Chan Kok Hooi’s paintings are loaded with bizarre tales. They illustrate the impossible and awaken the subconscious where each and every painting offers a message or memory of something that may have occurred in reality. His paintings appear to be randomly juxtaposed images - mixing modes of representation to create whimsical pictorial narratives that serve as metaphors and parodies of our consciousness.
Reality has it that surrealism is the uncanny manifestation of man’s dream. In art however, it is the stylistic and philosophical approach taken by the artist to render his dreams. Chan Kok Hooi is in no way inclined to recreate the dream into a coherent image but rather to display the dream as it came to him, thus allowing various images that could never happen in reality and that may not logically make sense, to exist in one place, akin to a dream.
In presenting a picture within a picture, where meaning and worlds collide, and contradictory idioms conflate, Chan Kok Hooi liberates the realm of the dream-world and the imagined to create fanciful monsters and heroes, and deploys the veristic division of surrealism, to seek the finest details in everything and relay visual discourses that explore the intangible relationships between subjects and their depictions.
Chan Kok Hooi received a full art scholarship from the Malaysian Institute of Art in 1992, and entered the college the following year. In 1996 he graduated, majoring in Painting. His early interest in theatre started back in school when he was actively involved in the performing arts. In 1999 he returned to theatre and started designing sets in 2003.The experience and artistic processes garnered from the world of performing arts influenced his art greatly, bringing on board the level of invention, complexity, delicacy and comedy that give rise to the dramatic tensions and contradictions in his art.
His works are abound with a disorientating array of imagery, symbols and junctions that reveal networks of fragmented and dislocated stories intended as translations of universal concerns of the human condition. The paintings reveal stillness, as if frozen at the most extreme point of tension, where mood and motion seem unresolved and agitation and ecstatic representation reconcile in a manner that pervades the aesthetic ethos of his visual language.
Chan Kok Hooi is the sole recipient of the Galeri Petronas International Residency Award, and this exhibition marks his return and commemorates his first solo exhibition in Kuala Lumpur. In September 2008, Chan Kok Hooi spent 3 months at the Red Gate Gallery studio facility in Beijing, China funded by the Galeri Petronas International Residency Award. It was an opportunity for him to engage in cultural exchange with artists from other parts of the world in a setting purposely designed for the development of artistic work.
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The new paintings are the product of 3 years work delving further into the world of the Virtual, and using the MSN Messenger icon as his protagonist. This latest manifestation of the MSN Messenger icon takes on a new dimension, a different persona than the one previously employed. The previous installment of the MSN Messenger icon, created during his residency in Penang, shows a series of works with an unbroken attachment to his environment, recalling memories of his childhood, his friends and hint of his implicit filial duties. The works measure ethnic identity, symbolism, belief and behaviour, tradition and the continuity of culture.
In contrast the 8 new works present the MSN icon in a different light. In a strategic manipulation of the MSN icon, Chan Kok Hooi re-appropriates the icon to tackle issues of a sensitive nature neither being overtly explicit nor controversial. These painting depict acts captured from a surveillance camera and viewed via the computer screen in the style of an old photograph. The result shows his innovative design in painting to capture a three layered view of voyeurism, presenting aspects of loneliness, solitude, narcissism and fetishistic tendencies in his luxuriant brand of black and white paintings
Each work has been given a two worded title to compliment the exhibition header .They are “Careless Whisper”, “Sensuous Smile”, “Midnight Heaven”, “Hairless Whisper”, “Lonesome Collector”, “Paintful Pleasure”, “Habitual Scenery” and “Orchard Hotel”. These works were created as site specific works, as intended by the artist, to transport the idea of “low” or otherwise surreptitious side of the human condition to a place of “high” culture to which stands the status and location of the Galeri Petronas in Kuala Lumpur City Centre.
The new works sees Chan Kok Hooi manipulate different perspectives and meaning in his art. Using a gradual reduction of colour, detail and brightness, he establishes various degrees of observation. In “Lonesome Collector” the picture is given an atmospheric perspective where the walls appear to be caving in on his protagonist. This is further highlighted by the blurry effect of the picture plane except for the sharp and clear focus of the MSN icon. In “Careless Whisper” and “Hairless Whisper” are painted with an aerial perspective and set in the confines of the bathroom, gives an impression of being observed from above and through a keyhole, respectively.
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