Exhibition Period: 7th November 2014 - 7th December 2014

Soya cincau is a Malaysian drink that combines soybean milk, sugar syrup and black grass jelly. It is particularly refreshing on a hot day – the sweet, chilled soya milk acting as an ideal match for silky strands of jelly. Regardless of its specific origins, the black-and-white drink represents the diverse Malaysian culture, appearing as a common fixture in the menus of restaurants, cafes and food stalls around Malaysia.

Likewise, despite the monochromatic theme of the Soya Cincau exhibition, it displays the lively, colourful nature of Malaysian contemporary art. Artists might mostly employ blacks, whites and greys, but it is intriguing to see how artists from diverse genres, with various styles – from figurative to abstract expressionist – interpret the theme of black and white in the context of their personal understanding and contemporary Malaysian art.

Monochromatic art dates back to the prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings, where Paleolithic humans drew and engraved forms on cave walls with charcoal and mineral pigments. Moving forward in time, Spanish master artist Pablo Picasso also had a fascination with creating works using blacks and greys, without the “distraction of colour”, as he put it. His Guernica, for example – a painted commentary on the Nazi’s bombing of Guernica, a Spanish town – evokes a powerful response from the audience without resorting to the use of garish colour to depict violence and devastation.

In our twenty-first century world of vivid high-definition screens, achromatic images provide a curious contrast with the brilliantly coloured ones we are so used to seeing. However, without the dressing up of colour, lines and forms are even more noticeable, enhancing the content of the image and the intent of the artist or photographer.

Thus, from a technical perspective, a black-and-white exhibition compels the artists to explore within the restraints and limitations of a predominantly achromatic palette to express a sense of their subject. In fact, Soya Cincau can be treated as an exercise for the artists to focus on conveying emotions and meaning with basic artistic elements like contrast, colour harmony, tone, composition and structure.