Although Ben Loong and Zulkifli Lee developed their artistic practices countries apart, they share certain similarities: grand visions of abstract art’s progressive potential, dominant personalities, and shifting alliances. All in all, they both possess a rigorous dedication to materiality played out with measured output and flair across the disciplines of mixed-media paintings and sculptures.

FrictionaL is an exhibition that engages with material culture, a field that considers how the process of giving shape to matter and the potential meaning of form manifest cultural and personal implications. The raw enigma of abstracted surfaces and what they communicate have long been of interest to the artists: their emphasis is not only on rationality but also on elements of chance that occur during production and the interpretations their artworks induce, prompting one to seek and see mystery in the familiar.

Addressing themes such as language and the narrative of materials used along with the corporeality of nature, the artists create works with the breath of allusion. And in this exhibition, the combination of their creations is compelling because the works exist as poetic manifestations.

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Much of Loong’s work suggests malleable organic forms, yet the textural paintings are nearly always produced mainly from industrial products, using various processes to mould and transform their properties. And they often bear traces of the different configurations that made them.

The artist is interested in narratives via an exploratory journey into the topography of urban structures, particularly the representation of actual surface patterns of public pavements and reliefs for allusive, abstract entities. The result can be witnessed in his ongoing Terra

Blanca series, where the bright white façade consists of poured plaster and resin, forming a swirly abstraction in the artworks while also retaining highly-textured evidence of kneading, pressing, tugging, and layering.

The artist is drawn to the uncanny quality of his materials and the unpredictability associated with his process when he pours plaster into small moulds. The plaster moves around in a state in between liquid and solid so that it stretches, and swathes form due to experimenting with the consistency of the mixtures.

Hence, many of these intricate works bear marks synonymous with an undulated landscape, like the ripples formed on a seabed or delineated terrain. Also, in a few of these works, as exemplified in Moonshard, sized 52 x 36 cm, and Stardust, sized 152 x 192 cm, Loong utilizes specks of gold leaf on the surface plane to spur the representational notion of something that is both industrious and sacred in its signification of our world. Thus, the gold leaf is playfully at odds with the primary medium of plaster, which is particularly associated with the construction industry, and the relative uniformity of the works’ tonal quality.

The oscillation between the painterly and sculptural reflects Loong’s recent exploration of the potential of cast to express further narratives related to labour and its inheritance expressed as material form. Through tiling and masonry, the artist produced large quantities of bricks and arranged them into several large, rectangular wall-like tableaux. In the exhibition, four are closely arrayed across a single room. They cling flatly to the gallery walls to construct a visual effect that manages to be simultaneously flat and sculptural when viewed. These works also bear the marks of fingers/hands that had been pushed into wet, unfixed matter before solidifying, as the surfaces show off a shimmer countered by the residue of air bubbles and blemishes caused by air escaping the medium as it set.

Compared to his previous series, the artist’s shift towards an obvious spatial activation of an architectural form, in the vein of brick-like walls, is a welcome development. At once geometric and architectonic, qualities Loong has purposely played with, these works wittily reflect on the nature of contemporary painting, the intersection of abstraction and representation, and the objectification and commodification of materials in art. Visually lush, these new works are enigmatic mementoes of industrialization

Over the past few years, Zulkifli Lee has cultivated a formalistic idiom linking nature, space, and colour to the physics and procedures of painting. Very much influenced by the Islamic aesthetic philosophy of Nazzariyah, the artist attempts to harmonize his artistic practice with a visceral approach to the mapping of nature, translated into visual imagery. The artist’s compelling and often abstract works are the result of various complex procedures, combining minimalist rigour with the mellow atmospherics of a lived-in quality that underscores the natural materials he uses.

In his ultra-rational pursuit of pure two-dimensional parameters guiding scale, shape, and character, Lee’s process revolves around the nature he observes in his immediate environment. The artist collects found minerals such as soil, limestone, stones, etc. and creates a pictorial reaction with these natural elements, presenting facets of his undeniable skill with finesse, particularly in terms of the calculated and methodical way he handles his materials by engaging with their physical and phenomenological properties. Through stencilling and layering, Lee produces geometric motifs that are repeatedly applied across his highly-textured work surface. The repetition implies an

infinite continuation and becomes points of symmetrical illumination.

Lee has also been working on a new series of smaller-sized works whose generative surfaces were either burnt, rippled or folded, exemplified by Kesan (No. 1) and (No. 2), both sized 114 x 90 cm. Teeming with wit and mystery, they represent a strong undercurrent of idiosyncratic, process-based abstraction that somehow remains open-eyed and current.

Making the experiential journey from two-dimensional works to sculptures that are debuting in this exhibition, Lee delves deeper into the interconnectedness between nature and its metaphysical conditions. By conjoining modular structures made of wood and steel respectively, the artist makes use of lattices via the criss-crossing diagonals of repeating vertical and horizontal bands matched together as both the structure and stable form of his sculptural works. Serving as metaphors for the by-products of nature, the works address how the materials are opposites of one another with wood being a product of nature, whereas steel is an industrial product alloyed from the natural elements of iron and carbon.

Lee has also sought to make his sculptures interactive, as visitors are invited to stack and reconfigure allocated pieces from the work Isi, sized 16 x 243.8 x 12.7 cm. Successive appearances of the sculptural whole are often left untouched until the next public intervention. This site of encounter can perhaps be understood as an instinctual reaction between the personal and the public, emphasizing on the utility of sculpture in a public space.The artist’s ability to keep a variety of media in concordance with his thought processes in relation to nature is remarkably consistent.

As the late artist Donald Judd expressed in his seminal essay, “Specific Objects” (1965), “Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Usually, it has been related, closely, or distantly, to one or the other. . . . But there are some things that occur nearly in common.” This framing of something that exists between painting and sculpture can be easily applied to this exhibition, which also resulted in a joint collaborative effort by the artists in creating an installation, 1+1=1. Created in situ within the gallery space, there is an open yet cleverly hidden path set up behind one of the gallery walls that has been purposely swivelled so that the public can choose to enter this soil-filled area, lit by a single fluorescent tube. Both an installation and de-installation that provokes thoughts on spatiality, the work further accentuates the common theme of both the artists, as it enthusiastically presents physical states within the language of materialized conditions.