Nothing is more irritating that a show that opens with its works already sold out (well, barred one), but I guess it also means the gallery is doing a good job in promoting its artists.
Wong Shih Yaw’s “My Story III: Redemption of the Fallen” is currently showing at Utterly Art. The singapore artist imagination never fails to tickle and amuse. The latest installment of his autobiographical series offer a fresh visual metaphors about the world around us. Each painting is dominated by a fantastical machine, which assumes the shape of an animal, another mechanical device or a vehicle of transportation within which the artist sits, or is sheathed or becomes a part of.
The machines appear rusty and in need of maintenance, a reference to the artist's own aging and ailments, and his stories are less a narration of actual events and episodes and more a documentation of his attitudes and emotional states adopted during specific periods of his life, in relation to God who observes his failings and provides forgiveness and encouragement in turn.
While a course in Japanese manga may have provided the science-fictionish 'look' of the series, between Transformers and the Twilight Zone, perhaps it is the artist's newfound status as a father that has directed him on this reflexive journey in a patterned timescape.
