A MOST ABSURD GUIDE
EXHIBITION
2021
Year: 20 August - 11 September 2021
Collaborators:
UltraSuperNew, Hilya Zubir, Santine Pillay,
Hanae Gomez, Brenda Tan
Services: Curation
Press:
Plural Mag
Business Times
Adobo Mag
TimeOut
A Most Absurd Guide is commodity of oddity that takes visitors through ways in which to navigate the existential dread of a world that’s quite literally on fire. Featuring brand new works by three artists across Southeast Asia - HelloPigu, Krack! and Soika Vomiter.
What went down on opening night: (Thanks Qi An and Liyun!)
From Yogyakarta, Krack! Studio (ID) present brand new hand-pulled silkscreen works that are life-hack manuals depicting truly ingenious Indonesian logic. Meanwhile, Cebu-based artist Soika Vomiter (PH) expresses laughter and insanity in their oil paintings of disintegrating caricatures of the self. Finally, our very own HelloPigu (SG) debut their trademark happy-go-lucky character, Pigubao on canvas paintings. Expect ancestral wisdom, irony, atrocities and psychosis.
The artworks are painfully self-aware, even crass, and hold a well-decorated mirror up to your face while offering filthy observations. They ask that you stare straight into the bloodshot eyes of your inner demons, and spill your proverbial guts out — well-sanitised tactile interactions in the gallery offer themselves up as tribute for total emotional expulsion.
A Most Absurd Guide is brought to you by UltraSuperNew Gallery and art programming agency Mama Magnet — curator Tulika Ahuja offers up counter-culture satire with a firm grasp of our current times.
The show ran from 20 August till 11 September 2021 at 168 Tyrwhitt Road, UltraSuperNew Gallery.
A handful of artworks are available in our webshop.
HelloPigu (b. 1992) is humour and light-heartedness in a bao (Chinese bread roll) you didn’ know you were missing. Founded upon the belief that both, good and bad, stories must be shared; HelloPigu injects fun and stupidity into the everyday occurrences of her idiosyncratic character, PiguBao.
More recently, HelloPigu has travelled out of the realms of digital illustrations and is taking full form by foraying into the physical world with murals and paintings. A Most Absurd Guide is HelloPigu’s debut of hand-painted artworks. She has previously done commissions and installations at Urban Design Festival, The Substation and Singapore Night Festival.
Krack! is a printmaking studio and gallery that was established in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in May 2013. They work collaboratively with artists to produce and exhibit print-based works that are visually innovative and respond critically to events, developments and cultural debates in the Asia Pacific region.
In the past 7 years, they have presented a diverse range of solo and group exhibitions in their own gallery space, as well as workshops, talks and residencies in Indonesia, Australia, Singapore and Italy. Krack! is a collaborative project between Indonesian artists Prihatmoko Moki and Rud (Lampung) Hermawan, Sukma Smita, Fachriza Ansyari, Rjo Rahardjo and Australian artist Malcolm Smith.
Soika Vomiter (b. 1990) is a Leyte/Cebu-based visual artist who expresses art through a signature mongrel character that is a product of his childhood. Embracing the repulsive and the crude, the subjects in his artworks are derived and signified with a sense of humor, juxtaposed with the seriousness of death, environmental destruction, self-deprecation and a pornographic outlook. According to him, his life experiences “full of laughter and insanity” are his artistic arsenal, expressed through acrylic, oil, latex and aerosol paints. Soika completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting at the University of San Carlos, Cebu city, Philippines.