A Singapore Ceramic Artist Experimenting With Mysticism, Functionality And Deliberate Ornamentation
Young rising Singapore artist Shayne Phua's beautiful ceramic works upends traditional notions of functionality and design "purity".
Shayne Phua Shi Ying’s debut solo show at Coda Culture gallery last October was titled Sehnsucht, a German expression that roughly translates to a deep feeling of yearning or missing someone or something, coupled with a desire for alternative experiences. Traces of such nostalgia can be found throughout her work.
For example, her sculptures are formed using vintage moulds – the kind used to make pastries. Collecting them remind her of her grandmother who brought her up, says the 23-year-old.
Shayne Phua Shi Ying
They also often sport Chinese symbolism as a nod to her family, who practises Taoism and Buddhism. “As we move towards science, logic and reason and cast spirituality aside, we run the risk of losing the wisdom of traditional practices,” she says. "Mysticism in moderation can teach us humility.”
The final-year student from the Glasgow School of Art certainly fits right into the Slow Movement camp. Each of her pieces can take over a month to complete and calls for up to three rounds of firing – all to create their lustrous hues and whimsical shapes and details that are her way of reacting against the minimalism trend.
Pictured above: Her 2018 sculpture U+1F595 Talisman, which was inspired by the folklore of the ancient skilled exorcist, Shi Gan Dang, from Tai Shan Mountain in Shandong, China.
To think her earliest works were mostly in black and white. Of this phase, Phua says: “Most of the objects I encounter every day are quite flat, clean, machine-made and devoid of excessive colour, and that subconsciously influenced my idea of beauty – that beauty meant something pure.”
Her evolution since has only proven that wrong: Most of her works from the Coda show sold out and Phua recently took part in a group show at Grafunkt at Funan Mall as part of the recent Singapore Art Week.
Below, a condensed interview with the artist.
"I would say the use of pastries produced by the antique moulds I’ve collected. I started appropriating from the pastry mould because the medium I deal with – clay and gypsum plasters – allow me to capture shapes of objects to replicate.
My first few moulds were from (bakeware store) Red Man. Later I found out that there are so many other types of mould in antique shops. That got my excitement to collect and also reinvent their functions. Now I have three boxes of wooden moulds, collected from different antique shops in Singapore and from overseas through eBay and Etsy. I also went on to collect brass stampings to incorporate their form in my works. Through collecting, I learn about the symbols and meanings carved on the moulds.
So it started out from the interest in the texture and form, to realising I’ve never questioned the meanings behind the shapes and icons on the pastries I’ve been eating since young. Now I’m playing with all these different moulds made by different unknown folk craftsmen, to see how these casted pastries can help to construct new meanings and forms and to retell or tell stories.
The combination of different style of carvings in a piece of work itself is fascinating enough for me. Sometimes I even make these casted pastries into functional parts of vessels-like as a lid or a handle."
"However, I think it’s important to not conform to a certain style or look, even if it helps to create a strong identity for the artist. I feel that is too constructed and unnatural – to think too much about branding your work and yourself, compartmentalising for easy identification; very much a capitalistic way of thinking. Hence, as much as I witness similarities in some of the works I do, I don’t wish to pigeonhole my practice.
I’m not quite keen on making myself and my practice, in general, to be distinctive and describable, though that might really save me trouble, coming to terms with commerciality and being known. I think every individual piece could be very distinctive from any other pieces if I don’t restrict to forging an identity.
Most recently, I started playing with more text on my pieces, with various methods. I’m all for variability, flexibility and plurality. I don’t want to be bored with what I’m doing. I believe people contain multitudes, inconsistency should not be stigmatised, at least not in art-making. It’s more human that way, to me."
"Visits to history museums inspire me the most. I suppose when you work with a medium with a history dating back to prehistoric time, you will be drawn to history museums with their magnificent artefacts. Ceramics withstand the test of time, surviving thousands of years and provide insights into past cultures – isn’t that fascinating?
Some of the utilitarian objects displayed in museum glass display boxes, with their purpose of existing now for us to examine instead of utilizing its original function, leads me to imagine how they originally functioned. How do they work? How does each part of the form contribute to the function? Why are they made in this certain shape?"
"Recently, while researching for an essay assignment, I learned about an art movement called Patterns & Decoration, an American art movement in the '70s. A movement as a reaction to minimalism and conceptualism and also a movement with close relation to feminist art movements. There are some revivals of the movement or at least with a close relation to it, from the exhibitions Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975-1985 and Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design.
I found that their philosophy is quite closely related to mine, and it helps me to understand the effects of modernist ethos of ‘purity’ and ‘ornament as trivial and undesirable’, which in my opinion, still dominates our current period. I feel that the fear of decoration and ornaments in art and design is unnecessary, thus this movement is quite empowering for me.
I feared of my works being too decorative and colourful at the beginning of my practice as well; my early pieces are either in white or black. I believe it is due to the fact that most of the objects I encounter every day are quite flat, clean, machine-made and devoid of excessive colours. I think it subconsciously affects me on the idea of beauty – that perhaps, only such purity is beauty.
This is unlike the modernist period where the functionalist associate ornaments to bourgeois, hence the need to cast out ornaments. I do in fact like the functionalist idea of form following function, so that inspires my works as well. The forms created for functional purpose, they are sometimes just as beautiful as ornaments. I enjoy examining functional objects and toying with the idea of functionality in my works. I want both; anything and everything. So really, why should I bother with consistency?"
"Collecting wooden moulds helps to relate me back to my grandmother, her stories and my childhood as I was brought up by my maternal grandmother. Though my grandma said she’s a Buddhist instead of Taoist, I thought that her practices are strongly a Taoist one.
Taoism and Buddhism are quite interrelated in Singapore and perhaps the same in some other parts of the world. My parents practise them as well, adding on with feng shui, so these beliefs have been a huge part of my life.
It shapes the way I understand life, death, afterlife and supernatural. I believe in keeping a good balance of both science and mysticism, because either in extreme is equally bad. As we move towards science, logic, reason, casting spirituality and traditions aside as unintelligent, we are running the risk of losing the wisdom of traditional practices. Globalisation and its excessive cultural homogenisation tend to dominate the culture and narratives of a few groups of people.
Looking at where we are now – filled with uncertainties of future, progressiveness should not only be about science and technology. Moving forward, I believe unlearning implicit biases is the key. I feel that I am lacking in cultural awareness, even my own cultural roots, as much I was brought up in a fully Chinese-speaking family.
Then again I’m not that great with the Chinese language, I am neither here nor there. Hence, through some of the works, I am bringing Chinese symbols, words and their homonyms to focus. Mysticism and spirituality in moderation can teach us humility. I am learning as I go along."
A version of this article first appeared in the January/February 2021 Art & Music edition of FEMALE