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Genevieve Chua / Singapore b.1984 / Artificially intelligent (detail) 2021 / Relief prints on paper, laser-engraved acrylic sheets / Ten prints: 45 x 41.3 x 3.8cm (each); two prints: 65.5 x 75.5 x 3.8cm (each); six sculptures: 27.5 x 39 x 20cm; 24 x 40 x 25.5cm; 32.5 x 40 x 27cm; 20 x 40 x 20cm; 31 x 39 x 33cm; 28.5 x 40 x 27.5cm; installed dimensions variable / Produced at STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore / Proposed for the QAGOMA Collection / Courtesy: The artist and Singapore Tyler Print Institute / © Genevieve Chua
Genevieve ChuaArtificially intelligent 2021
Not Currently on Display
Artificially intelligent stems from Genevieve Chua’s interest in computer algorithms within the high-tech context of contemporary Singapore. These works are constructed from the non-alphanumeric characters on a computer keyboard, such as stops, slashes and brackets. Inspired by Braille, the marks are realised in a technique of lightly printed embossing. The visual form of these characters is amplified, repeated on the pictorial plane to form grids, arcs and radials, or to drift or stutter down the page. With the aid of illustration software, Chua introduces gradual perspectival distortions that make rows of backslashes appear to rotate, condense and zigzag. Superimposed patterns of dots and dashes enhance and complicate the depth of field created by these effects, inviting further perceptual illusions.
Modest in scale, the prints are accompanied by wall-based sculptures featuring etched acrylic panels, as a reference to the plates used in the printing process. These fan out from the wall in stacked array inspired by the design of the cooling systems of computer central processing units.
Chua’s works take technology as their subject and focus on a particularly human response to it — expressed through the poetic devices of compositional and material artistic process. Where an algorithm is geared towards logic and efficiency, Artificially intelligent is fundamentally illogical and inefficient, the modestly scaled product of months of artistic labour, based in emotion rather than attempting to elicit a cursory, programmed emotional response. The aim, for Chua, is to ‘break the efficiency of systems in order to humanise them’.1
Endnotes:
1 Genevieve Chua, conversation with Reuben Keehan, February 2021.
Genevieve Chua draws from such disciplines as natural history and linguistics in her approach to abstraction as a mode of data visualisation. Major sources for her work have included Singapore’s status as a ‘garden city’, its persistent atmospheric ‘haze’ and the rhythms of Singaporean English.
Chua’s paintings combine a number of mark-making techniques, including printmaking, and often take on sculptural forms. Experiments in symmetry and hard-edged abstraction have evolved into shaped canvases and typographic play. More recent bodies of work have included screen and relief prints, explorations of the optical effects of layered patterns, and kinetic elements such as hinged brackets. This physical aspect is described by Chua as an approach to painting as a ‘two-and-a-half-dimensional’ medium.