Kwai Fung Hin is proud to announce its first overseas outpost in Singapore, a significant milestone in the gallery's international program. The new gallery will be inaugurated with a significant exhibition titled Worlds beyond Reality – Monet’s Legacy II.
Framed within Monet’s beloved garden at Giverny, this exhibition delves into the interplay between place and artistic inspiration through the enduring legacy of Monet. Drawing analogy between Giverny as a fertile ground for creative breakthroughs and Singapore as a garden city rich in diverse cultures, this exhibition also serves as the new gallery’s visual vision statement to become a cultural hub that plants the seed for future artistic discourse.
At the center of the exhibition is Monet’s 1887 masterpiece Pivoines, which offers a glimpse into the master’s personal nature cultivated with painting in mind. Taking viewers on a stroll through Monet’s garden in Giverny and the personal Edens of the eight artists across generations and geographies, this exhibition presents the garden as a dynamic site where nature and culture interact, a composed landscape that reveal the spiritual, philosophical and psychological realms beyond the surface of perception.
The abstract landscapes of Zao Wou-Ki, Lalan, and Chu Teh-Chunsynthesize the philosophical depth of Chinese landscape painting and the modernist emphasis on gesture and subjectivity. They are spiritual sanctuaries that echo Monet’s ethos of capturing the imperceptible force of nature. Following this lineage, Li Huayi channels the literati spirit into his experimentations with materials and ink techniques. His use of gold leaf on silk screen creates a kind of elusive luminosity that intimates the changing light delineated by Monet, offering novel perspectives to understand permanence.
Both working with paper using their own idiosyncratic techniques,Teo Eng Seng and Xue Song create mixed-media works that reflect their engagement with the contemporary reality and diverse cultural influences. Like Monet’s garden, their works are not merely to be viewed but inhabited, for they are inseparable from life.
Shara Hughes’s imaginative flowers and Ziad Dalloul’s interior landscapes are both symbolic and psychologically charged. They unearth the subconscious and memories through familiar forms, narrating hidden truth the same way in which the impressionist revealed the eternity of nature through transient phenomena.
