Our Summer Group Show highlights works by three of the gallery’s artists who are currently participating in the Venice Biennale: Tracey Moffatt (Australian Pavilion); Manuel Ocampo (Philippine Pavilion); and Sopheap Pich (main exhibition, Viva Arte Viva). These will be shown alongside works by Tiffany Chung and Jakkai Siributr, who will have solo exhibitions at the gallery in the coming months.
Tracey Moffatt (born 1960 in Brisbane, Australia) is one of today’s leading international visual artists working in photography, film and video. Her photographs play with many different printing processes and have a filmic, narrative quality. She approaches all her photographic and video work as a film director, and she is known as a powerful visual storyteller. For the Australia Pavilion, she is presenting a new body of work, My Horizon, comprising two photographic series and two videos, referencing themes of migration and displacement.
Manuel Ocampo (born 1965 in Quezon City, Philippines) has been a vital presence on the international art scene for over twenty-five years, with a reputation for fearlessly tackling the taboos and cherished icons of society and of the art world itself. He presents in the Philippine Pavilion an installation of large scale paintings shown together with a selection of his paintings from the mid-1990s, all of which mediate on issues of personal and national identities and artistic influences.
Sopheap Pich (born in 1971 in Battambang, Cambodia) works with local Cambodian materials – primarily bamboo and rattan – to make sculptures inspired by bodily organs, vegetal forms, and abstract geometric structures. The works stand out for their subtlety and power, combining refinement of form with a visceral, emotive force. Featured in the Venice Biennale is a new series of works on paper made by dipping sticks of bamboo in earth pigments mixed with gum Arabic, then repeatedly pressing them on watercolor paper.
Jakkai Siributr (born 1969 in Bangkok, Thailand) is one of Southeast Asia’s leading contemporary artists working primarily in the textile medium. He is noted for his embroidered fabric works and larger scale installations that make powerful statements about religious, social, and political issues in contemporary Thailand. A main preoccupation of his art is the interaction between Buddhism and materialism in contemporary life, and the everyday popular culture of Thailand. Earlier this year, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre mounted a major solo exhibition of his work, and he is currently preparing a new installation for his January 2018 solo exhibition at Tyler Rollins Fine Art.
Tiffany Chung (born 1969 in Danang, Vietnam) is noted for her cartographic drawings and multimedia installations that examine conflict, migration, displacement, urban progress and transformation in relation to history and cultural memory. She will present a solo exhibition at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in September 2017, which will include new developments in two of her ongoing series: The Syria Project, tracking the current crisis in Syria, a project she first developed for the 2015 Venice Biennale; and The Vietnam Exodus Project, which investigates the post-1975 dispersal of refugees from Vietnam.
