Genevieve Chua: Closed during opening hours

Closed during opening hours is a new work by Genevieve Chua which transforms the Earl Lu Gallery into a diorama.

Over the past three years, Chua has created a visual glossary based on computer graphics and bots (autonomous interactive computer programmes). She has also developed an expanded approach to painting. During her recent residency at Facebook’s Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore, Chua created a pictorial landscape, populating a corridor with graphic motifs and icons from buggy operating systems and internet debris. In these works, Chua uses materials to create contrasting impressions—flatness, depth, volumes and vacuums.

In Closed during opening hours, through the façade of an inaccessible gallery, viewers see similar materials and forms. Aphorisms projected onto an adjacent wall communicate inconsistent meanings. A text on the gallery’s façade describes the phenomenon of surface tension, in which ‘a man coming out of a bath carries with him a film of water about one-fiftieth of an inch in thickness’.

Through these elements, Chua explores the ways in which the appearances of materials bely their substances. In Closed during opening hours, viewers experience the ‘tactility’ of virtual images through vinyl that mimics textured surfaces. This strange sense of misinterpretation is reinforced by the gallery’s closure; viewing its contents from the outside, viewers are left to imagine their nature.

Image: Courtesy Genevieve Chua, 2019.