Turn Loose The Mermaids

iPreciation is proud to present “Turn Loose The Mermaids”, a group exhibition co-created by Luke Heng, Jeremy Sharma and Warren Khong. This exhibition highlights the practices of three Singapore artists that are divergent of painting. Exploring and intertwining medium, space, materiality, acoustics and objects, new readings emerge beyond the formal into one that is conceptual, relational and experimental.

Referencing the name of a song’s title, “Turn Loose The Mermaids” evokes the imaginary and the unconscious that emerge from the unknown to take hold and form. With this in mind, the project asks “how can form and material speak of ideas and thus engage with the viewer?”; “how can artists trained in the formal aspects of painting extend these ideas and sensibilities to structures, image, space and media?”; “How does one contribute or liberate new knowledge and discourse to the contemporary in a field burdened by its own history, can aesthetics here be as critically valued as socially engaged narratives?”

Jeremy Sharma is a Singaporean artist that works across media around ideas of aesthetics and production. His practice investigates various models of enquiry in the information age, addressing our present relationship to modernity and interconnectivity in the everyday and our place in an increasingly fragmented and artificial reality. Sharma graduated from Lasalle College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Art (Fine Art) with high distinction in 2003 and a Master of Art (Fine Art) in 2006. He has since had a many group and solo exhibitions and is currently also a lecturer at Lasalle College of the Arts.

Luke Heng’s works are primarily concerned with the conceptualization and manifestation of painting. Interested in the formal qualities of a painting, the Singaporean artist works to materialize a painting through various approaches when considering the ontological possibilities of what a painting is and what it can possibly become. Heng graduated from Lasalle College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) first class honours in 2013. He is currently lecturing in Lasalle College of the Arts, while he practices art independently.

Warren Khong is a contemporary Singaporean artist that situates his practice mainly in the field of painting. Akin to the aims of this exhibition, he contemplates the concepts of painting and its relation to surface and materiality in his works, while keeping in mind the aesthetics of beauty in the artificiality of creation. Khong graduated from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts with a diploma in Fine Art on 2006, then went on to attain his Bachelors in Fine Art: Painting and Drawing from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore in partnership with University of Huddersfield, U.K. in 2009. In 2015, he then graduated from Lasalle College of the Arts, partnership with Goldsmiths’ College,with a Masters in Fine Arts.