Valentine Willie Fine Art is pleased to announce Yasmin Sison’s debut KL solo this October, The Weight of Waiting. The exhibition is part of an ongoing series on her exploration on the mutability of memory, of media and spectacle.

Yasmin Sison refers to blotting as an act that describes how images are altered through a play on light and darkness. By painting over her figures, she erases their individuality, creating ghostly portraits that form a critique against the longings and desires engendered by media and an acceptance of its power. The exhibition will run from 15th October – 1st November 2008.

Yasmin SisonThe Shroud of Time

“The princess sits in the tower waiting…
Vines begin to grow over the palace, the princess and her people.
She wakes after a hundred year slumber and finds she no longer remembers what her world was like, it is no longer the same…”

Yasmin Sison belongs to an exciting generation of young Filipino artists who have garnered local and regional attention for the distinctive wit and intellectualism of their approach. One of the founding members of the Surrounded By Water collective, which boasts stellar names like Geraldine Javier, Wire Tuazon, Lena Cobangbang and Jayson Oliveria among others, Sison is recognized as one of the finest painters of her generation.

For “The Weight of Waiting”, her first solo exhibition outside of the Philippines, Sison presents a series of paintings which form part of an ongoing body of work exploring the “the mutability of memory, media and the spectacle”*. Inspired by the glossy editorials of fashion magazines, Sison’s repeated efforts in ‘intervening’ with images from this make-believe world, have found her concealing, camouflaging, masking, erasing the body through numerous painting methods and textures.

Sison’s works exist in a timeless world of intersecting identities and tales, rich with emotional textures and narrative potential. She employs a lexicon of visual references and storytelling devices, merging popular culture, personal memory, collective memory, imagined fantasies and fairy tales to construct an intimate space, dreamy yet haunting. Sison’s paintings entice with refreshing “girlishness” at first glance. And yet beyond the beautiful outdoors, the bunny ears, the high heels and pretty wallpaper in empty rooms, her figures are permanently locked in their painted shrouds. They strike a chord with their uncanny familiarity, “with their limbs and legs and hair taking a peek.” Each painting represents possible personalities from a spectrum of archetypal characters and our personal memory: the fairy tale princess, the playful nymph, the awkward ingénue or the alluring siren. We are uncertain of the association – is this fact or fiction? Like a name that we no longer recall, there is a likeness that we can’t quite place or remember, a fading encounter in the past. The concealment of the figure draws a sudden blank in our attempt to fill in the gap of this fragmented narrative. A mystery world exists behind this space, there is no way in and no way out.

A major part of Sison’s image-making process is informed by her deep fascination with the staging of a fashion editorial. She deconstructs the elements involved in the making of a photo-shoot –from technical photographic aspects such as composition, framing and lighting, to the styling of an image to suggest a particular narrative or mood using key ‘signifiers’ such as backdrop, wardrobe, accessories, make-up and props– and appropriates these elements on canvas. The notion of the photograph as “an image[..] floating in a sea of signifiers…open to a multitude of interpretations and narratives” (Barthes) as well as other readings of cultural theory and dialectics of photography also underscore the scope of her work. Meaning is always at play, constantly stirred and shaken by our thoughts and associations.

As a representation system that privileges visibility, photography makes it impossible for a subject to remain unseen. An image’s very nature is to reveal the body’s location within space. In highlighting the visibility-invisibility dichotomy, Sison puts a twist to the voyeuristic gaze we fix on beauty and celebrity by denying us access, shrouding the space usually occupied by supermodels, starlets and celebrated figures with layers of impasto paint. The female form and its adornment are blotted out, eliminated from the picture, transformed into an anonymous entity. However, the veils or blots of paint can be read as acts of vandalism or rebellion, a critique of the media’s role in shaping (and dictating) prescribed notions of beauty and material trappings, manipulating society’s hungry obsession of celebrity and fame, and other vain contemporary pursuits. While this negation may be harsh, it also offers a semblance of safety, perhaps a mask or a screen in which one’s identify is securely hidden from prying eyes.”To some people the excision of figures in the work can refer to people disappearing literally and also metaphorically, and can relate both to personal feelings and the power of the media to make our own selves disappear into a myth or illusions of an idealized existence of long limbs and high heels. For me the works are both funny and sad, they are a pun and a kind of rebellion against the longings and desires engendered by media and an acceptance of its power. This is one of the ways I look at the paintings.”

Read from another viewpoint, the notion of disappearing relates to the way time erodes and blots out memories. As suggested by the exhibition title, the ‘weight’ or heaviness the burden and shroud of time. Sison displays her deft control of colour and light in this series as she dulls and yellows her palette to give each painting a patina of age. This ‘dullness’ heightens the sense of nostalgia and the emotional distance between the viewer and the pictorial world; they are poignant, longing for contact. “…The figures in my paintings are either sitting or standing. Most are facing the viewer but can never be seen…alone and unreachable. They stand as figures caught up and hidden in their own worlds…but their secret selves, their faces are all hidden and masked from the world and yet are revealed as some kind of phantasm by the application of dripping paint in contrast to the way they are painted which is soft and dreamy. With the application of dripping paint into what were previously glossy magazine pages, the paintings meld into this mutable world where the act of remembering is both truth and fiction or somewhere in between.”

*All quotations from Yasmin Sison are from conversations with the artist on 16 September, 2008.

Adeline Ooi
Kuala Lumpur, September 2008