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Sun in ’D’E’M at PrayPal




PrayPal - Installation View at I_S_L_A_N_D_S Peninsular
2020


PrayPal is a group show curated by Pure Ever (Rifqi Amirul Rosli, Zhiyi Cao, Raigo Law, Elsa Wong, and Hilary Yeo) in collaboration with I_S_L_A_N_D_S.

PrayPal speaks to the significance of the occult as a medium that drives legitimate, self evolving narratives of being. One that takes the processes out of a distinctly human project, and confounds it with the weird and the eerie – both as a mode of affect, as well as a mode of science. It serves as a doorway, with an affective pull towards matters of being that demand attention by colliding it with the anomalous. Where the sphere of the occult is a medium for understanding the threshold between physicality and spirituality, the conscious and unconscious, the human and non-human, it is there too that we might find that we are not bound within singularity. But rather, this threshold illuminates the true nature of our contemporary social experiences, and reveals our relationship to our state as neoliberal subjects through manner and matter of ghosts, orbs, hauntings, spectres, plasma, spirits, gods, demons etc. And for those who have long understood the multiplicities of being, PrayPal is perhaps a haunted ontology – a hauntology – and it speaks to our humanity; to the elements of intangible oppression and suffering, and to the desires and wants that do not and cannot be sustained in reality.








Sun in ’M
Acrylic on Canvas Paper



Sun in ’D
Acrylic on Canvas Paper


Sun in ’E
Acrylic on Canvas Paper



Sun in ’D’E’M 
Paintings on the Wall

Presented at PrayPal, a collaboration between Pure Ever and I_S_L_A_N_D_S
B1-07B, Excelsior Shopping Centre


Sun In ‘D’E’M is a sustained inquiry into the co-figurehead of Singapore’s most notorious Pop Church, Sun Ho/Sun Geisha/Ho Yeow Sun. Where narratives are outfitted and speculations are abound, the church’s transpacific pop-evangelising project serves as a fertile directive for the creation of the symbol of ‘believe’ and ‘legitimacy’, which even eventual prosecution wasn’t able to shake. My interest in Sun stems from a desire to understand her becoming into such a figure through a Singaporean socio-cultural and aesthetic lens, the mural paintings my attempt to work through (visually) the multiple states of being of Sun.
Mark