Yavuz Fine Art Gallery, Singapore

Identity and estrangement are the watchwords guiding the selection of Navin Rawanchaikul’s works exhibited at this year’s Art Stage. Of Indian ethnicity but born in Thailand and raised in Thailand and Japan, Navin’s struggle with identity and its attendant pole of foreignness is rendered distinctly and light-heartedly in Navin’s magnum opus, Navinland.

Conceived as a “borderless community”, the Navinland series of works explores the concrete issues of citizenship and nationhood to mine the depths of the deeper themes of duality and dislocation, and to arrive at a resolution between the two. Art Stage is the literal staging area for Navin’s metaphysical experiment.

The Navinland project is the site through which Navin negotiates the disparate facts of ethnicity and nationality to arrive at fundamentally temporal state of definitive identity. Navin’s modus operandi is tongue-in-cheek, subversive and self-reflexive. By inserting himself into immortalized moments of history and popular culture, Navin usurps the ideological significance of the original images and reinscribes them with his own concern, his identity. This is evident in a reinterpretation of the seminal painting by the French artist Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps which features Navin himself on a horse, adopting the iconic pose depicted by Jacques-Louis David amid the backdrop of a snowy mountainous range. Another reinscribed image that beamingly greets visitors at Art Stage is Navin adopting the characteristic Uncle Sam pose and gesture, captioned by the parodied lines, “Navinland needs you!”

The unifying thrust of Navinland is clear in a massive painting that Navin undertook specially for Art Stage, Navinland Needs You: We are Asia! This 250 x 1260 cm work features the painted likenesses of the personalities involved in the production and business of Asian art. It is one of the largest and most captivating works on display at Art Stage and a veritable feast for the eyes. Navin sees this work a means to garner greater esteem and recognition for his “borderless community”.

Navin’s struggle with his identity is indicative of the very philosophy of the gallery exhibiting his work at Art Stage, Yavuz Fine Art. Gallery owner Can Yavuz affirms that Yavuz Fine Art exists to allow for “artists who have a story to tell” to express themselves in ways that are surprising and which expand the viewer’s understanding of issues to depths that are “beyond the surface”.

Indeed, the appreciation of Navin’s art and those of the other artists featured at Yavuz Fine Art has seen a steady increase over the years. Can opines that the gallery’s central location just behind the Singapore Art Museum and the interest and funding channeled to art by the Singapore government has led to more members of the public walking into the gallery to study and appreciate the works.

Of Art Stage, Can had nothing but praise. He lauded the organizers for doing a “tremendous job” in featuring “very good galleries” from all around the region. Not just for Navinland, then, but for Art as a whole, is Art Stage, in Can’s words, a “very important fair”.

- by Indran P.