Capsule Shanghai is pleased to participate in the inaugural edition of Art SG with a three-person show, featuring recent works by Leelee Chan, Mevlana Lipp and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang. Under the influence of their personal history and family roots, each artist draws inspiration from the nature to make works ranging from wall sculptures to textile pieces. From Leelee Chan's renaissance of recycled objects and ancient craftsmanship, to Mevlana Lipp's imagination of plants that appear simultaneously antediluvian and futuristic, and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang's weaving of abstracted and timeless natural and inner landscapes, together these works take the viewer on a tactile journey through time and space.
Leelee Chan orchestrates industrial debris, urban ecdysis and natural elements to make wall sculptures imbued with imagination, modernist form and unexpected hybrid of materials. Having spent her childhood in her parents' antique shop in Hong Kong, Chan developed an instinct for history, persona and craftsmanship implicit in an object, which later shaped her practice as a sculptor. In the featured works, she inlays plastic shipping pallets sourced from Hong Kong's container ports with scavenged tennis court asphalt fragments, natural gemstones and industrial materials. By assigning equal value to all her objects - popular and overlooked alike - as tokens of personal, familial and societal heritage, she revives ancient, forgotten or abandoned memories to tell a contemporary story about humans and our building environment.
Made of painted carved wood partially textured with sand, Mevlana Lipp's works combine painting and sculpting processes to create vibrant renditions of flora and fauna. Against the dark velvet background of the infinite universe, the biomorphic reliefs invite the viewer into a fantastical dreamscape that harks back to Lipp's hometown in rural Germany, where the nature was an emotional sanctuary that provided peace and wonderment.
Moved by her grandmother who, during difficult times, used to unravel old knitwear to fabricate new sweaters for her children, Miranda Fengyuan Zhang recalls her identifying recognizable shapes in her grandmother's unexpected and whimsical composition. In her intuitive process structured by the striated indexes of knitting and weaving, Zhang portrays abstracted landscapes that obscure specificity of time and place, yet creates a vastly open sense of space through her use of cavalier perspective that is common in traditional Chinese scroll painting. Boundless rice fields, rolling mountains across the water, golden pavilion against the sun... One's eyes are lost in the colors and forms that radiate warmth and vitality.
Capsule Shanghai is also pleased to participate in the film program “Fabricated Realities” with artist Yao Cong’s video Count (2020).
Time: 2023.01.12 - 15, 5 - 8 pm
Address: ArtScience Museum, L4, 6 Bayfront Ave Singapore
