Khor Ting Yan’s AMSR, ‘it is light and stackable’
By Louise Crocker

This is a writer's response to Khor Ting Yan’s AMSR. AMSR is an Art & Market project featuring digital and physical small rooms showcasing the practices of emerging artists and writers. For more information, click here.

Arbitrary elements of everyday life comprise the oeuvre of Singaporean artist Khor Ting Yan, who is displaying a selection of work digitally and physically for the inaugural edition of ‘Art & Market Small Rooms’ (AMSR). A plastic monobloc chair, the sunlit corner of an ambiguous room, snippets of chatter between friends, the interior of an apartment – the mundane is subtly pushed our way via intricate print compositions on paper and textile. Khor’s AMSR embodies an act of relooking at the ordinary, and repositions life’s backdrops as spaces of familiarity, nostalgia and perpetual change.

‘1 Binjai Park, Singapore 589818’ (2016) is a series of lithographic prints depicting an unremarkable street scene. An area with a coffee shop, windowed buildings, a traffic sign, and a monobloc chair is drawn with overt attention to detail. This scene is located close to Khor’s family home in Singapore, and she would walk past it daily on her way to school. Khor created these prints while at university in Chicago during a bout of homesickness. “I guess,” Khor recounts of the series, “it subconsciously captured my sense of wanting to be somewhere else”.

At first glance each composition in the ‘1 Binjai Park’series looks the same, however, differences can be observed on closer inspection. The lithographic printing process enabled Khor to vary each composition by grinding off, redacting and redrawing sections of the limestone slab she used for her template. In some versions a wallpapered interior is present in the left-hand corner, in others shadows cast over the buildings are more prevalent. Colour is also played with via the technique of chine-collé. Variations in this series are symbolic of the inevitable changes that occur in even the most consistent elements of our lives. These changes can be physical, such as in the way light and shadow fall as the day ticks by, or they can be emotional, as our memories distort and our experiences impact our perception over time. The ‘1 Binjai Park’ scene changes for Khor — what was once an insignificant part of her daily walks to school becomes a space of nostalgia later in her life.

Khor Ting Yan, ‘in between oakbrook and chinatown’, 2016, lithography on Muslin, quilted, 104 x 140cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

The notion of nostalgia is found, again, in, ‘in between oakbrook and chinatown’ (2016), but here it is placed in tension with the present. A Singapore alleyway appears merged with a corner of a swimming pool room in Oak Brook, Illinois in a recurring pattern on sections of muslin fabric. “It is sort of like a quilt”, Khor describes, “I was exploring how I felt displaced between Chicago and Singapore.” A deep sense of light and shade is present across both scenes thanks to the print’s monochromatic palette, aiding their intermingling. By physically drawing an inconspicuous scene from her past together with a similarly nondescript moment from her present, printing this drawing repeatedly on material and patchworking the material together, Khor creates an object that interlinks two disparate places. Knowing how Khor felt at the time, the making of this piece was perhaps a somewhat therapeutic process for her.

A specific time or place is not, however, identifiable in the screenprint series, ‘two chairs, some scribbles and a plant’ (2016), indicating a move away from personal nostalgia. Khor notes that she created the series at a time when she felt more settled in the US, suggesting her focus was less on reminiscing of home and more on what she could see in her present. Composed of unrelated objects – a monobloc chair, a plant, bricks, a tiled floor, child-like scribbles – Khor describes the composition as “abstract and decontextualised”. In both versions of the print on display in Khor’s AMSR, oranges and yellows contrast with aquatic blues, and a sense of warm sunlight and shade is palpable. By lacking specificity, the series holds a generic familiarity which gives space for the viewer to ruminate on the commonplace objects depicted and attach their own interpretations.

Khor Ting Yan, process shot of ‘1 Binjai Park, Singapore 589818’, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist.

A generic familiarity is thematic in Khor’s AMSR and epitomised in her recurrent use of the motif of the monobloc chair – her AMSR is named ‘it is light and stackable’ in reference to this emblem. “I cannot really pinpoint why I always go to the chair … I think it’s subconscious”, Khor says. She recounts that being in the US made her more aware of the chair and its presence in different contexts. While she would see it there from time to time as a piece of lawn furniture in people’s backyards, in Singapore she noted its use in an array of settings, from hawker centres to funeral services. A nondescript but familiar presence, the monobloc chair is a purely functional object, yet it also becomes an inanimate witness to an array of narrative yarns and, in turn, a potential trigger for an abundance of memories. In Khor’s work, it acts as a vessel for illustrating light, shadow and colour variations, while inadvertently imbuing a sense of collective familiarity through its instantly recognisable form.

‘my plant is dying’ (2016), a large-scale screen print on linen, is the only piece in Khor’s AMSR to feature snippets of text. Monoprint speech bubbles with hand-written dialogue float in the interior of an apartment. While Khor meant for the text to be the focus of the piece, she wanted it to be decipherable only when in close proximity to the work. Parts of the text read as everyday chitchat between friends – “my plant is dying” says one, “it’s a cactus”, says the other. Other parts allude to something deeper – “You want to be wanted more?” says one, “Yea”, says the other. There are no figures in the piece to attach the speech to and the text is sparse and vague, allowing the viewer to ponder on the words for themselves, perhaps recounting a similar conversation they may have had. “I wanted to capture my conversations with my roommates”, says Khor, “that they were really mundane and about nothing in particular, but they also hinted at bigger issues, about relationships, depression and mental health”. Khor highlights the importance of our casual exchanges which, although seemingly meaningless at the time, pave the way for more profound conversations.

“From the monobloc chair and nondescript locations, to our daily routines and trivial dialogues, Khor’s AMSR pays homage to the ordinary moments of our lives, revealing them to be gateways for a multiplicity of memories and helpful tools for exploring our state of mind.”

From the monobloc chair and nondescript locations, to our daily routines and trivial dialogues, Khor’s AMSR pays homage to the ordinary moments of our lives, revealing them to be gateways for a multiplicity of memories and helpful tools for exploring our state of mind. Simultaneously, this collection of work emphasises the print medium as a choice mode of artistic expression for Khor. The process of repeating an original, intricate image with slight nuances and variations enabled her to visually portray both the endlessly changing state of everyday life and the nature of memory to obscure as time passes by. Khor’s print work at once preserves moments in time, yet also encapsulates time’s inherent state of flux, encouraging us to slow down and allow the mundane yet unique movements of the day to catch our eye.

For more written responses to AMSR, click here.