{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":38928,"auction_id":55,"set_id":83,"lot_number":"66","artist":"Jose John Santos III (b.1970)","title":"Surface Tension","starting_price":4000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 2014 (left)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"60” x 72” (152 cm x 183 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Private Collection, Singapore","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"While notable for his figurative forays into surreal dimensions that act as a magnifying lens into contemporary life, Jose John Santos III has also ventured into conceptual terrains by paradoxically foregrounding the surface appearance of things. In this work, Surface Tension, which was part of his much celebrated show, 2Hide, at Pearl Lam Galleries in Singapore in 2014, Santos III explored the visual registers of objects that reveal, as well as conceal, their material nature. This duality is expressed in a diptych: the textural membrane of acrylic and the peeling paint from what appears like a wall. Based on this juxtaposition, one is disabused of the notion that what one sees is what one gets, that in every surface there lies an underlyingorder that, while hidden, asserts — through bumps, textures, and striations — its seeming omnipresence, its visual vibrations. Even in the title of the exhibition, Santos III played with this duality. After all, “Hide,” is a double-edged sword: as a noun, it refers to the “outer skin” that readily reveals the creature in possession thereof; as a verb, it means “to conceal.” In the intersection of the external and internal, the outside and the inside, Santos III seems to be saying, lies the true nature of things—a certain mutability that is, in itself, the essence of life, growth, and transformation. Nothing is ever static; even painting, which is also surface, accumulates its second skin, as it is held by a support and the frame of art history. “To put it differently,” as Kenneth Tay wrote in “Everything is Illuminated”, the essay that accompanied the exhibition, “these objects are no longer merely the stuffy inert furniture of reality. Rather, they are, in Santos III’s view, equally as dynamic as reality itself.”","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":"<p><strong>Jose John Santos III</strong> (b.1970)<br /><em>Surface Tension</em><br />signed and dated 2014 (left)<br />oil on canvas<br />60&rdquo; x 72&rdquo; (152 cm x 183 cm)</p>","alias":null,"hp":8000000,"bp":0.168,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":8000000,"userBid":5926,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":9344000,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":37349,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/55/83/lot/66.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":65,"next":67,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}