Bangkok--17 Nov--TQPR
H Project Space is very pleased to announce a new photo-based installation by Jason Wee, an artist and writer from Singapore and New York. Developed from Wee's recent artist-in-residency at Singapore's Center for Contemporary Art (CCA), the installation comprises two dozen cloth panels printed over with photographic images, arranged in the shape of a tall maze. This labyrinth recalls the dark rooms and other lurid dimensions of queer cruising, as well as a theatrical experience of barriers and walls. Playing up the eroticised pursuit of signs and misdirection, sexual 'orientation' in Wee's installation becomes a literal search for direction in the cities he's intimate with. 32
Photographic images printed on chiffon and polyester silk are pushed to the edge of illegible abstraction, provoking questions of recognition and misrecognition in our navigation of queer spaces.
The language and architecture of barriers offer a range of significant associations: walls prompt questions about privacy and protection, security and control, also division and difference. The particularly unusual context of H Project Space – 19th century architectural space amidst a modern metropolis – is heightened by Wee's construction. Surrounding sounds and scents bleed into the installation and layer an experience of both claustrophobia and surprise.
Stand. Move. (A Labyrinth) offers a different design for movement through urban places, cleverly juxtaposing a walk of pleasurable aimlessness against the ""proper"" life of cities. Wee's staging of the poetics of powerless through the eyes of a queer individual living in Southeast Asia, and his foregrounding of individual movement in view of coercive influence is a timely and provocative intervention.During the length of the exhibition, Wee will return to H Gallery at an interval to reshape the labyrinth with new images, panels and routes.
Jason Wee is an artist and a writer working between architecture, art, photography and poetry. A graduate of Harvard University, the New School New York and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, he directs Grey Projects in Singapore, an artists' space, library and residency program. Wee is an editor for the poetry journal Softblow. His writings have been in multiple anthologies, including Best Singaporean Short Stories 2016. He is a Singapore Art Museum Voters Prize Winner.
Wee's art has been exhibited in Chelsea Art Museum, Photo New York; Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg; ifa galerie, Stuttgart and Berlin; Singapore Art Museum; Singapore Biennale; Silverlens Gallery and Valentine Willie Fine Art. Residencies include Artspace Sydney, ISEA; Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo; ZK/U Berlin; and Gyeonggi Creation Center in Korea. He was artist-in-residence at Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore for 2016-17. Wee has received coverage in Artnews, ArtInfo, New York Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, Cha Literary Journal, Singapore Architects and Art Asia Pacific amongst others.
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