Shubigi Rao, 2024

This is not a Monster brings together ten graduating MAFA artists of seemingly disparate notions and practices, with clearly distinct voices. And yet there is a delightful nascent colloquy between their positions. Storytelling is a leitmotif, for instance, as is a delicate poetic movement between worlds real and imagined. Fictions abound here, from the imagined Traveller in Aaryama Somayaji’s work, to Chen Dongyan’s ‘FACTORY’, and in Jonathan’s Liu’s ‘The Death of Every Moment’. Starkly divergent in treatment, method and form, these works nevertheless summon spectres of the periphery and of the undefinable. There is a fearless sense of proposition being propounded, of exploration being presented as defiantly unmappable. This exuberance is reflected in the world of Chen’s FACTORY, densely populated with dimly familiar motifs, references and transmediated pictography drawn from multiple cultural traditions, revolving around her conceptual lodestones of “HANDS, EYES, PLANTS, and OBJECTS”. Video, paperworks, assemblages of objects all present puzzles that rely on the connective strands between these lodestones. Another world appears in the deliciously deceptive, unfolding epistolary scroll of Somayaji’s ‘The Feast’. Here the dialogue is between the food-blogging mystical Traveller and the artist, creating between them a planet of the Nameless that is yet instantly familiar. As every cook, even the most sporadic one, knows, world-building begins in kitchens. Here is the hothouse of stories, camaraderie and conviviality, traded secrets, poisoned chalices, jealously guarded recipes, murder, and love, of whispers behind the curtain.

Dialogue as generative method with the dark spectre of our time is mirrored in Jonathan Liu’s work, where the artist ‘feeds machine-learning networks his personal archive of landscape photographs’. In many ways this method remembers that landscapes are conflicted territories, and every painting or photograph is an attempt to affix a stable notion of sublimity to what is always in flux, and therefore indescribable. In the nomadic metaphysical landscape there is confrontation, a provocation that coexists with the uncanny aesthetic ethereality of generative art. Liu ranges beyond this, by employing the physicality of photographic material and process to renegotiate these images, extending the exchange to one of contestation on his own terms.

Meanwhile, contested ideas of selfhood and identity in Gloria Rossi’s installations challenge the treacherous translation of lived experience into essentialist tropes, avoiding neatly distilled bon mots on gender. Her articulations of the complexities of femininity and agency defy superficial readings of desire (both internal and projected). Material is key here, undercut with playfulness in her modes of display. This is both mimicry and provocation, with the sometimes-ludicrous nature of desire happily coexisting with its many reiterations. Replications, duplications, and reiterations jostle in Phoenix Fry’s sculptures and videos that go beyond pastiche to build an almost-animalist pantheon. Using conversations with friends and the paraphernalia of YouTube clips, field recordings with the swaddling-sweet comfort food of pop music and mass entertainment, a visit to Singapore’s zoo with a fear of the dark, Fry whips up a melt, a melange of multi-layered offerings that offer an alternative story-world, one where we may read ourselves into the zoo.

As caged species crawl across the works of Fry, superworms consume waste in Salim Basalamah’s ‘Asyik mencekik je [Endless munching]’, chewing through the polystyrene filth of our species. The audible munching of the invisible worms may be discomfiting, yet surely our species’ callous consumption and avaricious wastefulness by far the worse. Throwing this into sharp relief is the topographical ‘Tak habis-habis [Insatiable]’ whose material is wholly composed of “debris from digested polystyrene, with traces of Superworms”. This is a crime scene, an indictment of humanity’s self-absorption. After all, the human story of industrialisation and colonisation is one of terrestrial warring with the planet, gouging it with our quarrels and quarries. This debris that appears to be a waste-management solution, is perhaps more cautionary tale, a transformation more akin to the pervasive proliferation of microplastics in every biome. So many of our attempts to break down a problem just fracture it into newer, unforeseen ones. As always, we believe we fix things, when we’re simply building new fictions in the tiny timeline that we have dominated the planet.

The treatment of time and its residues flickers in Cindy Youngcil Park’s paintings, where handprints glimmer in and out of layers of organic material, and strata of materialised meaning. Texture speaks of stories within, of the opacity behind the image. The hidden is another leitmotif here. For what remains unknowable or unknown, is hinted at, meant to be inferred, lurking, flickering in and out, or dancing in the periphery of our vision, defying easy readings. This is evident too in Prapti Dangwal’s bound works on paper where it may seem impossible to ‘read’ the work end-to-end, or to apprehend its necessary ephemerality. The interiority of her world eschews the structural buttresses of conventional world-building, and while restricted to the codex-form, is nevertheless untrammelled in possible readings.

Grief and mortality shadow the works of Sherlyn Tang and Teck Lim. Subterranean sorrows, liquified circular moments of unnameable emotion flow, ebb, and dissolve in the structures of Tang’s ‘Silent Dialogues’. Again, we sense that the unspoken defies the titular monstrare, that these sure-footed notes are not necessarily harmonic, for within disharmony lurks the sense of what remains to be seen, what is nascent, what skulks behind the everyday. Unflinching yet tender, these ‘Dialogues’ rise and fall, and find echoes in Teck Lim’s ‘Premortem’ works. These portraits of mortality are sculptures that exist beyond the scaffold he often employs as a framing device. Breath is bated here, a stillness of form that draws from that most unknowable state of unbeing.

Threaded through these works by the graduating cohort is the building of new mythologies, often drawing from a wellspring of deep interiority, cryptic textuality, and a restless shape-shifting. There is exuberance here as much as there is quieter reflection – for the unseen monster in the dark is grim because it is inevitable. All our conquered lands eventually fall, and all the great monuments are but melancholic memorials of crumbled civilisations. Our lands are loams of dead cells and compost-heaps. Every mountain, monument of humanity comes to dust. What remains are the stories of these monuments, our personal monsters, nursed and nurtured in our imaginings, tethered by the weight of the everyday, and what lies behind the shifting veil, that inexorable march. In the absence of air, the curtain between worlds moves, as these works whisper their longing and fears to the soft dark. Caveats, snatches of the semi-familiar and of the disorienting and unknowable; these not-monsters ask as much of us as we do of them, and this is as it should be.

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Shubigi Rao is an artist, writer and filmmaker. Her fields of study include histories and lies, literature and violence, libraries and archival systems, ecologies and natural history. Her films, art, texts, and photographs look at current and historical flashpoints as perspectival shifts to examining contemporary crises of displacement, whether of people, languages, cultures, or knowledge bodies. The second book from her decade-long project, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book won the Singapore Literature Prize (non-fiction), while the first exhibition of the project won the 2018 APB Signature Prize Juror’s Choice Award. She has been featured in the upcoming 16th Sharjah Biennial, 10th Asia-Pacific Triennial, 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 10th Taipei Biennial, 3rd Pune Biennale, 2nd Singapore Biennale, and the Singapore Writers Festival.

Rao represented Singapore at the National Pavilion in the Venice Biennale in 2022. She was also the Artistic Director for the 2022-2023 Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

Currently, Rao is an adjunct lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, where she obtained her BA and MA Fine Arts (both with First Class).