7 June - 22 June 2025
Containment — Field
Curated by Lim Sheau Yun
Presented by The Back Room
80a Jalan Rotan, Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuanm Kuala Lumpur, 50460 Malaysia
(Left) A Fold in the Room, 2024, Inkjet print on fine art paper, 350 x 331 mm. (Right) Blue Ice II, 2023, Inkjet print on fine art paper, 245 x 290 mm.
Photography by Philip, courtesy of The Back Room.
Containment ———— Field brings together two print artists, Amanda Gayle (MY) and Liu Liling (SG) in an exhibition curated by Lim Sheau Yun. The title of the exhibition names one of many dyads that animate the work of these artists. One might think of each work in the exhibition as a container, an enclosed site of intent. A field, conversely, suggests openness, dispersal, and relationality, mapping between and outside the works. The field is where edges dissolve, where containment is tested, strained, or made porous.
Together, the two terms speak to the condition of print in their practices: at once bounded by substrate and process yet always threatening to exceed them. Between the controlled gesture and the accidental mark, Gayle and Liu chart a space in which print is not only image but event: a negotiation between matter, machine, and time
Curatorial Essay by Lim Sheau Yun, published on Art & Market
(Left) Installation view of 'Containment — Field' at The Back Room, 2025. (Right) Innerbloom, 2025, Inkjet print, 318 x 234 x 32 mm (framed).
Liu’s practice extends the timescale of the photographic instant. Her work begins with a photograph, which is taken in the seconds the shutter allows light to pass. It is through the printing and scanning process that Liu manipulates these photographs. Using the scanner as a tool for productive mistranslations, she employs repetitive scanning and re-scanning to create variations of an image.
(Left) Dreamwalker, 2024, Inkjet print on fine art paper, 635 x 455 x 30 mm (framed)
A fine-art inkjet printer also becomes a compositional agent, used to create sudden interruptions and accumulative overprints with careful stops and starts of the machine. It is an exercise in control, in equal measure both about compressing the space of the print and gesturing toward its expansive possibilities. Liu’s works in Containment ———— Field, made from 2019 to 2025, form a series of interrogations about the line. In what ways can a line bleed? Can a two-dimensional line contain three-dimensional volume? Can it disappear?
(Left) Black Cliff, 2019, Inkjet print on fine art paper, 760 x 537 mm. (Right) The Forest, 2025, Inkjet print, 270 x 333 x 35 mm (framed).
Meanwhile, Gayle’s temporal concerns fluctuate between the infinite time of contemporary media and the primordial time of the geological. In Containment ———— Field, Gayle presents a series of works concerned with the materiality and metaphor of rocks. Rocks, with their slow accumulation of material over millennia, become analogues for her own practice, where found images from magazines, digital scans of rocks, hand-scans from a hand-held scanner, and incidental marks, such as those etched over years into her cutting mat, are metabolised into collages. Horizontal striations made through the lateral movements of print and scan beds echo sedimentary layers. The vignette of a rock becomes a compositional container, an irregular ovoid serving as an intimation of early photographic circular daguerreotypes. A trawler of media ad infinitum, Gayle sifts through visual debris to produce works that index both deep time and our contemporary condition of image saturation.
