In collaboration with South Korean beauty brand JUNGSAEMMOOL,Vivarium presents works by BA (Hons) Fine Arts Year 1 students Siti Nur Batrisyia, Cadence Koh, Diamond Misson, Faye Marie Tungul Umas, Gwen Leo Yuhan, Michelle Tan Wei Ru, Kim Minji, November Crowbar, Puteri Iman Adani, Yang Yinuo, Lu Yu-Tung and Huang Zhenghao.
A pilot exhibition between JUNGSAEMMOOL and LASALLE, Vivarium situates artworks away from the white cube setting and integrates them into a retail space, encouraging curious and unexpected encounters. Though positioned within a site where self-presentation takes centre stage, the artworks highlight the dynamics and enactment of the gaze, quietly nudging us to reexamine our embodied relationship with performing and being subjects of the gaze.
The exhibition gathers practices that are still unfolding, exploring material and form while inviting a shared, process-led inquiry into the body as an archive of gazes: a surface that accumulates every act of looking. Through a range of approaches, the artists showcase multiple critical frameworks for seeing. The title draws from the notion of the vivarium as a contained environment for observation, where acts of looking are always in flux.
To look is to hold a certain power, yet at the same time, to be looked at is not necessarily passive. The works presented embodies this resistance, suggesting moments of opacity, redirection and refusal, where the body withholds, deflects or returns the gaze. The rituals of care, correction and presentation that run through these works carry the inherited script of how a body ought to appear, shaped by the eyes of others.
Vivarium is co-curated by BA (Hons) Art Histories and Curatorial Practices: Asia and the World students Lim Hui Xin, Maung Aung Kaung Myat and Valencia Tan, with mentorship from artist, educator and alumnus Khairullah Rahim.
