Singapore-born artist Desmond Mah explores the themes of strangeness and alienation from his position of cultural hybridity and fluid identity using monstrous forms and expressive body fragments. The artist whose works are currently on at the Spectrum Project Space makes clever use of a DIY (Do-It-Yourself) approach to create his artworks. Experimenting with his painting technique and intersecting new media and technology to define his visions of the body, the experimental and painstaking technique creates hybrid forms that borrow from the elements of both painting and sculpture, eliminating themselves from traditional painting surfaces. These resulting forms provide flexibility to the ways of exhibiting them. “The strange bodies are purposefully ‘frankenstein-ed’ by injecting technology e.g., mechanisms, sounds and sensors, reflecting the influence of the digital age,” says Mah who also brings to surface, these memory texts and images, unveiling his arcane and complex worlds of hybridity and anxiety. “I view the body and cultural identity as “DIY kits” that I can adopt and modify to better mirror my evolving sense of self. Consequently, the body becomes independent, self-published, self-made and self-distributed, away from a fixed mould,” he explains.
