Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery Singapore is pleased to present The Measure of All Things, a group exhibition bringing together twelve modern and contemporary artists whose distinct practices converge through the language of geometric abstraction.
“The artist must have something to say, for mastery over form is not his goal but rather the adapting of form to its inner meaning.”
— Wassily Kandinsky
Taking its title from the ancient Greek philosophical proposition that “man is the measure of all things,” this exhibition considers humanity’s enduring impulse to understand and organize the world through geometry, number, proportion, the grid, and the line.
Yet these structures are never entirely fixed or objective. Across the works presented here, artists transform systems of order into personal, intuitive, and poetic visual languages. Geometry becomes not only a tool for arrangement, but also a means of questioning the standards, social constructs, and systems through which we understand ourselves and the world around us.
Featuring works by Wassily Kandinsky, Serge Poliakoff, Piero Dorazio, Teo Eng Seng,
Cheong Soo Pieng, Tay Bak Koi, Daido Moriyama, Lin Hsin Hsin, Xue Song, Kubach & Kropp, Heike Krebs Bechtel and Hideki Satoh, the exhibition approaches abstraction as a space in which there is never only one way of seeing.
Lines may suggest movement, conflict, tension, or healing. Numbers may signal the promises and anxieties of a digital future. Repeated forms may evoke memory, cultural identity, labour, or endurance. Within these shifting relationships, the measured and the intuitive, the rational and the emotional, remain in constant dialogue.
"Every true artist has been inspired more by the beauty of lines and color and the relationships between them than by the concrete subject of the picture.”
— Piet Mondrian
Masters of Geometric Abstraction
Anchoring the exhibition is Wassily Kandinsky, widely recognized as one of the pioneers of abstract art. He sought to liberate painting from the obligation to reproduce the visible world, exploring instead the spiritual and emotional force of colour, line, and form. His work established abstraction as a language capable of expressing inner experience beyond representation.
Serge Poliakoff, a key figure of the post-war School of Paris, transformed geometry into an intuitive search for harmony. His interlocking fields of colour create a balance that is not mathematically imposed but Piero Dorazio who was a monumental figure in post-war European abstraction, pushes geometry towards light and movement. His overlapping lines create vibrating fields of colour, making the canvas appear to shift and expand before the eye.
Reconstructing Cultural Landscapes
In Xue Song’s New Landscape series, traditional Chinese landscape imagery is reconstructed with geometric collages assembled from burned fragments of books, newspapers, and photographs—creating compositions in which the ordered language of geometry meets the layered cultural memory of the shanshui tradition.
As a pioneer of Singaporean modern art, Cheong Soo Pieng continued to expand the formal and material boundaries of painting in his later practice. Rather than treating the canvas as a single, enclosed plane, he introduced diverse materials and textures through techniques such as collage, layering, and juxtaposition, allowing his works to unfold between two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional construction. This approach reflects his profound exploration of texture, spatial depth, and geometric composition.
Meanwhile, Tay Bak Koi simplified and transformed familiar rural subjects, developing a distinctive visual language through the reconfiguration of geometric forms, planar structures, and color.
Together, their practices capture the experimental spirit of post-war Singapore and the broader Nanyang art movement. They illustrate how abstraction emerges from materials, creative process, and spatial structure, offering fresh interpretations of Southeast Asia's visual language.
Healing Power of the Line
The exhibition also considers the line as a record of time, repetition, labour, and lived experience. In the works of Teo Eng Seng, geometry, arrangement, and colour become ways of exploring the connections between art and life, reflecting on human actions, relationships, and everyday experience.
Through the measured repetition of countless pencil strokes, Hideki Satoh turns uses the repetitive, systematic language of geometry into a meticulous and labour-intensive drawing process. From a distance, his works appear as quiet monochrome fields; at close range, their ordered structures reveal a dense accumulation of marks, gestures, and endurance.
Lin Hsin Hsin integrates the language of computer science into abstract art, transforming technology into both the subject and method of her artistic creation. Working with line, geometric structure, and spatial relationships, she views computing and computer-aided design as vital frameworks for understanding modern life. In her practice, the grid is not a neutral formal element, but a dynamic visual structure through which meaning is continually generated: it reveals order, system, and precision while providing a foundation for our evolving understanding of nature, society, and technology.
Across photography, painting, and sculpture, Daido Moriyama finds the insistent geometry of urban Taiwan in wires, scaffolding, tiles, signs, and architectural fragments. His photographic vision transforms the city into a restless field of lines, interruptions, and overlapping rhythms.
Kubach & Kropp unite geometric precision with the weight, tactility, and resonance of stone. Their sculptures suggest that geometry is not merely an abstract system, but something embodied in matter—shaped by gravity, pressure, erosion, and the passage of time.
Beyond Fixed Measures
The Measure of All Things ultimately proposes that there is no single measure of reality. The systems through which we organise the world may appear universal, yet they are continually reshaped by memory, culture, technology, perception, and individual experience.
By opening familiar structures of order, these artists invite us to look beyond fixed categories and perceived certainties. Their works reveal geometry as both rational and intuitive, universal and personal: a language through which we may consider history, identity, conflict, technology, and the human condition—something larger than ourselves that cannot be measured.
