Over/Time, a solo exhibition by May Oon. The exhibition runs from the 3rd to the 17th of July 2015 at The Private Museum. The backdrop of history has always been the fertile bed upon which May Oon draws inspiration from for her works in oils or charcoal. Oon has previously tackled representations of Peranakan culture, the early political life of Lee Kuan Yew, and 9/11. This time round, her references stretch further back to the coolie trade in Singapore. May Oon, Chinatown, 2014, Charcoal and pastel on mounted cartridge paper, 150 x 135 cm Compared to Oon’s previous work, the artist’s figures this time take on a more hard-edged quality, with their defined musculature etched against the street scene. The coolies and tradesman recede into the background, blending in with the visual rhythms of the buildings and infrastructure surrounding them. Gone also are the luxurious swathes of painterly coats, replaced instead with dry-brush underlayer or marks and erasures made through rigorous hand-rubbings. One of the roots of the word “coolie” itself comes from the Urdu word “Kuli”, which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The position of the slave has been a vexed figure in [...]
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