Richard Koh Fine Art is pleased to announce Faris Nakamura’s (b. 1988) solo exhibition in Singapore. Remember This Place, For We Will Be Back Here Again Someday is scheduled to run from 4 – 19 October 2019. The artist will present nine recent works in painted wood and mild steel.

Following his sold out show at SEA Focus, Faris Nakamura continues his inquiry of spaces in Singapore. Investigative, poignant and angled with a poetic scrutiny, the exhibition questions the privilege associated with the limited space we have in Singapore and its inevitable aftermath on the country’s architecture. The series draws the viewer in by coaxing alternate perspectives on viewing and questions about the psyche of space planning.

The hopeful connotation behind the title Remember This Place, For We Will Be Back Here Again Someday touches on the fraught attachment people pin to a place. With the rapid change in Singapore’s landscape, it becomes futile to claim any space as one’s own. Even so, we try to grasp at what a place once was for our emotional liberation. Revisiting a place can romanticize its notion, or be a jarring reminder of its past temporary comfort.

Each of the works have been aptly and poignantly titled to evoke a sense of yearning and loneliness in spite of their elegant, aloof nature. There are constant motifs of stairwells and suggestions of panels to maintain elusiveness in “The White Spaces in Between”, “The Dark Spaces in Between” and “Reminisce”. Nostalgia is a focal point in the artist’s rendition of these spaces, calling on different layers in his history such as the personal, the wider socio-economic environment and a certain political climate that anchors Nakamura’s present and continuing practice.

Upon further observation, tucked away corners in works such as “The Place In Which Everything Exists”, “In A Place of the Impalpable” and “Amid the Silence, Unquietly We Frolic” hint at a larger possibility for containment, secrecy and rumination. The detail of the corner is in the form of a subtle triangle at the edge of the doorways. With this, we see that the context of a space’s potential can be identifiable albeit overlooked. Nakamura prompts the viewer to dwell on these functions and examine our role in utilizing a space for what it can be, rather than what it is defined to be.

We see the artist’s conjuring of surfaces, angles and artful revealing in “Reminisce”, “If We Sit Here and Look Up, I wonder What Will We See?” and “If We Stand Here And Look Down, I wonder What Will We See?”. What are these spaces hiding? What will we discover when we choose to look another way? In accompaniment with prodding from the artist, we might find that the spaces enfolded in our awareness hold only what we can bear, rather than what they can fully offer.