床事—A THING OR TWO ABOUT THE BED Gillman Barracks

06 SEP 2013 - 03 NOV 2013

床事—A Thing or Two about the Bed

by atelier | small, Janice CHIN, Lucy DAVIS, TANG Kwok-hin, TAY Bak Chiang, Arron TEO, Andrée WESCHLER, Collective YANG Jie & Mavis SEAH

FOST Gallery is pleased to present 床事—A Thing or Two about the Bed, curated by Tang Ling Nah of activated C Studio, showcasing 9 mixed media artworks, to explore the bed in its different perspectives and meanings, both literal and figurative.

Throughout Western art history, artists have depicted the bed in their artworks. For instance, the infamous Olympia (1863), an oil-on-canvas painting by Édouard Manet, depicts an unclothed woman sitting on the bed and attended by a fully-clothed maid of African descent. One of the most controversial and celebrated contemporary installation artwork that involves the bed is Tracey Emin’s My Bed, which is a very emotional piece that looks at the artist’s past relationships and difficult times. Singapore artist Suzanne Victor had also used the physical bed as a metaphor to express issues of the human body, femininity and relationships. In the east, the most known poetry that mentions the bed is written by poet Li Bai from the High Tang Dynasty. He wrote the famous short poem Thoughts on a Still Night where he pondered on a full-moon night, and thought about his hometown at his bedside.

The works, presented in a variety of media (drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, installation and performance), examine the bed with respect to concerns such as private versus public spaces, the tangible and the intangible, human relationships and emotions, state of consciousness and unconsciousness, rest and action; life and death, realities and memories. It can be an investigation into the meaning of beds in daily life and the connections between all the beds we occupy physically and metaphorically over a lifetime. The exhibition goes beyond looking at the bed as a place for rest and sexual intimacy. In short, bed matters.