10 Chancery Lane Gallery is proud to present exhibition Beauty Will Save the World: Eight Artists from Southeast Asia, practitioners from Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Philippines, and Cambodia deploy various media, materials, and conceptual strategies to create pieces that through their uplift transcend bleakness of all kinds, including social tensions at home and beyond. Their works, some grappling critically with dire conditions such as incarceration, war, abuses of power, displacement, and environmental degradation, sparkle with humour and spirit as they mobilise viewers. Others radiate poetic light in more intimate ways, recalling humanity and the natural world. Curated by Southeast Asian art specialist Iola Lenzi, Beauty Will Save the World: Eight Artists from Southeast Asia assembles iconic artworks by Southeast Asian contemporary masters, as well as newly commissioned pieces impactful for their visual and sensorial seduction operating in tandem with their semantic play.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
iola Lenzi, PhD, is a Singapore curator and historian of Southeast Asian contemporary art. She is a specialist of Vu Dan Tan, has published extensively on early contemporary art in 1990s Hanoi, and researches connections between Southeast Asian contemporary art and regional social-political evolutions. She teaches Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art history, as well as curatorial methods in the School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her most recent book is Power, Politics and the Street: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia after 1970 (Lund Humphries UK, 2024).
iola Lenzi, PhD, is a Singapore curator and historian of Southeast Asian contemporary art. She is a specialist of Vu Dan Tan, has published extensively on early contemporary art in 1990s Hanoi, and researches connections between Southeast Asian contemporary art and regional social-political evolutions. She teaches Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art history, as well as curatorial methods in the School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her most recent book is Power, Politics and the Street: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia after 1970 (Lund Humphries UK, 2024).
