Goddess of Mercy

Goddess of Mercy
By Alecia Neo with Clarence Chung
Wednesday 15 – Sunday 26 February 2012, 11am-7pm
The Substation Gallery
Admission: Free
This is an InHouse Event 

Two families. Four faiths. Visual artist Alecia Neo and sound artist Clarence Chung bring forth an art installation about love and faith, and how each needs the other in order to survive.

In a huge rustic house in upper Bukit Timah lives Tan Ying Hsien and his mother Dr Nalla Tan. Nalla suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and her condition has deteriorated to the point whereby she is a stranger even to herself. While Dr Tan was an active member of church, her youngest son Ying Hsien calls himself agnostic, and unconvinced about life after death. In a shophouse unit in Queenstown lives the Neo family. Filled with books about Buddhism and cooking, it reveals Mdm Tay Siew Hwa’s areas of specialties. After being diagnosed with breast cancer, she devotes more time to self-study about her religion and life after death, while undergoing chemotherapy. Her oldest son Alex Neo, builds his own shrine of beliefs with religious pendants and symbols from Thailand.

Guests are invited to participate and witness rituals of healing. Photography and soundscape installations will evoke the range of emotions experienced by the mothers (Alzheimer’s sufferer and Cancer patient) in trying to reach out emotionally to their sons, as well as the abstract phenomena of how religion functions.

This exhibition is part of the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2012: Art and Faith.

Alecia Neo

With a great love for people and cultures, Alecia Neo‘s work is often about common human experiences of alienation and loneliness,dislocation and belonging, and the search for self. Having recently embarked on a series of documentary projects in Singapore, she is enthralled by the process of getting to know her immediate surroundings and the nucleus which she operates from.

Her latest body of work, Home Visits has received a Honorable Mention in the 2009 Berenice Abbott Prize by juror Tim B. Wride, Curator of the Department of Photographs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The series was selected for the 2nd Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF), in 2010. It was first exhibited in whole, in the first annual Singapore Survey show at Valentine Willie Fine Art Gallery, in 2009.

Portraiture has become the main focus of her art work. She has also been recently selected as 1 of 5 mentees of renowned NYC based photographer John Clang for his 2011 mentorship programme.

Clarence Chung

Paid to perform for the first time in 2006 at the tender age of 19, Clarence has been performing professionally ever since. Today, he entertains as resident musician at RedDot Brewhouse at Dempsey Road. In 2010, Clarence found an interest in contemporary sound design and post-modern composition and hence began to take on freelance motion picture projects that require the manipulation of sound effects and music to create emotive and abstract commentaries.

For more information visit www.singaporefringe.com