Meulensteen

In 2011 Meulensteen presented the American debut of artist couple Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu. The artists create work in a range of media, including painting, installation, performance and video. Through their practices, they respond to each other’s work and often collaborate on joint projects. Tun Win Aung’s multimedia installations and performances are often produced specifically for outdoor sites, responding to local histories and environments, while Wah Nu’s paintings and video works use color and symbolism to create dreamlike, wistful impressions of her surroundings. Both artists create elaborate exhibition models to imagine the installation of their works, which often remain unrealized. A series of photographs of these models are on view in the gallery’s Project Space and were recently presented at the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Also on view in the gallery’s screening room is Tun Win Aung’s two-channel video Train. In this work, the artist uses stop-motion editing to animate a makeshift model train made of white bricks as it moves through spaces that are important to him: his grammar school, his favorite restaurant, his home city, and the countries and venues in which the couple has exhibited their work. This footage is juxtaposed with scenes of train interiors from the different locations. The videos focus on moments of almost-stillness while flashes of action on the periphery simulate the disjointed sense of time and space experienced by travellers. Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu’s collaborations have traveled to the 4th Guangzhou Triennial, China; Videozone V at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv; the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia; the 11th Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka, Bangladesh; and the 2nd and 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennales, Japan. They have also participated in group shows at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; The Almaz Collective, Hanoi, Vietnam; Asienhaus, Essen, Germany; Gallery CON.form Architects, Berlin, Germany; Kunstverein Bad Aibling, Germany; Osage Singapore; University of Passau, Germany; Singapore Art Museum; and Shimbashi Station, Tokyo, Japan; among others.

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