“Closed During Opening Hours” recasts works from past series with new pieces. Several low wedges, or ramps, served as plinths for paintings excerpted from “Edge Control” (2016–18), a series of predominantly black-and-white diagrammatic and grid-like graphics, some on shaped canvases. A few of these contrasty paintings hang at floor-level, bottom edges even with the gallery’s floating walls, where they manage to insinuate vague trompe l’oeil fissures and portals. The simple ramp structures appear to exhibit texture and depth: through the glint of glass, we perceive shiny white tile, asphalt, gravel, stone and steel. In reality, however, they are composed of plywood, rubber and digital imagery of asphalt and steel, though the tile and gravel are genuine—a canny mix of authenticity and analogy. Two heavy-looking architectural forms rise above floor level: an unoccupied table and chair, ostensibly for a “visitor service officer,” and an open-work stepped fragment (plywood; not, as one might think at first glance, stone). Overhead lights create twinned reflections on the glossy plane of floor, and the eye happily accepts the notion of half-submerged sculptural anatomies.

Easy to overlook, a modest projector launches video imagery through the glass beyond the gallery, as Chua moors the impenetrable exhibit space to a busy outer atrium. The interior gallery-scape seems static; but the outer wall next to it pulses with the artist’s playful video of animated GIFs—larded with contradictory aphorisms à la neo-conceptualist Jenny Holzer (“all apologies are performative”; “a drone in the hand is better than two in the bush”). The video’s colors reflect on the gallery glass and then refract unexpectedly inside the exhibit space, where they dance and shimmer across an interior pillar. 

Genevieve Chua’s “Closed During Opening Hours” is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore until May 3, 2019.

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