Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, opens 2010 with Contemporary Rhetoric, a dynamic new exhibition by young Malaysian artists that explore visual practice as a powerful and common language to reveal public and personal artistic concerns. Featuring the works of Chong Kim Chiew, Eiffel Chong, Erna Dyanty, Gan Siong King, Goh Lee Kwang, Haslin Ismail, Liew Kwai Fei, Lim Keh Soon, Meor Saifulah, Muhd Sarip, Phuan Thai Meng, Ruzzeki Harris, Shahril Nizam, and Tey Beng Tze, the exhibition presents the latest evolution and reinvention of contemporary art as an engaging, persuasive, challenging and playful rhetoric of the ‘now’.

This strategy purposefully allows young artists the reach to explore a variety of media, subject and installation and anticipates a complex multifaceted visual conversation in the gallery space. Timely in its approach, the exhibition also reflects a current global landscape where popular culture is continually and prolifically mediated by images from film and television, the internet and printed media. As a source of information and entertainment, the power of the image has reached an unprecedented high, with the ability to communicate more quickly and effectively than text or sound. Such a reality in turn produces a challenging position for contemporary visual practice. With limitless subject matter to imagine and appropriate from, Contemporary Rhetoric exposes this dependence on visual language in order to question and understand how artistic images ‘speak’ and influence our perception of the world around us.

Curatorially, the exhibition encourages direct and subtle aesthetic provocation as well as conceptual interrogation in order to reflect the diversity of art practice taking place at the beginning of the second decade of the new millennium. How do young and emerging artists translate and reinvent their own visual vernacular? What are the hierarchies of subject matter from the purely representational, through the quoting of popular culture, politics, and the intuitive inner sanctum of thoughts and emotion? In a world where public consciousness is inundated with the visual, where images are processed and dismissed at rapid speeds, how can Contemporary Art still create transformative pauses for contemplation? Contemporary Rhetoric provides the necessary platform for these multiple lines of inquiry and begins the new year of Valentine Willie Fine Art’s continuing commitment to young artists in Malaysia.