Bringing The Pop To Culture

One is a Hollywood star whom Asia will now discover is a prolific visual artist. The other is a lawyer who’s bringing art appreciation to the masses. Melainne Chiew speaks to LUCY LIU and RYAN SU ahead of Unhomed Belongings, which headlines this month’s art calendar

- Melainne Chiew

You may know her better as one of Charlie’s Angels or that yukata-clad, katana-slinging villain in Kill Bill: Volume 1, but off-screen, Hollywood star and on-screen femme fatale Lucy Liu wields a mean paintbrush (and camera, needle and glue gun). A talented abstract artist, the New Yorker will be in Singapore for the first time this month to commemorate the opening of an exhibition featuring a selection of her works, alongside those of Singaporean artist and APB Foundation Signature Art Prize 2018 Jurors’ Choice Award recipient Shubigi Rao, whom she has never met, at the National Museum of Singapore.

Lucy Liu and Shubigi Rao: Unhomed Belongings, which runs from January 12 to February 24, bridges the worlds and works of both artists, casting a spotlight on the astounding parallels in two strangers’ art. Themes of culture, history, identity and relationships are explored and examined; incidentally, both Lucy and Shubigi are drawn to recontextualising found objects into new visual narratives. Having discovered intellectual chemistry as they corresponded, the two will finally meet in the flesh at this exhibition – even as works from Lucy’s Lost and Found and Shubigi’s Stabbing at Immortality: Building a Better Jellyfish meet in a curatorial dialogue.

Organised in partnership with private non-profit arts organisation The Ryan Foundation, Unhomed Belongings is free to the public – accessibility being a cornerstone to promoting art awareness in Singapore and around the world. Ryan Su, the foundation’s namesake founding director and a colourful regular on the arts circuit, says Singapore’s developing art scene is ripe for showing “two artists who happen to be strong women as they navigate themes of identity and growth with such honesty and strength”.