MY COUNTRY

SHALINI GANENDRA FINE ART launches its Asia Week NY 2015 Exhibition Program with MY COUNTRY, Asian Contemporary Art :

In an art world that emphasizes the global, Shalini Ganendra Fine Art’s My Country presents a selection of carefully executed projects that embrace the local. Issues of identity , the vernacular and cultural transformation are adeptly handled by these established, award winning Asian artists from Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. The exhibition specifically presents a narrative about respective geopolitical environments in the global context whether it be:

Vollak Kong, Cambodian artist and ACC Awardee, lives and works through the wild structural development of Phnom Penh speaks to us of his Sino lineage and the contemporary urban landscapes, through his elegant Ancestral Portrait scrolls on Cambodian silk.

Sanjeewa Kumara, Sovereign Art Finalist 2015, creates surreal and fantastical artworks addressing the challenges faced by post-colonial artists today. He highlights the difficulty of attempts ‘both to resurrect their culture and to combat preconceptions about their cultural identity – against the confines posed by Western discourse.’ The works blend social conscience and humour to question the existing. 

Zac Lee's large oils on jute referencing Malaysian iconography to comment on political issues, social angst and ironies. Lee was a Finalist for the Sovereign Art Prize in 2014, and is nominated again for 2015. He has undertaken the Three Shadows Residency in Beijing, and the Freeman Fellowship in the USA.

Ru Yi Tan’s elegant collage on wood works incorporating aspects of her Malaysian and Japanese environments in collage. The Grow in the Garden series C-Prints capturing her own installations of fluorescent clothes pins brightly and subtley introduced into landscaped gardens – celebrating the everyday and vibrant. Her most recent solo exhibitions include The Growth Project – New Creature to NANA and Female Male FemaleMale (Mie Center for the Arts, Tsu, Japan).

Chaw Ei Thien, Myanmar artist, activist and ACC Awardee, currently lives in New York has hopes of returning to a transforming homeland after years of exile. Through her Camouflage Series, particularly the Buddha sculptures, she shares her culture and aspiration, in code on an iconic image of peace and reflection.

The varied aesthetic voices of these important artists show the importance of layered cultural understanding, the deceptiveness of calm appearance, the vitality of investigation, while simultaneously celebrating understanding of regions beyond and bringing them within our personal.