by Felicity Ostergaard and William Bromage.

Painting Itself / 绘画本身, curated by Jonathan Nichols at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, brought together five painters from Hong Kong, Malaysia, London, Shanghai, and Singapore to explore how contemporary painting is being reimagined through East and Southeast Asian perspectives. In the following interview, Guan Kan Journal editors William Bromage and Felicity Ostergaard spoke with Nichols, alongside four of the exhibiting artists—Un Cheng, Chris Huen Sin-Kan, Noor Mahnun, and Jon Chan—about their practices and the works included in the exhibition.

William Bromage: Could you talk a little bit about your inclusion of Tang Dixin’s work in this exhibition?

Jonathan Nichols: Well, he’s never been shown in Australia, which I think is pretty incredible given how strong his work is. We can see an example of this in this piece [Yellow Peril], which I think really speaks for itself: the figure is play-acting as an Asian man, making an “Asian” face, in what appears to be a mirror. But of course, it's a painting. It's pretty harmless, but when the billboard [used as the exhibition’s promotional image] went up, there was a lot of strife.

Felicity Ostergaard: We were actually going to ask about that. What was the motivation behind choosing Yellow Peril specifically?

Jonathan Nichols: Oh, you'd have to ask the staff. When we were framing this up, we had five-to-ten works to choose from. But I can see how some people view this work as a form of patronage in this country, since it has never been seen outside of Asia. But while I get it, it indicates a Western stereotype. Having known a few Chinese people who saw it exhibited in Shanghai, I also see, you know, that there’s an attitude there too. It's a complex work.
        I think Tang’s work is fluid and quick to arrive at its message. He has a certain willingness to address people more directly. That was the quality that I was interested in. And we can see this in another example of his work here [On the Lake]. So, this work was painted in 2014. When I first looked at it, I thought it felt very calm. To be frank, it's beautiful. There's a small boat on the lake, then there's a reflection, and then there's this cargo on the boat. This cargo is, in fact, two figures whose outline resembles a mountain. And in the history of painting, in the West as well as in China, landscapes convey a sense of aspiration. So, a mountain shape is a story about aspiration and climbing to the top. But when you get closer and start examining what these guys are doing in the boat, you realise it’s very ambiguous. Suddenly, this very calm scene strikes me as a murder scene. It seems like one of the figures is drowning the other. So, you could say that much of Tang's work is dramatic and confronts its viewers. I’ve seen a lot of artwork in Australia, and this kind of thing is just not around. It’s very unusual.
        Here is another example of his work [On the Mountain]; it was painted about five years after [On the Lake] and is a landscape. You can see it resembles a figure; the landscape resembles a body. I think it’s a little bit like Mount Rushmore or something like that. It's just strange—it’s like the body has collapsed into the land. And if you think about it again, in Australia, while you do have these kinds of Western landscape traditions, they don’t resemble this. However, in Aboriginal practices, there is this kind of landscape knowledge, and in many, many respects, so do the Chinese. So, I think there is something shared there.
        When I was talking to Tang about the catalogue, I pulled up a Caspar David Friedrich picture off the internet. Through translation, I said, ‘Yeah, does this work?’ And he goes ‘Oh, yeah, you know kind of’. But there's another work of his that sort of does it as well, in which there’s a hunched-over figure looking at the horizon line, which made me remember those pictures of monkeys climbing to the tops of trees and looking at the sun going down.  And so, it's not just one work that's making you think about all these different things. 

William Bromage: Could you talk a little bit about the show and the thinking behind it?

Jonathan Nichols: Now, the concept for the show is only 13 paintings and five artists. I'm super aware that a show like this hasn't happened in this country. I don't know why that's the case, and I feel as though the system is deficient. Indeed, we are well out of a moment, of you know, let's call it modernism, postmodernism, or art history, or something where the codes were defined by the big towers, usually an American one, and usually a European one. While we are over that, here in Australia, you still have to travel in your mind, using the artwork you've got.  You can't just parade these old ideas about what was best and what wasn't. So the logic I've used to bring these artists together is a kind of studio logic that many painters use. In a way, I think it's a game of reflection and seeing the work like themselves.
        Painters self-identify as they see fit: they see a face and then look for the face in the painting. And through this process, the painting has its own face. It's a kind of self-recognition. It’s a very familiar methodology in studios, where, if you talk to artists, they'll say things like that guy, he paints more anthropomorphic; so while you speak as an artist, the painting also speaks like a person. It’s like there are two voices in painting. There's the artist's voice, and then there's the painting’s voice. And that idea, which I track back through, you know, has roots within Western philosophy. And it's well known to painters like Paul Klee, who worked in the Bauhaus and would articulate things in this way. And there are many others. But it's not just a Western concept; it's an idea or a way of thinking about painting that also occurs in other cultural spaces. So all of a sudden, here we are in Australia, and I want to traverse some borders and some cultural practices, right? And I'm using a way of making paintings that travel across these kinds of breaks. That was really the logic. 
        So the title of the exhibition, Painting Itself, is a Chinese interpretation of a translation. I don't read Chinese, but it's symbolic that this is not just understood in English, or even, let's go one step further, in Chinese as the lingua franca. As soon as you get to Singapore, there’s Mandarin. So, this exhibition is saying maybe we need to address these gaps.

Felicity Ostergaard: Actually, we were speaking about it before: in the Australian art world, even with its proximity to China, it largely ignores its northern neighbours. 

Jonathan Nichols: I think so, in a funny way, the art world can be very conservative. They go to art school, but they're not wholly trained. While they learn about art, they study art history and repeat it. I think they've got to turn their eyes now and look north, and certainly they've got to look across, independent of these histories that I think are completely flat. We can go, well, there's an important artist. But it is painters who really write art history. It doesn't come in books. You paint the picture. The painting comes first. So what we understand as art history has been defined by the painters who write it.  
        In Australia, I can barely name one serious art critic who's got a bit of tenacity. All the rest are long gone, you know? They've disappeared. They're like dinosaurs that have fallen off the page. Because they can't talk about modernism anymore. And in an exhibition like this, the tropes of modernism—say figuration or abstraction—I'm kind of not interested. I'm just not interested in going into that space. I mean, you could try and bring that into these works and go, ‘Oh, I understand what's going on,’ as if you're dragging things around and printing your stuff on it. So, there are a lot of gaps there.
        If we look at this work over here [by Un Cheng], we can see some of these things I've been discussing. Un Cheng was among all the democracy marches in Hong Kong, amid the collapse of democratic hope. In that moment, politics had changed monumentally. She was just a young artist, only a couple of years out of art school, when she went through 18 months of street marches and everything that comes with that. So this work, from that time, is called Beer, Weed and Spinach, referencing the fact that she was drinking too much and smoking too much, right? But here's the question. So, I see this as a kind of window into her exhaustion, a collapse. Now this is not an articulated collapse. Nor is it merely a physical collapse. Rather, it’s a depiction of her falling apart after the failure of two years of thinking something was viable. She, in fact, talks about waiting for a hero at this time. And in a Western tradition, somebody might have come along and said, Oh, this is very existential, so they would paint it black. But this isn't a black picture. The colours come from her bathroom. Its central motif, a toilet, is very hard to pull off with any credibility. I mean, we know Duchamp put the toilet or the urinal in the centre stage, but I don't think that was what was going on here. Rather, it's the painting itself that speaks, but it's also kind of in the background. Both these elements talk together.
        Un is with Blindspot Gallery, and they've been really helpful in getting her here. Blindspot has impressed me because I think it's different from those galleries that try to jump to the higher ‘trade’ as soon as they can. Those galleries you know, they're in the market a bit, but in the process, they lose sight of contemporary practice. But I think Mimi Chun [owner and founder of Blindspot Gallery] is just doing really good things. And we’ve talked in our interviews [with Mimi and Un] about leadership, which is an odd phrase. None of us believes it really. But you know, in the art world, there is this notion that thinks a city like Hong Kong can now lead the art world. I think it's because there's still a kind of stress, tension, and opportunity in Hong Kong, which is the kind of possibility the art world looks to. But if that's all going to come about, then it's people like Mimi Chun and blind spot that are going to be in the mix. But when we talked about it, I think you said the Hong Kong art world is a bit headless because it's hard for people to know where to go politically and how to structure things.


William Bromage: Could you talk a little bit about your work?

Un Cheng: So here we have two pieces of my work. This [No Bargain $10!] is one kind of self-portrait that I started making in 2021. That one was made two years later and is a portrait of a grandma tending to her fruit, which she sells on the street. I have a story behind each of my works, but we'll start with No Bargain $10!
        It came from a very random conversation I had with a grandma who asked me for a $10 discount on some flowers. Her sense of humour about it, I thought, really represented the attitude of not only people in Hong Kong but also of growing old—the “granny personality”, as I call it. Even though I live in a less urbanised part of the city, people think of Hong Kong as a highly compacted city with all these buildings. But I actually feel a connection to the city's “countryside.” You can see this in the painting, using grey-green and green-pink colours. I also really like using my signature purple-black combo because it helps with the technical aspect of drawing floor patterns. But anyway, I feel a connection every time I see an older person. With most of my work, I wouldn’t say it's isolating; it comes from my everyday experience. Out on the street, I really easily notice people or things that I think stand out or are left abandoned, such as drug addicts or people from different backgrounds in love. So I feel this painting depicts daily life in Hong Kong.
        This other one, however, is more like a self-portrait. I made it in 2021 during the [pro-democracy] protests in Hong Kong. It's part of a triptych, which is a motif I use a lot in my work. The other works in this specific triptych have a more yellow colour palette, but this one is more positioned within a ‘girls’ setting. The other works include a depiction of a figure taking objects from the street to make a roadblock and a portrait of a journalist holding a skateboard. But this specific work is titled Beer, Weed and Spinach. I was so frustrated at that time, one night, I began to throw up, hence the spinach. I was quite surprised to see it again.
        Everything was so devastating that day, but I saw this ‘hole’, and it was me. That shows in the colours that I use. So while I paint, some questions come up that I ask myself, like, can I make it very pink? Does it feel harmonious? How many colours can I include? So I intentionally make these contrasts to create the composition that I really want. Therefore, the colour contrasts ensure my work isn’t overly negative and that it evokes a sense of peacefulness. I don't want to create too much of a depressive atmosphere. So I also use softer lighting and different brush strokes to counteract this. When I have stronger emotions, my brush strokes become more prominent. 
        The human figures that I draw are also very spontaneous. They mostly come from my emotions, my mood, and the memories that I had from that time. Even though it's quite grainy, you can see this in the two additional figures I include. That’s in fact shit in the toilet.
        However, while trying to make my work more granular and more spontaneous, I always try to make the composition quite straight. This ensures that there's a clear delineation between the positive and negative spaces for comparison.

Felicity Ostergaard: So, obviously, there are a lot of layers in the work. Do you sort of plan out your renders of the composition ahead of time, or do you go with the flow of the painting?

Un Cheng: I don’t do many sketches before I start to paint, but there are a few phases in my process, like deciding on the colours and brushstrokes. I like really abstract paintings, so I try to make different kinds of tools to paint with, from making my own brushes to stretching the canvas, to maybe using a wooden bar from some event. So, I think in the first phase, I try to be very expressive. And when I have the colours that I like, I start thinking about the composition. But the composition in terms of whether it's indoor or outdoor. So let's say this one, I feel like it's an indoor one. But there is also a composition: a triangle or something like this. After that, I go with the flow.

Felicity Ostergaard: Regarding your use of colours, you said you wanted them not to convey dark, depressing themes. In this process, do you draw the colours from the actual space itself or from somewhere else?

Un Cheng: You need some reference for some things. For myself, I watch a lot of Japanese anime, like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. It's quite popular in my province. So at times you have to connect with these kinds of child-like things to make people feel connected to a sense of innocence and instruction.

Felicity Ostergaard: Did that inspire your choice to include physical objects like this toy star in your work?

Un Cheng: Yeah, I mean, in some of my works, I will include something around me, like a stamp, a piece of paper or in this case, something off my slipper. I think of it as creating a visual diary that connects my ideas with my voice. As if to say that there is stuff happening in my daily life, I draw on not only my mental but also my physical resources. So, yeah, it can be very unique,

Felicity Ostergaard: We noticed that in a lot of your works, you use things like bricks or tiles; these quite spare shapes, which emphasise these lines. Is that something you do on purpose?

Un Cheng: I think maybe this comes from the consciousness of my consciousness. Because I mean, Hong Kong has many buildings and skyscrapers. So I do feel really conscious of my memory, and how that reflects in my use of lines, particularly in my interiors. Space always reflects a general atmosphere for me. But colours are more accurate in detailing specific things. As in China, the colours in a painting have a similar effect to ink. But yeah, the mood of my paintings is always related to space, and the different lines I use. But in this one, I use some colour layers to compare and highlight the line's contrast. But some are really neutral in their message. So in a way, there are two different ways of doing things, like different body movements or different thoughts. Two different interactions are going on.

Felicity Ostergaard: Could you talk about some of the works you have in this exhibition?

Chris Huen Sin-Kan: So, usually I wouldn't talk about, like, a specific work, but rather my practice as a whole. My practice is always about the ordinariness of life, so my work is woven into my daily routine. Like, when I wake up, I drop the kids off at school, then I take the dogs to the forest for a walk. And after that, I go back to the Studio and start working. Basically, I like to paint my daily routine over and over, revisiting it day by day. In this way, my works become an accumulation of my thoughts and memories; there is a constant refresh. In this sense, I get to convey this passage of time. The figures in my work are actually my wife, my children, and sometimes my dogs. I think this reflects the fact that all works on display are about a single period in my life.
        Very recently, one of our dogs passed away. So, slowly but surely, she was phased out of my thinking because she was no longer physically there.  But I guess that’s what I intended to do. I wanted to face and highlight these subtle changes in my life. Like when my kids start growing up and become teenagers, they might stop being in my painting. But hopefully, they will come back and will bring more members to the family. But maybe later on, at the end of my career or the end of my life, there will only be my wife and me. So, that’s the kinda’ story I want to tell.

Felicity Ostergaard: Given the exhibition's context, with paintings featuring faces, I noticed that your family and even the dogs are all making eye contact with the viewer, which I found really interesting. Would you say that's more them making eye contact, or is it also the painting making eye contact? Would you say they're separate things? Where do they merge and interact?

Chris Huen Sin-Kan: So in the beginning, when I painted them,  they weren’t looking. But then I always felt like something was missing. So I thought, what if they look back? Once I did that, I felt a sense of connection between these interacting “observers”. Like when we see the painting, they're looking back. Given also its life size, it also adds to this sense that we are looking in, but they are also looking out. Through this, I can make a connection between the painted space and the space we were in. 
        I feel that when we look at a painting, and even sometimes when I'm working on one, it almost becomes merely an object. But by adding this sense of connection, it becomes more like a space that you’re thrown into, rather than just an object to observe. 

Felicity Ostergaard: Is this part of the reason why your paintings are life-sized?

Chris Huen Sin-Kan: Yeah, because I think that's a big reason why I like to paint on larger scales. But also, a large part of that is because I'm not trying to depict the objects within, but rather the experience of being in this space or place, and how that influences how the things around it unfold. So the larger scales allow the painting to wrap around the viewer and occupy their focus.

William Bromage: I was going to ask because, I mean, I notice that in a lot of your paintings, the figures you describe are not only always front and centre, but their features remain consistent and detailed. But the objects around them are really hard to make out. Could you talk a little bit more about how your memory shapes that relationship and the experiential aspect of your work?

Chris Huen Sin-Kan: I always say, when you try to imagine a tennis ball, there are always a few characteristic features you think of, like it being green and having a U-shaped line and so on. This highlights that when we try to reconstruct and communicate things to others, it's always drawn from our memory and understanding. And this means it seems pretty easy to describe things like a tennis ball or even a glass of water. Yet there's also a lot of underlying nuance in this process. What if you think of a different version of that same thing from a separate time in your life? Like the tennis ball or the glass of water is not the same every time. Perhaps the shape is different, like a wine glass. So there is a lot of nuance to this process, and when it comes to the lived experience within the paintings, it's not concrete—rather, it's a process of interaction between new and old memories.
        So the figures, for me, are kind of like an anchor point, because they’re always the people or the animals that are the closest to my heart. But for a lot of people, they’re just strangers. You don't even know them. I had this experience a lot when I was a kid, actually. I would go to the museums in Hong Kong and later in London, and I would see portraits of famous and/or noble people. Yet I didn’t know anything about them; I felt like they were so far away. When I looked at them, I knew they existed, but I could never connect to their lived experience. I could never get a sense of somebody’s experience of what they were. So, as an artist, trying to describe everything around me is like planting a seed. Everything starts to grow from that point, like the trunks start to come up, and then, you know, there's the roots, and then the branches, and so on. 

Felicity Ostergaard: Was there a big change in your style when you moved from Hong Kong to London because of the different surroundings?

Chris Huen Sin-Kan: I think so, because there is a big geographical difference. So I started to notice many differences in my sensations, especially in the colours around me and in the climate. Different greenery started to appear in my daily routine. But I try to incorporate these changes naturally into my work, not to force them. I try not to think about it too much. I tell myself you're still you. It's not like you spend 30 years in your hometown and then, when you move to another place, you suddenly become a different person. So I think change in my work happens slowly but surely. It's like the family structure, you know, it changes subtly. But I wouldn't say it's a style; rather, it's how I react and respond to the changing environment around me.

William Bromage: I was wondering, given that a lot of the works in this exhibition are exploring this relationship between truth and experience, what do you think of this relationship in your own work?

Chris Huen Sin-Kan: I think it's like, we build up an idea of how things are.  We have many presumptions about how things work. But in fact, I always feel like the nature of things is always changing. There is a certain ferocity and uncertainty about things. So yeah, I don't know if I would say my work explores truth so much as how we understand life.



Noor Mahnun: When I started the painting, All Dream, my gallery introduced me to Jonathan [Nichols]. So this painting is connected to Jonathan, too. The gallery owner came to my studio and asked to represent me for a solo exhibition. And I said, ‘Okay, but I can't do it next year. ‘Can you give me two and a half years?’ Because I usually don't do many solo shows. I paint in my studio accordingly. I don't think about whether there's going to be a show. But for this one, I thought it would be shown in a gallery in Singapore, so I needed to plan for it. So I built a model gallery. I was thinking, okay, I want colourful walls because I don't like white walls.  Then I thought, what about the first wall, how big should it be? And then I thought, it should be this painting [All Dream] that will be on the first wall. So, All Dream relates to that solo exhibition.
        This piece [Homework] is a play on how I like to do housework. I was in Germany for a long time, and I enjoyed doing housework. So before I start something, I clean up my studio and spend at least two hours tidying. This piece depicts my studio. When I start my paintings, I like to make them like a stage set and set them up so they actually show my room. Like, there’s the actual table that I have. There's a rock [points at painting] that I included in one of my previous paintings about mazes and labyrinths. Actually, it turns out my carpet was sold to me in exchange for a painting by this guy who became a gallerist, and whose gallery is next door to my workshop. So there’s a lot of ‘secrets’ in my work that build up.
        I'll start with a grid, then I'll do a flat perspective. Actually, the figure in this piece is not me, but a surrogate for me. This painting is drawn from another work I did called Homework, which depicted me wearing a school uniform with yellow gloves. I always have a vase in my studio, and originally I painted it with flowers. Originally, I wanted to paint myself, but somehow I didn't like it. So I took it out because it was too much. But I thought if I have an empty vase, I or the viewer could put any flower that they or I want. So I left it empty. This is in stark contrast to the foliage in the background, and I included this largely because my studio overlooks a dense forest. When I was in Germany, there weren’t many forests to paint. But when I came back, I thought, oh my God, there were so many different species I didn’t know, but I wanted to get to know.
        I feel like I'm a bit like a goldfish in my studio, every time I paint. Even though I can’t see any monkeys, I feel like they are watching me paint. So this piece is actually about memory. In a nutshell, it's like you're watching the painting, but the wild animals in the painting are also watching you.

Felicity Ostergaard: So, where did you get this idea of using flat perspectives?

Noor Mahnun: I've always liked Mughal paintings and Japanese woodcuts, and how they always have an oblique perspective. But for me, it's easier to compose something if I don’t have to create a proper perspective. Then I don't have to make sure things are at 45-degree angles and so on. So I feel like it's more democratic if I have a flat perspective. Because, as people, we often see things in 2D, and I mean, a painting is flat… Yeah, yeah, I shouldn't pretend!

Felicity Ostergaard: Did you want to talk about this piece [Baju Kurung]?

Noor Mahnun: I like sewing very much. My grandmother taught me how to hem at first, and then I really got into sewing. So now I'm trying to learn how to sew a Baju Kurung, a traditional dress that was also my school uniform. It relates to that homework sketch because when the collector bought it, he asked, ‘Oh, why don't you do one with Baju Kurung?’ So it's a scene sort of about a Baju Kurung, but it has so many different interpretations, you know, with her hand outstretched and so on. For me, because the exhibition's name, as Jonathan explained, means enclosure, I think that's why I included the stripes, it's kind of like a jail. Like in Malaysia, most houses have a grill like this. And for me, it's kind of like checking in on your own house. The figure stretches out her arm as if she's been through a fitting for the Baju Kurung, but it's also like a formal surrender to whatever happens. It reminds me of when I was in boarding school: everybody wanted to be in the choir, and because there was a lot of competition, I couldn't get into it. But I was in the recorder group, and we were quite good, and in fact, we won the national championship. So, this piece also relates to where I was at that time. 

Felicity Ostergaard: With the exhibition as a whole, there’s this key theme of inner tension. Where would you say that inner tension in your paintings lies?

Noor Mahnun: I suppose, from the perspective—there's this sense of seeing one thing and another at the same time. It's also like, “what's real and what's not” in terms of perspective. I think it brings this unease; in this one [points to painting], it’s not so obvious. But, as in my earlier work, it looks like the figure will slide down because the floor is flat. There are also no shadows, which would conventionally ground these figures. It's intentional.

William Bromage: Could you talk a little bit about your work?

Jon Chan: I'll start by saying, as a painter, I'm usually very cautious about telling stories. But increasingly, my work has a lot more content, so it's unavoidable. 
        This [points to a painting] is a park in Singapore called Chang Hong Lim Park. It's the only place in Singapore that you can protest. Anywhere else in the country, you’ll get arrested. Even just a little sign—a placard, even—and you get jailed. The name of the park, Chang Hong Lim, is actually that of my ancestor. He's my great-great-great-grandpa. I have one work about him [set] in the clouds because I wanted to isolate him. After all, he is from such a different context. He was an opium trader, a philanthropist, and one of the key figures in early Singapore. He was from a group of people called the Peranakans. And the Peranakans were basically like intermediaries between the colonisers and the rest of the population, i.e., the Chinese and the Malays. So I picked him because I'm related first of all. The idea in the painting is generational. But also there’s this idea that he was conflicted because he's half an opium trader, but then he's kind of half good, in the sense that he's a philanthropist. Someone would think of him as like The Godfather, whose nature is so separate from that of the public park and its political role. But all my work is about these divides, and in particular, the divided self. So I try to convey that this place is both political and a park. I usually try to emphasise both, but this one's really specific.
        What you see here [pointing to the work] is an old photograph of, I can't remember the exact date, but it was a protest for a, I think, a Brazilian soccer player that came to Singapore. I think he brought drugs and had to be executed. So these protestors were hoping for a favourable outcome in the trial. But it's one of those instances where not many people join in, so it's isolating.
        This piece [Tochi’s Ghost] actually depicts a very prominent figure in Singapore. Singapore basically has one main ruling political party called the PAP [People's Action Party], but there's a lot of opposition. He [points to the portrait] is from the SDP [Singapore Democratic Party], and his name is Chee Soon Juan. I'm not sure who the other three figures are, but I think they're all sort of friends. And they gather to protest a death, which is also interesting, because it speaks to an idea of ghosts. This idea of ghosts, traces, and things left behind is sort of like giving a painting new life. The last thing I'll add is that this photo contrasts with the background, which is more real time. So this one is the past [the painting], and the other is more like the present time [the photo], yeah? Which kind of links to this idea that painting has this aperture? It passes through time and location.
        This piece is called White to Blue. It's mostly blue, almost like a formalist painting with a white space in there. Again, it's political, and it actually depicts a makeshift memorial. It's not the actual thing, but it's meant to be a prison cell. It was made about an event called Operation Spectrum. In 1987, a group of people who were in church were arrested and, without trial, were sent to prison with the accusation being that they were communists. It was highly controversial because the government stepped in to curb anything that could be seen as opposition. So I contrasted this with the idea of the painter painting in the studio. It took a while, you know, looking at all my heroes and building the painting in terms of layers, and thinking about that. But it's also commentary about breaking away from a certain kind of formalism. There’s this kind of window of freedom to get out of. And mirroring that comes with this political tension. These guys were just an opposite position, but like they're human. I always try to convey them as being more than just these people to get on the stage and become symbols, you know. There are real people.
        Picasso for me, and even comics, they're all about moving around, cutting up space. That’s actually most of what paintings do: they merge space and time. So this [painting] is actually just the outside of this thing.  But a lot of what interests me also is how paintings operate internally, and how they kind of branch out and speak to a wider world. So, paintings are like us, they're basically people, yeah? We have our whole inner psychology, but we have to face the outside to understand this complicated world. There's a kind of anthropological function to the painting, like a human.
        By the way, my skill is usually modest. I tend to paint things that feel like you have to be with them. It's like coming close to a person saying ‘hi,’ like being overwhelmed, feeling like you're more like a window frame.

Felicity Ostergaard: Yeah, with the window and the different shades, within. Do you have any idea what's beyond that?

Jon Chan: Well, it's a window. These are like painterly marks. Everything here is about indicating my goals; in a sense, it's why it's like a presence. I was thinking, because it’s painted from an image, I don't quite have a full sense of the reality. Whenever I have that, I'm critical of abstraction, but that's a little bit of what's going on there, you know. And then it just becomes a place. So this one [points to a painting], I was thinking with that in particular. The guy is looking up too, looking at the banner. He’s pulling a kind of Singaporean blank face… yeah, doing a role. He's talking about important stuff, so he’s gotta be listening and present as if I'm doing a job, honing the umbrella, you know.

Felicity Ostergaard: So you paint from images. Where do you source those?

Jon Chan: Some of the images are stuff I've taken, you know, mostly for the blank spaces, yeah. I'm trying to go beyond the point of people like Gerhard Richter, so it's not really so much commentary on photography as it becomes more of a tool. And I'm always trying to find a kind of Singaporean local kind of colour palette, yeah, none of my colours are natural. Still, my colours are coming from myself, in it. So the colours aren't quite real, if you know what I mean.
        This is actually the toughest one to talk about. This is actually a painting of a forest that's no longer around. It's gone, so it was bulldozed to make way for housing units in Singapore, which they called the HDB units. And basically, the idea of painting, that something that doesn't exist anymore, again, is like another kind of a ghost. It’s very much fundamental to the idea of painting and the myth of painting. There's a very famous myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. It's an old Greek myth about a painter who outlives her lover, who leaves without a trace, except for the work he made of her. And that's basically like the idea of the work, the idea of holding on. 
        This tree is native to Singapore, and it sort of decays from the inside. It hollows out naturally. And because it gets weak, it will fall, right? And then, what's really nice is that a new one will come up. So I've always been interested in things that Singapore projects itself on to—that's, like, very strong and efficient.  But I like subject matter that falls apart and remains valuable. Anyway, this triangle in the composition gets complex. It's actually a reference to the well-known German painter Sigmar Polke. So, Polke painted a picture where this triangle was actually in the top-right corner. And the title of the painting, roughly, you have to research: it’s something like "Higher Beings Commanded: Paint the Upper-Right Corner Black!" So it's a really complex work that aims for a formalist aesthetic—a sort of commentary on abstraction, formalism, and cultural voids. So, I took that and reversed it; now we're talking about higher forces. It's the stuff that a painter would paint when they start to feel that it's not just about their expression, but things that are guiding them, like ghosts. You could say they're demonic or they're heavenly, but there's this idea that it—something otherworldly—is there. And Jonathan [Nichols] also talks a lot about that. 
        The colour is inspired by the filmmaker Tarkovsky, and also Brazilian painting, so it kind of talks a bit about death, yeah, so like life after. If you look at the tree trunk, see the letters C, T, O, S, E, E, and B, O, T, H, C, L, I, M, B, climb. And then the title is higher. So it comes from a quote by the French philosopher Simone Weil, where she says that if you want to understand reality fully, you have to consider two opposing, contrasting values, right? So to do that you gotta rely on something higher. So you've got to shut up your senses. That’s really what it's trying to do, the shift from blue to purple.
       This is one of the pieces I've completed, but I'm still working on the series—so, this tree will be in the rest of the pieces, mostly. This piece belongs to the previous world, the other. It sort of plays on the whole. I'm saying to people, I'm aware I noticed this. This whole world with collectors and the art economy, and so if you buy one, you won't get the full thing. That's really me trying to put a spanner in the system and trying to take some autonomy back from it.
       It's very much a conscious act to hide the text, because all my work is about this—trying to find balance. My previous work with the Hong Lim Park is about balancing the rhetorical with the visual, and [to] sense the way the work  speaks to you visually, you know. So I try to hide aspects of it. It's very… a very sensitive gesture. I'm also prepared to let certain things not be known or seen, but it's still there. There's still space for wonder. There's something they will miss. You know, maybe I miss.
        If you also notice, these marks are going that way a little bit, as much as I could, this way [Chan gestures across the canvas, indicating the direction of the brushstrokes]. Yeah, the space is still a little bit Chinese in that sense. I don't see myself as Chinese, because Chris [Huen Sin-Kan], I think, really embodies the Chinese thing. I'm supposed to be Chinese, but I can't speak it. So I always felt a bit like a phoney, but it's sort of there, because if you look at the ground, I leave bits of the ground in the background, so it gives it a kind of airiness. There's a quality of Chinese painting. Western art would be a little bit more realistic and grounded, but this one's a bit more airy [an aesthetic quality significant in Chinese painting]. So the thing feels like it's at once a little bit  heavy, but that it's lifting.

Felicity Ostergaard: Throughout the exhibition, there are many faces—a strong presence of portraiture. Can you talk about the significance of portraiture and the face in your painting?

Jon Chan: There's this idea in anthropology about tradition, this is the idea of the mask. I don't necessarily read it literally all the time, that you have to paint a face? But this tree could be, in a sense, a face. The face is, in a sense, to remind you that it's human, to move towards the anthropocentric or anthropological view of things. So to me, all good paintings respond to things as if they were people.
        Your introduction to them is usually visual. Your assumptions about them are usually based on these first impressions. First, you see, what's this guy? What's he trying to say? I don't know if I'm quite like him. And then after a while, he's actually funny. Yeah, so this painting has got that kind of thing going on.
        I think it takes a lot of confidence to allow something to exist. There are these parts of you that people won't see and will miss because they're just seeing you. But the confidence is just letting it be. I'm learning a lot from Jonathan by just leaving these things as they are and not over-explaining. To be confident and just let them sit there.

Jon Chan, Un Cheng, Chris Huen Sin-Kan, Noor Mahnun, Tang Dixin, Painting Itself / 绘画本身, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 6 February – 29 March 2026.

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Header images:

1. Noor Mahnun, Homework (detail), 2024. Image courtesy
of artist.

2. Jon Chan, Tochi's Ghost, 2021. Image courtesy of
artist.

3. Chris Huen Sin-Kan, Joel, Haze and Tess, 2023. Courtesy
of Ota Fine Art.

4. Noor Mahnun, Baju Kurung, 2025. Image courtesy
of artist.