature as a means of documenting a region that I am visiting. In 2011 I was invited to be artist in residence on a field trip to Rwanda. I joined a team of scientists in the Volcanoes National Park a region that straddles the border between Rwanda and the Congo. These scientists examined the impact of environmental changes on gorillas in the region, and on how environments have changed in the recent past. Inspired by this residency my work looked at the experiences of the people I met in Rwanda and the human- environment interactions researched by the scientists. Many of the paintings are based loosely on real environmental scenarios. The day-to-day challenges faced by those living in poverty, the clearing of forests for subsistence farming and its impact on the mountain gorilla, the impact of the population on the land, and how implementing sustainable forms of development can have beneficial impact the local communities. In these human narratives I try to convey at least a small fragment of the complex story of the people I met in Rwanda. For me, these images I am creating function as reflecting pools of our times.
Helen Dalton is an Irish painter. Her portraits were described by Aidan Dunne in the Irish Times as “exceptionally sympathetic”. She has been awarded residencies in USA, Costa Rica Spain, Ireland and Rwanda. Her residency at Rimbun Dahan in July 2014 was funded by the Irish Arts Council.
