Flesh and Spirit

Throughout time, the very crux of the human condition has been the struggle between the desires of the flesh and matters of the spirit. This tension between the corporeal and the metaphysical has been a constant preoccupation of cultures, philosophers, and religions: how does one reconcile one’s embodied experience of the world — with all its attendant pleasures and travails — with our aspirations towards the transcendental and the divine? 

Flesh and Spirit is a meditation on how we negotiate our place between these realms. The selection of artworks circles the arc of human experience and emotion, starting with the intimations of birth and the beginning of primordial time, to encompass ideas around survival and sacrifice, faith and ideals. Other artworks suggest the illusory nature of our constructed realities, and prompt a reckoning with the self and ego. Yet others plumb the depths of the human psyche, and hint at elemental forces too great to be contained by rational enquiry, gesturing towards other means of apprehending the world and our place within it.

Last but not least, a passage of works suggests that the transcendental, to which we aspire, is not entirely separate from our embodied reality; rather, it manifests itself in familiar or natural phenomena, offering us a fleeting glimpse of a threshold where we may briefly reach towards or apprehend the sublime.

Enjoy the exhibition catalogue here.

Flesh and Spirit was featured in the Singapore Tyler Print Institute’s S.E.A. Focus programme in February 2021, which featured an exclusive online tour.

Or read Plural Art Mag’s feature of the show and its story.