We spoke to Malaysian contemporary artist Ivan Lam about his exhibition at Wei-Ling Contemporary, ‘THE SOIL ON WHICH I BLEED’. The exhibition is on view until the 25th of April 2021.
In this exhibition, the artist presents three main oeuvres through which he collapses the boundaries between two contexts – his country and himself – raising fundamental questions that encourage us to reflect on what it means to be a citizen of a nation. Throughout the global pandemic, we have inevitably witnessed the fall of our healthcare systems, economy and government, yet as citizens, we are often placed at the periphery, acting merely as observers. As a master of dualities and dichotomies, both tension and harmony are equally embedded into Ivan Lam’s paintings, through the subject matter and compositions adopted.
