Koh Kai Ting’s practice focuses on exploring the narratives of power and its flow. Excerpts from online news, memes, historical facts, cult films, and fetish gossip are just a few of Koh’s inspirations. Imagination plays a huge role in manipulating and incorporating this information into her work.
Gundam Crab
2022
acrylic on polyester mesh, mounted on acrylic board
63 x 50 cm
Koh’s fresh body of work draws from her year-long residency at Pulau Ketam, using both maritime motifs and lustrous colour palettes found around in the locals’ gear, boats, and houses.
Gethsemane
2022
acrylic on polyester mesh, mounted on acrylic board
61.5 x 52 cm
Private Collection
Representing a place of uncertainty and unrest, Gethsemane takes after the name of the garden where Jesus held his last prayer before the Crucifixion. The crabs in the painting seem almost like deities fighting among themselves, caught in a situation that is fraught and unsettling.
Rather than a reflection of Koh’s personal faith or a connection to the Christian faith, Gethsemane was actually inspired by Rick Owen’s FW21 collection of the same name—a subtle nod, not to the religious context, but the sense of disquiet embodied in that garden, the uncertain now and the hopes of a reckoning.
猥琐果冻 (Salacious Jelly)
2022
acrylic on polyester mesh, mounted on acrylic board
64.5 x 51.5 cm
Sea slugs are a form of sea creature that are predominantly hermaphrodite, able to switch between sexual roles within their lifespan. Through their depictions in 猥琐果冻 (Salacious Jelly), Koh contemplates the idea of sexuality in the natural world, and its oppression in human society.
Ribbon Eel
2022
acrylic on polyester mesh, mounted on board
102 x 102 cm
The painting Ribbon Eel could possibly comment on gender fluidity. It evokes the double image of Caduceus, the snake rod of the Greek god of healing. The eel coils in a convoluted figure eight that obscures its start and end. At this stage of its growth, the ribbon eel has a medical blue colour, which is rare in natural flora and fauna. Much like the androgynous Greek gods and non-gendered shamans, eels and jellyfishes are sequential hermaphrodites, which are common in many sea creatures. The eel’s jet black and yellow shades indicate that it grew into a male and will eventually take on a yellow female form.
Eunice Lacaste, Pasang Surut: Ebb of Memes
Cosmic Dance – Metamorphosis 01
2021
acrylic and watercolour on polyester mesh
66 x 53.5 cm
Koh was inspired by the dancing Shiva Statue in CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) to create the Cosmic Dance series, which plays on the concept of resilience.
CERN is a European research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. One of the largest projects in CERN is the Large Hadron Collider discovering the “Higgs Boson”, known as the god’s particle, which is supposedly the origin of the Big Bang, or the birth of the universe. There is an underground facility that is working on finding the god’s particle, operating between the borders of Switzerland and France.
The appearance of a Hindu deity in a European research centre might seem strange at first, but Shiva is widely known as the god of destruction in Hindu mythology, and his dance symbolises the cosmic cycle of creation and destruction. This deity was displayed in CERN because of the parallels drawn between the cosmic dance of the Shiva and CERN’s modern study of the subatomic particles’ ‘cosmic dance’.
Cosmic Dance – Metamorphosis 01
2021
acrylic and watercolour on polyester mesh
66 x 53.5 cm
The Cosmic Dance Series contains visual elements that refer to this cosmic cycle, featuring rope-bound crustaceans with snake skin patterns outlining the borders.
Koh was inspired to paint crabs and crustaceans as crabs have a very strong regenerative ability, with the capacity to regrow their lost limbs and shed their old shells when they reach a certain growth. Crustaceans are also dubbed to have biological immortality, because their cells divide with negligible aging.
The snake skin border is a reference to Vāsuki, the snake that coils around Shiva’s neck and upper arm. Snakes are symbolic of reincarnation in the Hindu belief. Their natural process of moulting is symbolic of the human souls’ transmigration of bodies from one life to another.
Both the snake and the crab’s nature resonates with the idea of birth and destruction, in order to grow, they must first shed off the old self. This highlights destruction as the beginnings of new life.
The Corpus of Symptoms
2022
acrylic and watercolour on polyester mesh
90 x 90 cm
Floating World – Till Love Do Us Apart
2022
acrylic and watercolour on polyester mesh, mounted on wooden panel
44.5 x 65 cm
Yet some works are monochromatic. The paintings Gluttony, Floating World, Till Love Do Us Apart, and the Corpus of Symptoms are a handful of lacerated delicacies. To reproduce, some species of fish use all their energy to return to upstream breeding grounds. After spawning, they become a sea of grey zombies and eventually die. Their rotting flesh floats along for other animals to feed on, or they decompose to become nutrients for the riverbed. Both Floating World and the Corpus of Symptoms balance each other in this continuous circle of life energy, despite the desaturation.
Eunice Lacaste, Pasang Surut: Ebb of Memes
Gluttony
2022
acrylic on polyester mesh, mounted on acrylic board
51 x 64 cm
Gluttony explores one of the seven deadly sins. Rather than the primitive instinct of hunger towards food, Koh references the greed for power. The inflated stomach of the fish represents this dilemma of endless gluttony; swollen with greed, the fish is no longer able to swim or float.
Luminary 01
2021
acrylic and spray paint on polyester mesh
66 x 55 cm
The word ‘luminary’ could be understood as giving off light, however, the luminescent backgrounds of these works were inspired by the idea of chemical spills and the uncertainty of our turbulent world.
Carnal Desire
2021
acrylic and spray paint on polyester mesh
66 x 55 cm
With fluorescent paint, Koh captures both the noxious glow of pollution and the beauty of the deep sea.
Luminary 02
2021
acrylic and spray paint on polyester mesh
66 x 55 cm