The work of an artist is often viewed as a solitary activity. The recluse, the narcissist; these are stereotypes associated with personalities of the art world. In reality, of course, many artists work in collaboration with other creators and visionaries. Egos may clash but the consequences of such collisions can lead to limitless imaginative and aesthetic possibilities.

Chin Chai is a collaborative exhibition premised on a concept familiar to most: friendship. Sharon Chin and Lydia Chai met many years ago in art school, where their comradeship blossomed. Using this bond as a starting point, the two artists conceived of an artistic duet, initially laboured from afar - Chin in Malaysia and Chai in New Zealand. In the days leading up to the opening, they came together to construct their work within a specific site: 67 Jalan Tempinis Gallery.

The result is an elliptical aesthetic exchange that, strangely enough, underscores the unacknowledged gaps in friendship: the realisation that the space we give our friends to be who they are, is the same space that sets us apart. Chin and Chai's work echo and feed off each other but the minimalist installation space lacks the warmth one expects of close friends.

With its floor covered in striped blue and white tarpaulin, the gallery is a re-imagined oceanic topography, its capaciousness accentuated by the lack of large three-dimensional artworks. Underfoot are small, roughly constructed mechanical contraptions connected by twisting lines of wires; they fill the room with a perpetual buzz - aural interference in a sombre space. Their presence is shot through with uncharacteristic whimsy amidst a landscape of simulated natural quietude.

Although secured to flat surfaces, Chai's mini-machines are not static; battery attachments power their rotating kineticism, each unit spinning within its own orbit and emitting a unique rhythm. Some resemble miniature industrial machines with whirring fans and turbines, while others look curiously like oil rigs, their vertical motion akin to oil excavation. In the evening light, these machines throw delicate shadows, their cardboard discs like man-made moons on a tarp sky.

The moon motif surfaces often in the exhibition, most notably in Paper Moon, a large four-panelled work by Chin and a corresponding video by Chai, Moon Rising. The two works create an interesting dialectic of the imagined and the real. Using paper soaked in water from the Klang river, Chin creates a moonscape, complete with cracks and crevices caused by shrinkages in the paper during its drying process. In an accompanying booklet, various numbered markers on this grey terrain are named and given coordinates: 'Ocean of Storms', 'Bay of Rainbows', 'Serpent Sea', among others. These names speak of features invisible, and conjure up a new archaeology of viewing.

Moon Rising, alternatively, is evocative rather than provocative. In three minutes and three seconds, we watch the moon ascend on a cloudy night punctuated by rumblings of thunder. Contained within the visual rectangle of the television screen, the bluish orb appears rather unreal - a moviescape emptied of imperfections next to a paper moon filled with them.

Although Chai's video works lack conceptual coherence, her watercolours are lyrical explorations of a delicate, beautiful symmetry. Painted with the lightest tones of liquid colour, the three works exude a quiet grace that gels with Chin's wall works. Amorphous, ambiguous, organic shapes intertwine in a fluid, visual ballet. What surfaces in these inspired watercolours is the tension between union and separation.

In Pull I, the earth tone shapes resemble Siamese tadpoles with long, interlocking tailes that fuse and recoil, and in the process expose an opening at its centre. In Pull 2, femur-like shapes and malleable branches resemble visual arcs that curve in and our of a central mass. Finally, in Pull 3, fingerling tendrills are so intricately intertwined, it takes time for the viewer to realise that they are not connected. Such organic lines and natural shapes feature prominently in previous works by Chai and they serve as an intriguing counterpoint to her mechanical contraptions.

Motifs from Chin's previous works also recur in this exhibition. Moon River is the porcelain relation of an earlier piece exhibited at last year's 3 Young Contemporaries, though this time more abstract, less political. The meandering curves of a riverine geography cut into the tarpaulin are transposed onto porcelain white oval discs: small, mobile artifacts of a temporary, constructed space. This act of layering one space from one dimension, onto another space existing in a different dimension, challenges our perceptions about space and form. Whether two- or three-dimensional, painted, drawn, sculpted or suspended, these artistic formations are abstractions and aural refractions of things familiar to us: the moon, machines, land and rivers, tanah and air.

A concrete representation of Malaysia is absent but the exhibition draws from an abstract relation to home and country, poignantly experienced through friendship. The two artists and friends live and work in different locations but their creation is an exploration of a conceptual togetherness. The most explicitly personal work in the exhibition, Hush, is symbolic of the fecundity of long-distance friendship. Chin's act of surrendering her diary to Chai is the supreme act of trust; Chai's subsequent act of making incisions into the diary - which then unfurls into a wild, accordion-like sculpture - reveals just how much vulnerability the two artists allow each other.

In the exhibition catalogue, Chin's exquisite poems and Chai's poignant fable celebrate the ephemeral nature of a friendship whose gaps and fissures mark a distance that can never be bridged; but this apart-ness is not a debilitating, destructive separation. The space-between is a distance that nourishes dialogue and engagement; Chin and Chai's work as a team lends credence to the idea that friendships are forever unfinished, constantly evolving and imperfect.

Chin Chai was at 67 Jalan Tempinis 1 Gallery from 9 to 23 August.
disclaimer: this article was not written for this website. It is taken from the stated magazine source.