2020
The Foot Beneath the Flower is an exhibition held at the Nanyang Technological University, School of Art, Design & Media's ADM Gallery, featuring contemporary art from Southeast Asia in the key of high-pitched camp and kitsch. Camp, as Susan Sontag has remarked, is characterised by artifice, frivolity and “shocking excess”, qualities that likewise mark the aesthetics of kitsch. Guest curated by Louis Ho, the show proposes that such excess may nonetheless encompass themes that are in equal measure canny, critical, and redolent of the realities of life in Southeast Asia today.
The works here engage with the region in various ways, representing familiar socio-cultural narratives as stylistic froth and counter-ideological glee. The recontextualisation of everyday Southeast Asian visual and material cultures within the frameworks of camp and kitsch are being embodied across installation, sculpture and mixed media works.
The exhibition title was a wordplay on the book The Flower Beneath The Foot by Ronald Firbank, and we decided to make meaning of this through a graphic laden exhibition identity which also portrays an overall eccentric aesthetic. With the flower overpowering the foot, it conveys a subversive celebration of the complication of status quo.
A series of exquisite labels were also produced to accompany each artwork; blooming flowers decorating the colourful walls of the exhibition.
