Dear artists,

Congratulations on your farewell exhibition and completing your studies with us. I hope that your time in the studios and discussions with your supervisors were memorable and fruitful.

Whether you agree or disagree, I would like to think that all facilitators were able to learn something unique about what you brought to our table as artists.

While preparing for this show, in the midst of various considerations with senior lecturer/curator Adeline Kueh, I had a sense of eager anticipation and promise towards everyone’s artistic voice within the context of a gallery rather than what we were familiar with in the studio. Witnessing the development of this exhibition, I took pleasure in how each of you were discerning in proposing your selections while revealing vast experimentations with your materials, giving focus and meaning to your research. It was encouraging to see many of you were absorbed in the serious play of ‘setting up’, while capitalising on the happy accidents to how your works interacted with that of the galleries’ inherent architecture, shadow and light.

The exhibition title, written or uttered, This is not a monster refers to the contradictory attempts at referencing and communicating between language and image. Art itself is complex and slippery but it always seeks to exist. It exists and ‘appears’ pulsing as a question. This exhibition itself ‘is not a monster’ but it is ready to find solace with each of you.

As artists in this exhibition, you make no apology in presenting materiality and fiction as it ‘appears’ poetically and narratively. ‘They’ come in formations and traces of everyday and traditional art materials. I see you creatively working and responding to patterning, geometry, drawing, painting, eating, depicting proximities, arrivals, escapes, possible worlds, small worlds, micro worlds and disappearances.

Throughout the one and half years, you have explored ways of making, envisioning roads towards what you want to see. You work with image-making and arrangements, comparing and synchronising your studio explorations in response or subversion to art history, disciplining and dis-skilling encounters with your artistic tools, in order to discover new footings between the ‘axis’ of intuition and precision. Your time at LASALLE has seen each of you dial and journey within this ‘axis’, that which stirs artistic deliberations, achieving reflexivity and accountability to ‘what you want to see’. 

Thank you for always trying and for being present to possibilities.

Wishing all of you and your loved ones a happy and restful graduate celebration.

See you all at Convocation 2024!

Ian Woo

Programme Leader
MA Fine Arts