The agnostic wonders: Can we comprehend the existence of “god”? The atheist asks: Does such a power even exist? Artist and sceptic Toh Hun Ping, driven in part by midlife soul-searching, meditates on these and other existential dilemmas in his multimedia installation, Dance of a Humble Atheist (2019), which comprises several hundred ceramic “tiles,” an expository three-channel video and an immersive 17-minute film. Displayed at the Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film’s Chapel Gallery in an exhibition of the same title, Dance of a Humble Atheist is Toh’s conceptual allegory on belief, death and a possible afterlife, with a quick squint at consciousness, abstraction and aesthetics. His exuberant primordial soup of a video work churns with images that are agitating and alien—yet they hint at the infinitely familiar.  

Toh is a Singaporean educator, researcher and experimental filmmaker. His innovative films include, most notably, Covets of an Outsider, a compilation of short works that appeared in the 2016 Singapore International Film Festival. These involved the artist’s direct manipulation of film itself as a kind of “proto-medium” where he abraded and tinted emulsion, and distorted processing and exposure. The resulting filmic compositions were unmediated blasts of pictorial abstraction, from which Dance has evolved. 

For his new project, rather than scratch or etch directly on film, Toh created filmic avatars in clay and then scanned these components one by one, editing the images to render ferocious swells of stop-motion animated pattern and movement. The use of clay in stop-motion film might conjure up malleable “claymation” figures, but the visual underpinnings of Dance are founded in 600 unique handmade “film-frames” that were each inscribed with fissures, apertures and intricate matrices before being glazed and fired. Each design, if that is the right word, seems deceptively unintentional and organic. At Objectifs, Toh’s ceramic “frames” were laid out on lightboxes in the darkened gallery. Arrayed in rows against the light, they resemble ribbons of film. Visitors were encouraged to handle the thin rectangular shards, which have the heft of vintage glass negatives. Three nearby video screens presented animated sequences of their patterns, in an attempt to deconstruct how these sculptural “frames” function as the elements, which, through stop-motion and our own persistence of vision, convey Toh’s abstractive film.

The final Dance video unfolds in a three-part “narrative.” The first segment is titled “Funeral,” which assails the eye with underexposed, melancholic topographies and static that unravel into something resembling atoms, or galaxies. Then comes the gratifying “Cornucopia,” with compositions that first insinuate white light and tunnels: these mutate into radiant configurations that suggest mitosis, and which then flower into translucent, pulsating honeycomb-motifs. Geometric devices stagger out of this deluge in graceful intimations of a primordial awareness. Finally, there is "Phosphorus,” where kaleidoscopic light-patterns transmigrate into lucid (presumably rational and skeptical) cohesion. The Chapel Gallery space, a deconsecrated church, lent a gentle irony to this gorgeous metaphysical imagery.