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About The Artist
The practice of Singaporean visual artist John Clang (b. 1973) often straddles dual realities of global cities, unfettered by confines of time and geography.
A double-sight navigator of a world in constant flux, he absorbs seemingly mundane and banal external stimuli and conveys his internal observations and ruminations through the mediums of photography and film. His approach, reminiscent to a barometer, accords his works a unique position at the confluences of the open-ended and definitive, surreal and factual, personal and universal.
Clang’s first exhibition, at age 20, was a duo-show at the controversial (and now defunct) Singapore art group 5th Passage Artists. He has went to on to stage solo exhibitions at Jendela Gallery, Singapore (2004), The Substation, Singapore (2007), 2902 Gallery, Singapore (2010), Pekin Fine Arts, Beijing (2012), National Museum of Singapore (2013) and FOST Gallery (2016).
He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions including Singapore Art Museum (2009), National Museum of Singapore (2010), LACE, Los Angeles (2011), KSU Art Museum, Kennesaw (2012), CCC Strozzina, Florence (2014), Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York (2014), 1X1 Art Gallery, Dubai (2017), Pera Müzesi, Turkey (2018), ArtScience Museum, Singapore (2020), Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany (2021) and Gajah Gallery, Singapore (2021).
His works have entered the permanent collections of Singapore Art Museum and National Museum of Singapore. In 2010, he became the first photographer to garner the Designer of the Year award at the President's Design Award, one of the nation's most prestigious design accolade in Singapore. In 2013, a showcase of over 90 works by Clang was exhibited at the National Museum of Singapore.
In 2015, Clang earned his Master of Arts Fine Arts from LASALLE College of the Arts in partnership with Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2017, he made his first foray into film with Their Remaining Journey, which premiered at the 2018 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and garnered a nomination for the festival's Bright Future Award. It’s also the opening film for National Gallery Singapore’s Painting with Light: Festival of International Films on Art. In 2020, he returned to the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) with his second feature, A Love Unknown.
Clang lives and works in New York and Singapore.
[Sold] Erasure | 2011
By John Clang
Fine art archival print with birch wood frame | Edition of 1/3 + 2AP | 71.1 x 101.6cm
Erasure revolves around my aged parents and parents-in-law in their seventies and their photographs taken during a family trip to Tokyo several years ago. The series title refers to my painstaking act of fading their images from the photographs with an ink eraser as a graphic portrayal of how life quietly empties itself from them.
The resulting faint images becomes an urgent testimony of their slowly fading existence from this world, as well as from my life. Ironically, they are resurrected in my emotional space as reawakened memories by the very act of erasure - at once emotionally torment and intimate.
Despite the joyous association of a holiday destination, this work speaks of my own uneasy anticipation of their final destination - death. This dread extends even to the contemplation of my own death. Their fast aging faces become a reflection and questioning of my own mortality - a question I first asked myself many years ago as a child of four: “what will happen to me when my parents die?” This thought haunts me till this day.
Shipping fee issued upon purchase
By John Clang
Fine art archival print with birch wood frame | Edition of 1/3 + 2AP | 71.1 x 101.6cm
Erasure revolves around my aged parents and parents-in-law in their seventies and their photographs taken during a family trip to Tokyo several years ago. The series title refers to my painstaking act of fading their images from the photographs with an ink eraser as a graphic portrayal of how life quietly empties itself from them.
The resulting faint images becomes an urgent testimony of their slowly fading existence from this world, as well as from my life. Ironically, they are resurrected in my emotional space as reawakened memories by the very act of erasure - at once emotionally torment and intimate.
Despite the joyous association of a holiday destination, this work speaks of my own uneasy anticipation of their final destination - death. This dread extends even to the contemplation of my own death. Their fast aging faces become a reflection and questioning of my own mortality - a question I first asked myself many years ago as a child of four: “what will happen to me when my parents die?” This thought haunts me till this day.
Shipping fee issued upon purchase