작품 상세

Welcome to a woman’s inner space, a safe space which afford glimpses of her personality, character and habits, like the popular realtime social-media roomview popular among the young, and a new form of exhibitionism. Though this is a static one-clip voyeuristic view, it affords some touch points with the personified: a young woman sitting on her bed having an intimate distraction with her fav teddy-bear, while doing some work, presumably related to art / graphic design with the page print-out, a camera and a handphone in front of her. Outside, it’s sunny but maybe, it’s time to snuggle up with the cushion, or maybe, even give her beau a call or play hard-to-get and let him call instead. Such voyeuristic snaps of private moments of solitary woman wrapped in her own space are reminiscent of the works of Edward Hopper. This work was exhibited at the START Art Fair at Galeri Chandan, and at Saatchi Gallery in London in 2014. 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 Galerie 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 Fair 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 160cm