Gan Siong King’s Bodhisattva depicts an iridescent heart-shaped diamond, meticulously painted to reveal the play of light and colour reflecting off each facet on its surface. The dispersion of light and the painting’s glowing effect is captured by the use of sharper strokes of oil paint at the centre of the composition, which gradually dissipates into softer lines towards the edges of the panel. Blown up dramatically in scale, Gan’s diamond displays the artist’s careful study of his source: an image he stumbled upon on the Internet. 

The painting was displayed at FEEKA in December 2014 in a solo exhibition entitled “The Pleasures of Odds and Ends”, a show representing Gan’s exploration of Internet interconnectivity and his ongoing attempts to escape the rectangular confines of the painting surface. For the latter goal, Gan’s obvious formal strategy in Bodhisattva was to employ a heart-shaped wooden panel which echoes the shape of its content. But Gan’s challenge to the rectilinear limits of painting extended beyond the panel: in the exhibition, Gan presented his paintings alongside a series of QR codes that offered links to related online media as a means of populating the painting with multiple entry points. Such a move was to reimagine the painting, located in the digital age, as a single node from which a network of meanings can be formed.

Understood in this context, Gan’s realist approach in Bodhisattva is strategic, employing a truth to detail which he exploits to conceal the layers of real and virtual spaces and materials that underlie its creation. It contributes to the postmodernist adage of the real/fake, or the influence of the conditions of the hyperlinked, post-digital world and how they have complicated the value of meaning and authenticity.