Between Beginnings - Inside Artists’ Studios

Between Beginnings is a series of short films focusing on the time an artist spends in his or her studio; between each new artwork, each exhibition, each fresh start. For the first four films in this series, FOST Gallery has commissioned acclaimed directors, Liao Jiekai and Russell Morton and produced by Jeremy Chua, to lend their unique story telling styles.

Between Beginnings | Wyn-Lyn Tan

Wyn-Lyn Tan's artistic practice is grounded in painting, and is driven by a visual language shaped through rhythm and intuition. Her paintings often build on the notion of ‘absence as presence,’ where the act of erasure leads to traces and residues that make visible the absent. She is also interested in the nature of spaces, both metaphysical and physical, and their evocative power. The film features her solo exhibition A Matter of Time in 2021, which explores form, space, light and perception, and questions the dichotomy between the two- and three-dimensional.

Director Liao Jiekai, is a Singaporean filmmaker, visual artist and educator based in Tokyo. His moving image works often investigates hidden history of places, drawing out the relationship between people and land/place, both past and present. His practice also shifts fluidly between cinema and visual arts, often appropriating and expanding on similar trajectories in these two different contexts.

Between Beginnings | Ian Woo

Ian Woo is an artist influenced by forms of modernism, perceptual abstraction and the sound structures of music improvisation. His paintings, painted objects and drawings are characterised by a sense of gravitational and representational change. Each work often bears signs in which the function of image is seen as a diagrammatic guide towards consciousness. His use of frames, axis and invisible grids as starting points to build upon his work has led to the development of his ‘compartments and systems’ approach to understanding a painted space as activated time.

The filmic and performative practice of director Russell Morton explores folkloric myths, esoteric rituals, and the conventions of cinema itself.

Exhibition Documentation
We Cannot Step Twice Into The Same River, Elaine Roberto-Navas

'We Cannot Step Twice Into The Same River' is the first part of a quote by Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 540 B.C.-c. 480 B.C.). In his Doctrine of Flux, this impossibility of a situation is explained because the river is ever flowing and the person ever changing. Well-known for her lush landscapes, Elaine Roberto-Navas' new paintings are of the same subject matter but here, sky, water and earth are disconcertingly inverted, rendering the landscape almost abstract. But with persistent observation, the forms emerge and a scene appears before us. Conceived and produced during the lockdown period in Singapore, these poignant new works are based on fellow artist Mawen Ong's photographs. The paintings are an expression of Elaine Roberto-Navas' sense of optimism during a time of uncertainty and anxiety.