Charcoal Sketches of
Urban Transitional Spaces

ce2021

Essay

To Draw—Sketches by Tang Ling Nah   Quek Li-En


Drawing


A line drawn with charcoal is not a precise incision: a single stroke carves a swathe of tonalities depending on the strength exerted and the angle at which the fragment of charcoal is held. The series of studies and sketches exhibited here allows us to appreciate the act of drawing as both a tactile and emotional process—a translation of the artist’s thoughts into markings on paper.

Some sketches are bathed in a shimmering luminance and others retreat into deep shadow. Through adept employment of chiaroscuro, Tang Ling Nah brings out the intrinsic atmosphere of the spaces she studies. While there is a three-dimensional corporeality to most of the sketches, at times a monumental flatness overcomes parts of some drawings. By juxtaposing different dimensions, Ling Nah structures her composition, enlarges the boundaries of a drawing beyond a single point of reference and allows it to transit from one viewpoint to the next.

The viewpoints are carefully considered as evidenced by the many iterative sketches she has executed. Meanwhile, the viewer is not an external party to the work but an essential participant, whose perspective Ling Nah examines through the monochromatic world that she frames. Oftentimes, her final composition has several vanishing points, which offer multiple avenues through which to approach the work. These allow for an imaginative reading of her work and give the impression of a world strangely familiar yet quietly abstract.


City


The subject matter of the sketches comprises elements that are easily relatable to anyone living in an urban environment: repetitive doorways, long corridors, endlessly rising staircases. These spaces are part of the public realm which we give little thought to, but they are nonetheless integral to our collective experience of the city—the background upon which the drama of everyday life unfolds.

Ling Nah’s work constitutes a form of research, a study into the essential relationship between the city and ourselves. Walking the streets with a critical eye, Ling Nah dissects the city for what it actually is and not what it aspires to be. She analyses both its carefully ordered façade and its tangled mess of ad-hoc interventions. The lives of its inhabitants are not divorced from the attendant structures and the city is considered in its complex and contradictory whole.

Through painstaking and extensive documentation of transitional spaces in the city, Ling Nah amplifies their presence and captures their persistence in our everyday lives. The same escalator may be traversed by a thousand different people in a single day, where the vagaries of light and shadow are never the same. Ling Nah’s sketches capture these momentary fragments of time and become an investigative resource into the experience of the city, forcing us to reconsider the common spaces we thought we already knew.


Context


This exhibition highlights the drawing process which underpins Ling Nah’s work. However, it should be noted that her work spans a wide range of media including dance, performance art, film, site-specific installation and sculpture. Her sketches not only inform her charcoal drawings but are also conceptual studies into realising her work across various formats.

Many of Ling Nah’s works show a great sensitivity to scale, and she tests this out by overlapping numerous sketches on her studio walls. In site-specific installations like The World Outside, large-scale drawings envelop the viewer, and seats have been positioned strategically to punctuate the space and structure the viewpoint from which the audience sees the work. In An Other Space, a louvered window of the gallery becomes one of the focal points of the exhibition; the window lets in light depending on the time of day and the weather outside, which subtly modifies the atmosphere within the exhibition. Ling Nah does not treat a site as a blank canvas but actively engages with its material and contextual reality—sometimes rendering in charcoal the texture of the exhibition wall or traces left by previous users—to create an immersive experience.


Time


Ling Nah also studies the relationship between time and her work. In Drawing Parallel, she conceives of drawing as a verb—a movement through time—and collaborates with dancers to explore the potential of the human body to trace transient lines across a room lined on all sides with newspapers. In a reversal of the drawing process, the newspapers lining the walls and floor of the performance area are progressively disassembled to “erase” the drawing. Finally, all that material is rolled into a furious ball of paper and out of the room, leaving the audience in an empty space.

In her latest short film 2488, Ling Nah works with 360-degree cinematographer Lee Sze-Chin, film writer and editor Looi Wan Ping and animation producer Jerome Romulus Santhanam to further explore the notion of time. In this work, the cinematic and virtual reality experiences allow us to witness events in multiple timelines in a pre-set order. As a parallel to drawing, 2488 associates disparate moments in time with the creation of new perspectives. In evolving her practice, Ling Nah has continually reimagined what it means to draw, what it means to observe and what it means to dream.


26.04.2021

Writer's Biography

QUEK Li-En, an architect inspired by everyday life, currently practises in Singapore. He founded Quen Architects in 2016 to pursue the integration of art and architecture.