16th August – 29th September 2007
PRANA: Art, Light, Space
By:
Khiew Huey Chian
Be Takerng Pattanopas
Richard Streitmatter-Tran
Toi Ungkavatanapong

PRANA: Art, Light, Space is an exhibition of visual art that explores relationships between light and space. Prana is an ancient Brahmin term for breath, understood as an animating force with spiritual connotations. The term can be related to the Greek origin of the word pneumatic, meaning soul or life-force, and has a variation in the notion of the ethereal. PRANA: Art, Light, Space examines the immaterial; the resonances of that which can be felt but not grasped.

In our purported age of globalization, claims for trans-national influence and exchange form a pre-eminent context for considering contemporary art practices. These claims necessarily produce their opposite: an intensification of critical questions about cultural integrity and national identity. PRANA: Art, Light, Space acknowledges the impact of this divisiveness without seeking to resolve differences or tensions. The artists on show evoke manifold cultural contexts and histories through the diminished sense of gravity, suggestions of the infinite and implications of meditative states.

Toi Ungkavatanapong employs light as a ground to explore the physical affects of color. Richard Streitmatter-Tran’s mesmeric film of flickering neon captures the compulsive beauty of the seemingly arbitrary and insignificant occurrence. Be Takerng Pattanopas creates the illusion of solid form, reflecting ancient sculptural canons in South-East Asia; while Khiew Huey Chian’s installation dances between the perceptual and experiential dimensions of presence and absence.

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