“For me, painting is interesting largely because it can hardly breathe under the weight of its own history.”[1]

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It was in 2011, when Ruben Pang was included in Singapore Show: Future Proof at the Singapore Art Museum which I co-curated with David Chew. His three paintings were executed on metal, scraped and scratched. This was the first time I spent extended periods with paintings by Ruben, enclosed in its own private space. And when I conduct tours and received VIP visitors, I shared the thinking behind its technique, including circumstantial backgrounds in relation to the young artist who was then still serving his mandatory National Service in the army. Subsequently, each time I encounter a work by Ruben, I ask myself if such paintings and artistic practice would hold its own against the discourse of contemporary art. This especially given the context of Southeast Asia where artworks embedded in the social and political still appear to carry the most currency. Besides, peers working the international field have impressed on me many times before how they believe that the practice of painting here are really posthumous derivatives and imitations of key movements and artists from the west. I believe that there are many truths in this supposition. On this, I have grieved the apparent lack of direct contact, and the seeding of dialogues and exchanges by senior local scholars and artists with their peers from that side of the world given that many of them had spent time receiving education, working and living in the west at the turn of the avant-garde.

Painting, as practice and material, faces continuous challenge in sitting alongside an increasingly conceptual, coded and often porous practices in contemporary art today. Ensuing the age-long argument on the ‘death of painting’ famously spurred by a 1935 critique by then Director of National Gallery, UK;[2] ‘the end of painting’ in 1981 by Douglas Crimp[3] and even much earlier in 1839 when in reaction to the daguerreotype, Paul Delaroche is quoted saying ‘from today, painting is dead’. Paraphrasing James Elkins, painting is the one medium in art cursed by the baggage of its own history. All ironies aside, this two-dimensional plane is still a format that has remained pertinent for artists and the art audience. In 2014 for example, the Museum of Modern Art, USA (MoMA) revisited the genre with an exhibition entitled Forever Now featuring the works of 17 American artists ‘whose paintings reflect a singular approach that characterizes our cultural moment at the beginning of this new millennium’.