Under a flag

Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix

10 January - 20 February

Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix is pleased to announce a two-artist show ‘Under a flag‘, introducing Shao-Jie Lin and Anthony Ngoya, comprising various installations including paintings, video, found objects and sculptures.

The two artists employ vastly different languages; Lin‘s is a carefully constructed social or political statement, the message covered under the subtle and simple, but intriguing visual. His objects are created by deconstructing original materials, image or ideas, and composed anew; thoughts and ideas are weaved in at every step of the process and become an integral part of the physicality of the works. The reconfigured materials and internalised concepts render the gracious presence of Lin’s objects into a quiet yet potent statement.

Dynamic, fluid and intuitive, the oeuvre of Ngoya is personal, reflecting his own life and identity. His practice is based on painting, but he often works directly with untreated canvas sheets or repurposed fabric. His liberal use of found objects such as discarded construction materials asserts the contemporary life and incorporates marginal or non-mainstream existence through decontextualisation and re-contextualisation.

Formally the practices of the the two artists may seem to be the farthest away from each other, but then, the drive for creation and their conceptual backgrounds have some common elements, one of which is a deep-rooted question of identity. Ngoya‘s practice is driven by his desire to trace back time and revive memory or reconstruct the past, present and future both real and imagined. As a member of the society where his parents came to live, his idea of past, present and future and memory are naturally shaped at least partly by the conscious or unconscious conceptualisation of where they came from, where they came to, and the conflict as well as the wealth of living and owning more than one culture.