Maybe we read too much into things brings together six young Singaporean artists, Aki Hassan, Daniel Chong, Kevin Fee, Genevieve Leong, Leow Wei Li and Ryan Benjamin Lee, whose practices explore the materialities of everyday objects. Curated by Berny Tan, the exhibition spans sculpture, installation, video, animation, and painting, showcasing diverse art practices that possess a fascination with the familiar, and its potential for transformation.

Through diverse approaches to assemblage, everyday objects become not just symbols for ideas, but mediums to be played with, manipulated, and reconfigured, in ways that establish a new visual language of objects. Yet, the six artists do not necessarily speak a common tongue. Instead, each creates their own ‘dialect’, built out of a vocabulary of the mundane: a biscuit, a clothes peg, an earplug, a flower, a sponge, the handle of a screwdriver—speaking to each other within and across works. What we assume to be ‘known’ is, in fact, something that can still be subjected to repeated close reading, generating new interpretations and constructions each time. Maybe we read too much into things—or maybe they are worth our time, attention, care, and curiosity.

Genevieve Leong, Untitled, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.