The artist’s latest exhibition, Sitting on the fence, exudes a scrappy and DIY energy
A serene sort of ambivalence is explored in Genevieve Leong’s solo exhibition, which brings together recent delicate and pastel-toned sculptures, installations and writings. Often comprising items being precariously stacked and balanced, or wiggly shapes that seem like they are morphing from one state to another, the works celebrate a hazy zone in which the meanings of things remain inchoate and inconclusive.
Leong works with both found objects and sculptures, often combining them into assemblages that are oblique in meaning, but childlike and playful in form. Scattered around the gallery, for example, are works from the series Surfaces of rest (2024–25), which are repurposed subway hand straps, the trapezoid frames of which hold colourful amoebalike forms that Leong made from polymer. It’s easy to like these fey and cutesy, albeit slight, creations, but the show mines a richer seam when the combinations of found and made objects perform more dynamic and pointed balancing acts, whether in terms of form or meaning. This can be seen in Comfort is confusing (2025), a series of assemblages that generate a tension between soft and hard, structured and free-flowing. Leong’s strategy is to contrast an existing ‘harder’ geometric frame of a found object, such as wall-mounted metal brackets or railings, with original sculptures that have more sinuous shapes; so that the latter reads to me like a visualisation of the liberation of the subdued energy latent in the original object. One work features the pink legs of a stacking stool (without the seat) and a long, snaking sculpture coming out of its centre, resembling a squiggly worm escaping skywards; another comprises a cream-coloured bathroom grab-bar installed vertically on the wall, and next to it, a wavier, more colourful version of the same, with one end detached and floating free.
If, seen on their own, Leong’s small sculptures generate quirky but pleasing harmonies, for her largest installation, The sensation of floating (2025), she creates more complex music by sending many little assemblages drifting around a shallow three-by-three-metre pool. These ‘rafts’ are constructed from humble disposable materials: sponges, rectangular plastic paint-palettes, rolled-up foam wrapping, with a plastic spoon as an oar and an egg as a passenger, and so on. The work exudes a scrappy and DIY energy, and the movement of these lightweight, makeshift arrangements – wandering aimlessly within a little jail – both charmed and saddened me at the same time.
Leong also works with language to further her investigation into states of indeterminacy. Printed on two walls, for example, are various pairings of similar-sounding words, such as ‘humour’ and ‘hummus’, ‘melancholic’ and ‘metabolic’, half-rhymes that generate gentle associative ripples. A series called Dilemma Paintings (2025) are irregularly shaped grey ceramic plates, hung on the wall, carved repeatedly with the letters ‘Y’ for yes and ‘N’ for no, literally conveying the state of pinging between two poles. There are also four chap-books for sale, with titles such as ‘a pocket dictionary of hesitation’, where quirky explanations are given to common words. In the catalogue is printed a poem by the artist titled Windowsill (2025). ‘I revel in the occasional breath/ that has yet to be translated into language/ an interval/ where an imaginary margin is drawn/ between the nest and the wilderness,/ permanence and transience…’ I’m on the fence about the inclusion of these text works. They are arguably complementary to her art practice, but seen as a whole with the exhibition, the texts run the risk of over-narration, and in a show all about latent and potential meanings, there is a case for the beauty of things left unsaid.
Sitting on the fence at Starch, Singapore, 31 May – 29 June
From the Autumn 2025 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
Read next: On a tour of Singapore’s seasonal gallery offerings, Adeline Chia recounts the dreamscapes and hollow-eyed monkeys she spotted along the way
