[01] Mnemonic, Falling Inflection 4, by Genevieve Chua

“Paintings by Genevieve Chua are filled with references to things that happen in the real world. Perhaps they are happening in slow motion, or have a completely different sense of time. They slide along the surfaces of the paintings and fall off the edges and onto our minds.”

• “Future Greats: Genevieve Chua” by artist Heman Chong, ArtReview Asia

“Through muted, tonal colours, subtle mark-making, and custom canvas designs with jutting, bulging, and undulating edges, [Genevieve Chua] challenges the boundaries of the traditional canvas and the medium of painting to create works that exist somewhere between 2D and 3D; works that protrude into the gallery space, inviting viewers to engage [with them].”

• The Peak, Singapore

The Mnemonic series by Genevieve Chua unfolds as a visual score for speech and sound. Its modular width, height, and sliding profile trace a cadence across space. When extended across a wall, the work reads as a score for percussion—a mapping of rhythm and pause.

Mnemonic, Falling Inflection 4 evokes a speech pattern that dips with finality, a tonal descent that asserts closure, regardless of scale or subject.

Genevieve Chua shares:

“I studied linguistics in university… It left an impression on me because we had to listen to a lot of sound samples and speech samples of people. At that time, we were listening to a lot of Singlish and trying to validate that it is a language. One of the most basic things of Singaporean English is that there is a lot of staccato, in nuance and in the emphasis of some words. Singlish is quite interesting because of that. […] This work was specifically about language.” 

Within the series, the Mnemonic paintings articulate notations of rising and falling inflections, registering the subtle emotional contours of conversation—as though overheard, or here, overseen.

Biography:
Genevieve Chua (born 1984, Singapore) is a painter who works primarily through abstraction, with a multidisciplinary practice that spans many different mediums. She is currently based in London and Singapore. Chua employs a method of working that unfurls and reveals the painter’s process through diagram, palimpsest, syntax, and the glitch. While notions of nature and wilderness persist across several works, the form taken by their exhibitions – image, text or object – is disrupted through painting.

Genevieve has presented the work Artificially Intelligent in APT (Brisbane, 2021). Selected solo exhibitions include Wilful Machine (Singapore International Festival of Arts 2024); grrrraaanularrrrrrr (Singapore, 2023); Twofold (Singapore 2020); Moths (Hong Kong, 2015); Parabola (Singapore, 2014); Cicadas Cicadas (Los Angeles, 2014). They were conferred the Young Artist Award (2012) by the National Arts Council, Singapore and was a recipient of the National Arts Council Georgette Chen Scholarship (2003-2004).

Specifications:
– Year: 2016
– Medium: Acrylic and Screenprint with enamel on shaped canvases
– Dimensions: 36(H) x 24.5(W) x 4.5(D) cm