How do we begin?
The universe, a story, or a piece of art. Each unfolds in its own way, shaped by forces seen and unseen. The artists of Big Bang: A Myth of Origins step into this timeless question, reconstructing beginnings through fragments, traces, and mythologies. In a world where stories shape our reality, what happens when artists rewrite them?
Curated by Joyce Toh, Big Bang: A Myth of Origins is on view at Gajah Gallery until 2 March 2025. The exhibition considers the many ways in which beginnings or origins — whether cosmic, personal, or mythical — can be understood not as singular moments but as shifting, evolving narratives. It brings together artists from Southeast Asia and beyond, each weaving their own interpretation of how creation unfolds.
From the garden of Eden to the Chinese primordial god Pan Gu, creation myths can be found across the world’s cultures. Myths are not just about gods and origins. They were humanity’s first attempts to make sense of existence, turn chaos into meaning, and shape an unfathomable world into something graspable. Here, each artist steps into the role of a modern mythmaker, weaving fragments of the past, traces of the present, and visions of possible futures into new narratives, delving into humanity’s enduring fascination with beginnings, beings, and becoming.
Human traces
As we walk into Gajah Gallery, the first thing that stands out is the interplay between absence and presence. The human figure is nowhere to be seen, yet it lingers in its traces — etched into objects, embedded in materials, and whispered through the remnants of what is left behind. These works ask profound questions: Are we only our bodies, or do we exist in the things we create? Do we live on in the objects we shape, the myths we tell, and the marks we leave behind? Or do we vanish the moment our physical presences fades?
In Pam Yan-Santos’ Household (2024), the unassuming egg becomes the heart of a family portrait. The Filipino artist uses trays of eggs as symbolic vessels for family identity. Inscribed with utterances unique to each family member, these fragile forms become records of personal and collective memory — shifting from mere objects to carriers of lived experience, reshaping the familiar into a personal cosmology, and turning the ordinary into the mythic.
Similarly, in Jose Santos III’s (Philippines) From the Horse’s Mouth (2024), remnants of everyday life take on poetic weight. His work, recalling early European cabinets of curiosities, is an assemblage of objects steeped in quiet histories. This cabinet becomes a space where disparate forms converge into something neither entirely natural nor wholly imagined.
Within this hybrid assemblage, two horse heads emerge from the cabinet, flanked by bird wings, human arms, and hooves, with an interior filled with crab shells. Land, water, and sky collapse into a single entity — an almost mythological fusion of bodies and symbols that defies classification. These unexpected juxtapositions create a tension between logic and belief, natural order and myth. Does knowledge come from observation or authority? From the tangible world or the symbolic one? Santos’ work refuses certainty, instead creating a space where contradictions breathe, and the dialogue between science and faith remains unresolved.
Meanwhile, in Miguel Aquilizan’s New Earth (Post-Genesis) 1-8 (2024), fragments of the natural and man-made world are gathered and reshaped, becoming vessels for new myths. These hybrid beings exist in flux, composed of past debris yet reaching toward an unknown future, suggesting a species on the cusp of evolution. Are they remnants of a lost world or glimpses of what is yet to come? Their extraterrestrial forms blur the boundaries between creation and destruction, history and prophecy, questioning where existence truly begins and ends.
In Prajakta Potnis’ (India) Capsule 202 (2016), a freezer interior becomes a surreal, poignant landscape. Potnis’ works capture the traces of inhabitation, the ghostly imprints of lives once lived, transforming the ordinary into something intensely charged. Even in the most mundane spaces, history, memory, and consequence accumulate.
Making sense of creation
Some artists surrender to the unknown, embracing uncertainty as part of the process. Others try to impose meaning, mapping out possibilities in search of an answer. Big Bang: A Myth of Origins presents both approaches, one that lets chaos lead and another that wrestles with it, attempting to contain it within structure. But does creation ever truly follow a single path?
In Jitish Kallat’s Palindrome/Anagram Painting (2021), an otherworldly map unfolds, one that resists a singular reading, allowing meaning to shift and rearrange itself like constellations in an ever-changing sky. The Indian artist’s preoccupations with time, sustenance, transience, and the cosmos are scattered across a grid with multiple possible orientations. Maps are powerful things. They bestow knowledge. They provide certainty, offering a sense of order and direction. But here, Kallat subverts this function, presenting a map that refuses to be read in any singular way, offering no clear direction, no singular truth — only irresolution, a reminder that not all things can, or should, be neatly nor linearly contained.
Then there is Yunizar’s (Indonesia) Burung Kolibri (Hummingbird) (2024), whose childlike aesthetics becomes an invitation to create our own myths. His raw lines and fantastical elements may appear naive at first glance. Yet, they hold entire worlds within them, blurring the lines between reality and imagination, between the domestic and the mythical. Here, the act of interpretation is left to the viewer, as though meaning itself is fleeting, hovering like the hummingbird in perpetual motion. A sense of wonder and playfulness regarding the natural world and simple things enlivens the work, capturing the rasa of the extraordinary within the ordinary.
And, lastly, I leave you with Aku dan Simbolku (Me and My Symbol) (1997) by the late Balinese artist I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih. A sinuous dragon stretches across the canvas, its head replaced by an open book, its tail clamped between the pincers of a crab. A dragon, a creature of power, as a book; its treasure is no longer gold but knowledge. Perhaps this is Murni herself, the master storyteller, reminding us that just as dragons guard secrets, myths safeguard wisdom across generations.
Myths of the past, myths of the future
In many cultures, origins are not just historical events but are imaginative stories passed down and reshaped through time. In Asia, where oral traditions and folklore still inform collective memory, this exhibition feels like a contemporary extension of those storytelling traditions. It reminds us that mythmaking is not a relic of the past but an ongoing, living practice, and that cultural stories are continuously written and rewritten to reflect new realities.
From Aquilizan’s chimeric figures to Murni’s symbolic dragons, the exhibition taps into Asia’s long history of myth and reinvention. It also raises a question: What do we choose to preserve in an era of rapid change, and what gets rewritten?
Ultimately, Big Bang: A Myth of Origins reminds us that beginnings are neither singular nor static. Whether through myth, memory, or material, artists continue to unravel and reweave stories of creation.
Our stories are never truly finished. They shift, echo, and evolve, just as we do. Perhaps the question is not where we begin but how we continue. In a world that is constantly reshaping itself, what myths will we leave behind for those who come next?
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Big Bang: A Myth of Origins runs at Gajah Gallery till 2 Mar 2025. Find out more at gajahgallery.com.
Header image: Agnes Arellano, Nuwa (2024), coldcast marble, 38 x 213 x 48 cm.
