Institutional critique with heart
By Ian Tee

Goh Chun Aik, ‘I am an Artist (An Artist’s Practice)’ (video still), 2023, performative installation. Image courtesy of the artist.

Goh Chun Aik is a Singapore-based artist whose practice explores the different ways reality is processed. He draws from personal experience and overlooked moments in his immediate environment, and translates these subjective perceptions into gestures and materials. Chun Aik’s approach retains a light touch as he works across a range of media, from photography to text and performance.

Goh Chun Aik, ‘An Exhibition about Art’, 2023, installation view at Art Outreach Singapore. Image courtesy of the artist.

Chun Aik’s first solo show ‘An Exhibition about Art’ (2023) is a reflection on his personal journey into the art world, as an arts worker with no former training and also an aspiring artist. For him, working at a gallery was akin to going to art school. This “learning on the job” attitude informs Chun Aik’s practice and is also the source material for this body of work. He examines the common objects and processes in an art gallery, such as the press release and the white cube setting, and brings them into question by shifting their context.

‘Don’t Leave Me Here/Please Take Me Home’ (2018-23) is an installation consisting of two parts. ‘Don’t Leave Me Here’ is a set of 64 blown-up prints of press releases the artist collected to learn more about contemporary art. It is accompanied by ‘Please Take Me Home’ , a set of specially prepared press releases for the work, which audiences are invited to take home. Notably, ‘Please Take Me Home’ is printed as a signed edition of 100, changing the once-throwaway sheet of paper into a work of art. This cheeky gesture plays with the air of exclusivity associated with artworks and puts the spotlight on how ideas behind an artwork is communicated to audiences.

Goh Chun Aik, ‘The Meaning of White 3’, 2020-23, photography, UV print on acrylic, 60 x 90cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

In another series ‘The Meaning of White’, Chun Aik photographs freshly painted white patches on the walls of public housing estates in Singapore. Often, these sections are painted to cover up vandalism or unsightly stains. The images are composed to provide a sense of context for where these walls are located, with the backgrounds visible or other identifiable architectural elements such as street signs and security cameras. As the title suggests, these photographs interrogate the meaning of white walls across contexts, in public space and in the art gallery. Formally, the images also recall high modernist tropes such as Mark Rothko’s fuzzy rectangles and Robert Ryman’s white paintings. In bringing these two contexts into sharp contrast, ‘The Meaning of White’ urges viewers to consider the intentions and conditions that define perceptions of value.

Goh Chun Aik, ‘I am an Artist (An Artist’s Practice)’, 2023, performative installation, documentation of opening performance at ‘An Exhibition about Art’. Art Outreach Singapore, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.

These ideas culminated in a performative installation titled ‘I am an Artist (An Artist’s Practice)’ (2023). In the work, Chun Aik goes through his daily duties in the gallery: packing artworks, reinstating the walls after an exhibition, speaking to visitors. It ends with him peeling a vinyl wall text letter by letter. Initially, the sentence reads “I am working at an art gallery and I want to be an artist”. It is then transformed to “I am working to be an artist”, before finishing with “I am an artist”. Through this deconstruction of the duo roles he plays, Chun Aik articulates his own relationship with art. I think of it as a form of institutional critique that has a lot of heart.

Click here to read our dialogue with Goh Chun Aik, where he speaks about his first solo show at Art Outreach Singapore, participating in the Curator Open Call programme at Objectifs, and co-founding Queensway Television, a space for presenting video art.