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Guo-liang Tan makes pretty pictures of flowers, but look again and they are anything but just pretty. In his first solo exhibition, Play Dead – Paintings, in Space Cottonseed gallery at the Gillman Barracks, he paints still life of flowers that are not held by any vessel and float about in ambiguous space. In his installation of paintings, he has managed to capture a sense of history, tradition and image more than flowers or even paint. And for the untrained eye looking at them for the first time, they are marvellous exercises on beauty, motif, memory and mystery. His paintings are a real oddity in the local contemporary art scene. You could even say they are an anomaly, like a wonderful, persistent little blemish. That is why they are unique. These anachronistic paintings critique yet embrace a large chunk of Western illusionism. It harks back to a time art students love to tread, while looking at art books in the library, which made them want to paint in the first place. They have that kind of dingy darkness we do not see any more in paintings, like a Goya, but with the modesty of a Chardin still life and the deft, suggestive strokes of Velasquez or Manet that made them so innovative in their time.
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