Featuring Artists: Ronald Apriyan, Petr Weigl, Tommy Yue, Ink & Clog and Zheng Yuan Wu
Pop art first emerged as a movement in the United Kingdom and the United States in the mid to late 1950s. Pop’s reintroduction of identifiable imagery drawn from mass culture such as advertising, comic books, and mundane mass-produced objects was a major shift for the direction of modernism. Pop artists celebrated commonplace objects and people of everyday life, far from traditional themes of morality, mythology, and classic history. It was a turn back to a representational visual communication, often optimistic, generous, and naïve.
White Space Art Asia proudly presents Vintage Pop, a show that examines the central tenets of the Pop art movement and how it continues to be relevant and resonate with a new generation of artists decades after its introduction. In this dialogue, seriality, repetition, and the eye-hungry references to mainstream popular culture and mass media are visible proof that the concept of Pop is still pertinent in today’s contemporary art.
The pioneers of Pop art sought to merge the visual vocabulary of mass culture with high art. The concept that there is no hierarchy of culture and that art may borrow from any source has been one of the most influential characteristics of Pop art. As Andy Warhol put it, “a Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum in the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”
By co-opting universally recognizable imagery such as a Campbell’s soup can or Mickey Mouse and emphasizing that as a mass-produced item, Pop artists were not simply emphasizing popular imagery, but rather providing a commentary on how people have come to perceive art as commodities to be bought and sold, identifiable with one glance.
Vintage Pop features five contemporary artists stretching across different geographical, cultural, and ideological backgrounds. Five artists from five vastly different countries and life experiences (England, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Singapore) will work with popular imageries and iconographies dating back to the 1960s. Alluding to iconic films, cartoons, videogames and pop music, these artists distort the still deeply entrenched demarcation between “authentic” and “commercial” culture.
Popular culture is ubiquitous but not universal. Its shape and form are defined by the prevailing sentiments and norms of a society. While each of these five artists brings a different postmodern interpretation of Pop art, the shared beliefs of the democratization of art and the use of easily identifiable iconography rooted in vintage pop weaves a global unifying language across time and geographies.
Join us as we celebrate these artists and their inimitable interpretations of Pop art in the contemporary context.
Opening Reception: 3 April 2021, Saturday 4pm-8pm
Exhibition Period: 3 April 2021 to 15 May 2021, Open 10am – 7pm daily
Venue: 1H Yong Siak Street, Tiong Bahru Estate, Singapore 168641
General Enquiries: +65 6738 4380
