Maybe we read too much into things

To find out more about this exhibition and access its accompanying texts and resources, visit the exhibition website here.

Maybe we read too much into things brings together six artists—Aki Hassan, Daniel Chong, Genevieve Leong, Kevin Fee, Leow Wei Li, and Ryan Benjamin Lee—whose practices explore the materialities of everyday objects. The exhibition spans sculpture, installation, video, animation, and painting, showcasing diverse art practices that possess a fascination with the familiar, and its potential for transformation. Through varied approaches to assemblage, everyday objects become not just symbols for ideas, but mediums to be played with, manipulated, and reconfigured, in ways that establish a new visual language.

Yet, the six artists do not necessarily speak a common tongue. Instead, each creates their own ‘dialect’, built out of a vocabulary of the mundane: a biscuit, a clothes peg, an earplug, a flower, a sponge, the handle of a screwdriver—speaking to each other within and across works. What we assume to be ‘known’ is, in fact, something that can still be subjected to repeated close reading, generating new interpretations and constructions each time. Maybe we read too much into things—or maybe they are worth our time, attention, care, and curiosity.

This exhibition was held at 72-13, home of T:>works, from 21 – 30 January 2021, as part of Singapore Art Week.

Design by Judea Faith Cheong. Photos by Marvin Tang.