Tuesday, 31 May 2011

Artist Statement: Chun Kai Qun


I Think I Can Keep My Faith In Man

I Think I Can Keep My Faith in Man relates to how dreamscapes are constructed as a physical reality in architecture, painting and film. With the advancement in technology, the world can be freely built from our wildest imagination, we can easily find a nostalgically themed cafĂ© in a shopping mall, revisit the Jurassic age at an amusement park and be immersed in an epic magical world in true high-definition 3D. Our experience of the material world has become phantasmagoric like a dream (or perhaps a nightmare) in which disconnected scenes morph seamlessly from one to another. Unconsciously, we have adopted a stance of unquestioning indifference towards this confusion created by the constant blurring of reality with fiction in our environment. In this work, I have created a dioramic collage of disparate scenes and landscapes which merge into one another, and through the employment of different scales and proportions to induce alternating perceptions about the composition. There is an emphasis on faux painting techniques which are often used to fabricate the aged furniture in period interiors of now popular coffee-shop franchises (for examples, Toast Box and Killiney Kopitiam) in Singapore. There is also a reference to a pre-CGI cinematic technique used in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon in which black sumi ink was used to intensify the rainstorm in the film. The work leads to the scrutiny of its manufacture and bring forth an inquisitive attention to the constructedness of our physical environment.
   

No comments: