Nova Contemporary presents In saying these things, I went to sleep, a group exhibition of works by Cole Lu, Christian Quin Newell, and Supawich Weesapen. The exhibition draws its title from Of Virtue, a fourth-century text by the Alexandrian alchemist Zosimos, in which he uses dream to decipher the mysteries of the waking world.
Inspired by this sense of alchemical slippage—where boundaries shift between slumber and waking, solid and liquid, and body and spirit—the three artists take on the role of shapeshifters, engaging in a kinetic play with the elements. Here, matter is torn apart and reassembled, creating new forms of substance and self. Their works ruminate in an instability of form, offering passages we can traverse on route to becoming.
Lu’s works embody calcination, the first stage of alchemy, where intense burning and decomposition is used to reduce matter to its purest form. He intricately burns onto copper and linen, initiating a process that is simultaneously destructive and generative. Depicting images of the mythical and premodern, including an engraving of the Black Sun—representative of the shadow self and renewal through darkness–he presents a space where material, identity, and consciousness can be broken down and reinvented.
Inundating the gallery with a luminous waterfall, Weesapen invokes the subsequent process of dissolution, a stage of entropy and release. Drawing on lore from his hometown, he recounts a story of a young man who trespassed into the forest to collect honey, and disrespected the spirits of the land. As the man climbed onto a vine, it transformed into a snake and caused his fatal fall. Extending a long lineage of using folktale as alchemical analogy, Weesapen invites confrontation with the unseen and illusory, merging realms in stories of transfiguration and release.
For Newell, painting embodies the stages of separation and conjunction. He engages in playful divination: drawing from a range of historical materials, from a Japanese dictionary of colour combinations to Hokusai’s manga sketchbooks, he rolls dice to select the page numbers of his references, extracting arbitrary pairings and postures. Colouring his tabula rasas with this gentle agency, he engages in a continuous cycle of extraction and reinvention. Amongst atmospheric gradients, his androgynous emanations shift between human and ethereal, floating in transient limbo.
Here, the gallery takes up the fourth element, becoming a spatial vessel for dynamic elemental dialogue. The three artists capture an impulse to compose and recompose, making room for us to transfigure, transmute, and ascent.
Text by Colette Auyang
