An Exhibition With No Title
Varipuse Artists
Tony Godfrey, Nice Buenaventura, Edith Lawrence and Guo-Liang Tan
Tony Godfrey, Nice Buenaventura, Edith Lawrence and Guo-Liang Tan
15 August–13 September 2026
Curated by
Tony Godfrey
15 August–13 September 2026
A SHORT ESSAY ON AN EXHIBITION WITH NO TITLE:
with works by Nice Buenaventura, Edith Lawrence and Guo-Liang Tan.
The first work you see when you enter this exhibition that I, Tony Godfrey, have curated is anomalous, but it is also the germ that led to this exhibition.
It is a quickly sketched portrait of a woman, Kathleen Crawford, who was a close friend of my mother. My mother inherited it and then when my mother died, I inherited it. The artist who made the portrait, Edith Lawrence lived in the same small village (Donhead St. Andrew in the West of England) that I grew up in. I must have met her, but I have no memory of it. She had been briefly a successful modernist printmaker in the 1930s but then was forgotten. She had however made a second longer career as a watercolourist. I saw some works by her at auction and eventually collected 14 works by her. How would they look next to the work of the artists I know here in Southeast Asia? How would their work look shown next to work from another era?
Bringing together works from different times and different cultures. An artist from Manila, an artist from Singapore, an artist from England who died in 1973. I had a feeling (a hunch if you like) that the work of these three artists would be harmonious, would resonate. All the works, with the exception of the portrait, we could bring considered, nuanced, complex - and to me - beautiful. I couldn’t put a title to this exhibition. A title can close down meanings rather than open them up. I wanted it to be open. This exhibition to me is more like a seminar than a lecture, a place where you go and discuss things, where you try and make connections: abstraction? colour? a certain melody? This exhibition is more like a condition than a statement. I am trying to find something out, not tell you something.
As a writer I contribute to this discussion by having copies of the interviews I have done with the two living artists (Nice Buenaventura and Guo-Liang Tan) and an essay I have specially written about Edith Lawrence printed out. You can sit and read them if you want. Or you can just look at the pictures.
In her time, Edith Lawrence was a radical artist, a modernist, a proto-cubist when such things met without comprehension. Nice and Guo-Liang are radical too in the way they approach picture making, in the materials they use. They are challenging artists, but they, like Edith Lawrence, are not confrontational.
As the curator Massimiliano Gioni recently said, “I still don’t understand art.” We make exhibitions to try and understand why we are so fascinated and moved by it. It’s a search. It’s an ongoing search. It’s fun and it matters.
I hope you can make it to this exhibition and can spend some time with it. And, of course, I hope you enjoy looking at the works. Should you think of a good title, let me know!
—Tony Godfrey
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About the Artist
About the Artists
Tony Godfrey (b. 1951) writes, curates and teaches. His books include Conceptual Art (1998 and soon to be translated into Chinese) and Painting Today (2009). He teaches at Ateneo University, Manila and the University of Plymouth where he is a professor. For many years, he led the MA in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute. He moved from Britain to Asia in 2009 and has worked with artists from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore and The Philippines. Future projects include an exhibition of fifteen Filipino artists in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, books on artists in Indonesia, on the English artist Nigel Cooke and a global history of Contemporary Art. He currently lives in the Philippines.
Nice Buenaventura (b.1984) is a visual artist from Manila. Her methods revolve around the offloading of tensions, often between ethics and aesthetics, through drawing, painting, installation, new media and citizen-ethnography. This offloading extends to her project called Tropikalye, an online co-learning resource on vernacular culture in tropical and postcolonial Philippines. Varied modes of productivity allow her work to become generative expressions of concern, tracing links between seemingly disparate issues using the logics of the archipelago.
Nice holds postgraduate degrees in media and arts technology from Queen Mary, University of London and Ateneo de Manila University. She has presented work and participated in art-adjacent projects in Southeast Asia, East Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. In 2021, she received the Cultural Center of the Philippines – Thirteen Artists Award and the Ateneo Art Awards – Fernando Zóbel Prize for Visual Art.
Guo-Liang Tan (b. 1980, Singapore) is a visual artist whose practice centers on painting, from which works in other media and modes of presentation occasionally emerge. Surfaces, painterly or otherwise, serve as sites for staging gestures of affect and a haunting dialogue with the ghosts of abstraction. His process is marked by gaps and overlaps, fragmentation, and the gathering of traces. Tan is particularly interested in how these elements expand and reorient our perception of the body, time, and attention. His work has been exhibited at Pola Museum of Art, Japan; Singapore Art Museum, Singapore; National Gallery Singapore and Sifang Satellite Space, Shanghai, among others.
Guo-Liang Tan is represented by Ota Fine Arts.
Related Exhibitions
About the Artists
About the Artist
Tony Godfrey (b. 1951) writes, curates and teaches. His books include Conceptual Art (1998 and soon to be translated into Chinese) and Painting Today (2009). He teaches at Ateneo University, Manila and the University of Plymouth where he is a professor. For many years, he led the MA in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute. He moved from Britain to Asia in 2009 and has worked with artists from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore and The Philippines. Future projects include an exhibition of fifteen Filipino artists in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, books on artists in Indonesia, on the English artist Nigel Cooke and a global history of Contemporary Art. He currently lives in the Philippines.
Nice Buenaventura (b.1984) is a visual artist from Manila. Her methods revolve around the offloading of tensions, often between ethics and aesthetics, through drawing, painting, installation, new media and citizen-ethnography. This offloading extends to her project called Tropikalye, an online co-learning resource on vernacular culture in tropical and postcolonial Philippines. Varied modes of productivity allow her work to become generative expressions of concern, tracing links between seemingly disparate issues using the logics of the archipelago.
Nice holds postgraduate degrees in media and arts technology from Queen Mary, University of London and Ateneo de Manila University. She has presented work and participated in art-adjacent projects in Southeast Asia, East Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. In 2021, she received the Cultural Center of the Philippines – Thirteen Artists Award and the Ateneo Art Awards – Fernando Zóbel Prize for Visual Art.
Guo-Liang Tan (b. 1980, Singapore) is a visual artist whose practice centers on painting, from which works in other media and modes of presentation occasionally emerge. Surfaces, painterly or otherwise, serve as sites for staging gestures of affect and a haunting dialogue with the ghosts of abstraction. His process is marked by gaps and overlaps, fragmentation, and the gathering of traces. Tan is particularly interested in how these elements expand and reorient our perception of the body, time, and attention. His work has been exhibited at Pola Museum of Art, Japan; Singapore Art Museum, Singapore; National Gallery Singapore and Sifang Satellite Space, Shanghai, among others.
Guo-Liang Tan is represented by Ota Fine Arts.
Related Exhibitions
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