Albert Camus once wrote in a plague that there is “nothing to do but mark time”. In February this year, A+ Works of Art unveiled Holding Pattern, curated by Aminah Ibrahim, an exhibition marking the suspension of time in the midst of Malaysia’s second Movement Control Order (MCO 2.0). The exhibition’s title referred to “the flight path maintained by an aircraft awaiting permission to land—an operation designed to delay an aircraft that’s already in flight, while keeping it within a specified airspace.” Six months later, we present our landing.

Preserving the analogy, This Time: Contemporary Watercolour might be considered as an exploration of that aircraft’s action of ‘taxiing’ along the runway— its movement along the ground under its own power. Let us evoke our own bodies moving forward at a specific time. We could project our pent-up fantasies and frustrations as energetic aspirations for change and the unfamiliar. The present exhibition aims to do so by irrigating this flow of critical practice and thought after a long period of stasis, channelled through a focused examination of the watercolour medium.

As a medium we tend to disregard, and one unfamiliar to the practices of most of the artists involved in the present exhibition, watercolour provides ample opportunity to unsettle and to excite through unfamiliar applications and exotic juxtapositions. This intergenerational exhibition brings together fifteen artists who embrace a fluid understanding of the medium, actively rehearsing and playing with its surrounding ideas to engage us in the unstable imaginary of being in this time today.

The medium is dragged from the representational to the somatic, applied on familiar surfaces like silk and photographs but with renewed contemporary significance. Others take it as a springboard for looking at watercolour through the lens of its composite parts—water, pigment, surface, and artist— to experience our time in bits and to variously emphasise or erase our entanglement with each. Here are multiple forms of the quarantined artists playing out their efforts to pour over and to mark time.