작품 상세

A nubile naked girl wandering in the open with the soft confetti showers of fern leaves overhead as the Biblical Eve personified, but more so with the onset of pubescent and all the dreams, secret fears and desires. It brings to mind a passage in Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal, on the ‘Lolita’ Consuela Castillo, “with her gorgeous D-cup breasts: round, full and perfect with a nipple like a saucer”… and “super-classically the fertile female of our mammalian species… caroming about with her eyes shut, off in a child’s game of her own.” Her legs are crossed awkwardly. Light shadows fall on her legs like fading tattoos. Being young is transient, and it’s great to savour Nature’s little gifts in the buff, aglow in soft pastel colours and light. This work was exhibited in the Being Human showcase by the f-klub at Art Stage Singapore in 2015. Chong Ai Lei started the trend of self-voyeurism, first using herself like a Cindy Sherman coquette play and later, a model. After graduating from the Dasein Academy of Art in 2005, she worked freelance as a graphic designer and then briefly, as a gallery assistant before going fulltime in 2010. Ironically, she was to have her first three solos overseas – PINK at Yogyakarta’s leading Sangkring Art Space (2013), then In The Room at Galerie Canna in Jakarta (2016) and in Hong Kong in 2017, before her first Malaysian solo, When I See You Again, at The EDGE Gallery in January 2018. She won the Malaysian Emerging Artists award in 2011 after being a finalist in 2009, and won Honorable Mentions in the Freeman Fellowship Asian Artists Programme in the United States in 2010 and 2011. Her international profile is astounding – Art Stage in Singapore (2015) and Jakarta (2016), START Art Fair in London (2014), Art Busan and Art Taipei (both in 2016), Affordable Art Singapore (2013), Kembara Jiwa (Bandung and Yogyakarta, 2012), Young Guns Singapore (2014) and Concurrence (Manila, 2014). Her auction record of the equivalent of RM34,843, was set at Christie’s Hong Kong in November 2013, for True Romances II. 220 x 180cm