Tangerine dreams
London-based Nigerian artist Ken Nwadiogbu hit upon his trademark “thermographic” orange palette in his large portraits while taking a bath and staring at a lit candle: “It’s a beautiful color. There’s something about fire, it’s authentic.”
Another signature feature of his works are the cutout eyeholes, usually revealing the artist staring back at the viewer. “I started with: How can I represent this darkness within a view of light? Almost like I want to get access to your soul or your being.”
Trained as an engineer, he veered towards the Royal Academy of Art and started generating immersive canvases framed in oranges and yellows. They were a hit, and Retro Africa gallery founding director Dolly Kola-Balogun decided to bring him to Art SG.
A key theme of Ken’s work is immigration—his friends and fellow creatives are shown framed through doors, or with backs turned, leaving the frame. Elsewhere, he collaborates with Migrate Art to raise money for Myanmar, and donates site-specific works to art therapy initiative Hospital Rooms in the UK.
Dolly and Ken tend to emanate as much energy as his “thermal” artwork does, and she’s not shy about promoting a bridge between the art worlds of Asia and Africa. While admitting it’s still an “uphill battle to get people to be open-minded,” she sees more similarities than differences: ”Culturally, we’re very similar to Asia: very communal, family-oriented, spicy food, even in terms of indigenous philosophies.” She admits “the culture shock lies in external differences that seem vast—race, mode of speech, language—but once you start breaking it down to value systems and ideas, you see an overlap.”
While Retro Africa, which she founded in 2015, is the only African gallery at Art SG this year, with artists like Nwadiogbu—whose visual language crosses barriers easily—the time is coming.
“When it catches fire, I think it will be intuitive that contemporary African artists and Asian institutions can find a natural harmony,” she says.