Genevieve Chua

b. 1984, Singapore

Genevieve Chua is a Singaporean artist who calls herself “a painter who works primarily through abstraction.” This characteristic understatement permeates her works, which are expressed through painting, photography, and installations: they maintain a calm vibe on the exterior, which belies their cerebral and sometimes disruptive nature.  In her words, Chua “employs a method of working that unfurls and reveals the painter's process through diagram, palimpsest, syntax, and the glitch.”

Chua’s various series demonstrate a wide-ranging curiosity and the talent to express ideas through a variety of media and materials.  Despite her very different approaches, she hews close to an academic interest in line, shape, pattern and space.  Her exploration of different modes of expression are reminiscent of Russian avant-garde artists just after the revolution, which often resulted in a sense of destruction of the old and discovery of the new.

In her series Edge Control, Chua explores the fundamentals of painting by focusing on lines, shapes, and patterns through the elimination of color and the flattening of perspective on largely monochrome canvases, which she sometimes creates in revolutionary shapes. The result is both calming and unsettling, the lines initially familiar but somehow ending up askance, like pieces of a puzzle that should fit together but don’t.

Through Breeze Blocks, Genevieve once again explores line and shape, this time with a more academic approach. The canvas paintings of three-dimensional compositions have a sculptural feel: the shapes have perspective but lie flat on a plane, and yet they seem to be trying to sneak out into space.  Her use of a trichromatic palate of industrial tones lends a mechanical air to the series.

In Grrrraaanularrrrrrr, Chua takes the themes of lines, shapes, and three-dimensions and brings it to the next level, creating geometric shapes in bas-relief using a canvas of cement screed on paper. Hanging somewhere between painting and sculpture, and between the world of two and three dimensions, Genevieve seems to be defying both genre and gravity with this series. On some works she punctuates the monochromatic grey of the cement with a thin orange line, expressed in thread, taught and strung out on hooks, precariously delicate yet vibrant and challenging.

Typestracts is another exploration, this series executed with typewriter characters hammered into thick paper, arranged in patterns that find, when viewed from afar, Chua’s familiar movement in line, shape, and space.  Look closely and the imprint of each character becomes apparent, giving texture to the works and echoing the bas-relief that she often adopts.

Chua received two awards from the National Arts Council Singapore: The Young Artist Award (2012) and the Georgette Chen Scholarship (2003-2004). Additionally, Chua has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Singapore and internationally, including participating in the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT 10), Brisbane, 2021. Chua has also completed residencies with the Gyeonggi Creation Centre, South Korea; CCC Shizouka, Japan; STPI, Singapore; The Banff Centre, Canada; and London’s Royal College of Art, UK. Furthermore, prominent regional and international institutions have recently acquired Chua’s works, including recent acquisitions by Swiss Re Switzerland. She studied painting at the Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore and graduated from the Royal College of Art, UK with a MA in painting in 2018.