Seeing Through Matter explores how material processes shape perception—how surfaces, textures, and forms negotiate the unstable thresholds between presence and absence. Across scorched lace, carved marble, and layered paint, materiality does more than convey image or form—it unsettles perception, refracts presence, and renders the act of seeing newly felt.

Drawing on theorist Jane Bennett’s notion of matter as “quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own,” the exhibition foregrounds material not as a passive substrate but as an active participant in meaning-making.¹ Its vitality lies in the marks it bears, the traces it holds, and the forms it yields through the dynamic exchange between human intention and material agency.

In the practices of Kanchana Gupta, Alex Seton, and Gregory Hodge, this exchange becomes a form of resistance. Against an image economy driven by acceleration, legibility, and frictionless consumption, they turn process into provocation. Through acts of burning, cutting, and veiling, each asserts that matter resists capture—that surfaces hold the power to withhold, defer, and demand.

Where images dissolve at the swipe of a screen, their works insist on remaining—dense with touch, time, and thought. They restore weight, duration, and materiality to seeing, foregrounding the labour of making as an ethics of attention. Here, perception is embodied rather than instantaneous—formed through encounter, not algorithm. In a world where attention splinters and depth gives way to speed, these practices resist the frictionless gaze. They compel the eye to linger, to falter, to feel. What Gupta, Seton, and Hodge offer is not comfort but confrontation: an invitation to look into uncertainty and sense what persists beneath visibility.

^{[1] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), viii.}

Lives and works in Singapore
Born 1974 Patna, India

Gupta’s abstractions blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture, positioning material process as a locus of meaning. Working with jute, tarpaulin, and lace, she folds together personal, cultural, and political histories into surfaces that pulse with memory and labour.

In her Open and Close series (2024–present), she layers up to thirty coats of oil paint over lace before applying heat until the surface softens into a pliable skin. With slow, deliberate strokes of a palette knife, she peels back the surface to reveal delicate lace imprints. The process is both archaeological and visceral: form wrested from matter through rupture and resistance.

Here, paint becomes an active collaborator, alive with what Bennett calls “thing power”—matter’s capacity to act with its own unpredictable force.² Gupta embraces this unruliness, letting the material decide what can—and cannot—be revealed. What takes shape is not an image but a negotiation between control and accident, revelation and concealment. The surface becomes a living threshold, where making itself unfolds as a conversation between will and surrender.

In her hands, lace transcends its ornamental status to become a charged surface—evoking the intertwined histories of women’s labour and the colonial legacies that shaped its production.³ From the moral regimes of Victorian domesticity to the missionary workshops of colonial India and today’s bridal and lingerie trades, lace has long mediated the female body as a site of both adornment and constraint.⁴

Gupta reclaims this fraught material, transforming it into a site where endurance and fragility, beauty and violence, coexist in uneasy tension. Her palette of white and red heightens these tensions, evoking both restraint and desire.

Through this process, perception itself becomes tactile—seeing is made material, and the viewer is drawn into a slow, embodied encounter with surface and trace. Without ever depicting the body directly, Gupta summons it through absence. These skin-like grounds resist clarity and immediacy, demanding forms of looking that are felt as much as seen. Crucially, she preserves not the lace itself, but its memory—raised edges, delicate patterning, fragile geometries embedded in paint. What remains is spectral imprint—a scar, a whisper, an echo of what cannot be fully seen yet refuses to disappear.

^{[2] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xvi.}

^{[3]Introduced through European colonial influence and promoted by missionaries as both moral instruction and economic relief, lacemaking in India was taken up largely by women and developed into a domestic industry shaped by imported techniques, local adaptations, and the hierarchies of colonial labour. See Maria Mies, The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market (London: Zed Press, 1982).}

^{[4] See Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), for a discussion of how needlework and embroidery were bound to Victorian ideals of femininity, purity, and domestic virtue; and Jill Fields, An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), on the twentieth-century lingerie industry’s negotiation of desire, discipline, and the modern female body.}

Lives and works on Gadigal Land/Sydney, Australia
Born 1977

Where Gupta inscribes absence in fragile imprints, Seton excavates marble into weighty shells that summon vanished forms. He is known for rendering soft, familiar garments—hoodies, T-shirts, puffer jackets—as spectral stand-ins, each fold chiselled with uncanny precision to conjure a body’s recent departure.

Among his earlier works, the Drop Cloth series (2019), carved in Wombeyan marble, most closely prefigures his latest body of work, The Tenderness Series (2025). In these sculptures, the pale, collapsed forms of the Drop Cloth works drew on the classical language of drapery, their ghostly folds echoing sculpture’s enduring role as vessels for memory and loss.⁵

While The Tenderness Series extends these concerns, it also marks a tonal and conceptual shift. For the first time, Seton turns to Portuguese pink marble, a dense yet sensuous stone whose blush tones, fleshy translucence, and mottled striation evoke not the cold permanence of monumentality but a disquieting corporeality. Resting on plinths like votive offerings, these bundled forms appear to collapse inward under their own weight. Their apparent softness is a deception: fabric seems to sag and ripple, yet the marble remains intractable.

Poised between skin and shroud, these sculptures unfold as quiet elegies—not to heroic bodies, but to the anonymous, the displaced, the erased. Modelled after the artist’s own T-shirt, taken off his back, they register and trace the imprint of a body once present. Their bundled masses resemble folded skins— dense forms that speak to the brutal ease with which lives are extinguished by war and forgotten by history. In their charged stillness, they confront the politics of remembrance: whose lives are commemorated, whose omitted, whose erased.

Though meticulously carved to resemble fabric, the marble asserts its own agency, refusing full transformation. Its anatomical pigmentation and mineral density expose the limits of illusion, reminding us that matter itself participates in acts of remembrance. The effect is profoundly unsettling: stone masquerades as skin, textile turns flesh.

Here, marble becomes a threshold where absence presses against presence and the body persists not as subject but as trace—matter made eloquent through memory, heavy with what can no longer be held.

^{[5] On the long-standing association between drapery, commemoration, and the sculptural representation of absence, see Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1964).}

Lives and works in Paris, France
Born 1982 Gadigal/Sydney, Australia

If Seton carves absence into stone, Hodge lets it flicker across the painted surface—unfixed, elusive, always on the verge of becoming. Like Gupta and Seton, Hodge treats the surface as a site of negotiation, where material process exposes the slippage between what is seen and what is withheld.

Since relocating to Paris in 2019, he has deepened this inquiry. The gestural abstractions that once defined his practice have yielded to representation that emerges with greater insistence yet remains in flux. Drawing from photographs of intimate, everyday scenes—domestic interiors and familiar landscapes—he inflects the personal with art-historical resonance.

Informed by the visual syntax of 16th- and 17th-century European tapestry, Hodge approaches the painted surface as a woven field where image and structure intertwine. Working with acrylic paint, he constructs compositions through a slow choreography of making and unmaking. He designs and fabricates his own tools to draw, drag, and thread pigment across the canvas with heightened tactile sensitivity.

Despite this material intensity, the surface remains thin, the paint almost translucent—its luminosity belying the density of labour beneath. Each painting bears the trace of its own becoming, built through loom-like passages that both construct and unravel the image. Here, vision and touch converge: a synaesthetic field where the eye registers texture as sensation, reaffirming painting’s capacity to blur the boundaries of perception.

From this interlacing, light gathers and disperses across shifting layers, as though the canvas were a backlit screen. This optical shimmer draws the viewer’s gaze into the surface only to undo it—creating an oscillation between depth and flatness, image and material. The hand-made surface flickers between touch and vision, craft and code, mirroring the restless flux of digital perception.

Through this visual volatility, Hodge insists on a slower, more embodied mode of looking. Countering frictionless image consumption, his paintings defer resolution, holding what is seen—and what remains elusive—in delicate balance. In their play of light and matter, they reclaim the act of looking as a tactile, time-bound experience—one that resists immediacy and insists on duration.

Yvonne Wang is an art writer and the Singapore desk editor for ArtAsiaPacific. She regularly contributes to leading international art publications and collaborates with art platforms to develop curated content. Her writing has appeared in Frieze, Art SG, Asia Art Archive, The Art Newspaper, Art & Market, among others.

As an advocate for the visual arts, Yvonne supports a range of contemporary art institutions and initiatives across the Asia-Pacific. Her involvement focuses on advancing cross-cultural dialogue, regional collaboration, and critical discourse—particularly through efforts aligned with her research interests.

She holds an MA in Asian Art Histories from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MSc in Politics and Communication from the London School of Economics.