Skull

Born in Singapore, Ian Woo (1967) graduated from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1991 and furthered his studies in England and Australia. In 2006, he received his doctorate degree from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Woo has held five solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions in Singapore and internationally, and is the recipient of a number of awards, including Juror's Choice, Philip Morris Group of Companies ASEAN Art Awards (2000) and Category Winner of the Abstract Medium, The 18th UOB Painting of the Year Art Competition in 1999. Woo's paintings often evoke a sense of spontaneity and immediacy, heighten by his seemingly accidental drips of paint. Woo re-examines the dynamics of representation with his brushworks, fluctuating between representation and abstraction, keeping his subject in a state of flux. In 'Skull', he moves away from his usual colour scheme of painting a series of strongly coloured images on a light-coloured background to placing clusters of painted forms on a solemn black background. Here, decaying flowers and other objects melt into one another, suggesting that it is a still life representation while its composition suggests a landscape of a colourful island, located in the mysterious black sea.