Fo(u)r Humours

Cuturi Gallery is pleased to present Fo(u)r Humours, a group exhibition curated by Justin Loke featuring works by Anna Du Toit, Chiew Sien Kuan, Immanuel Koh, John Low, Lu Pingyuan, and Marla Bendini.

Revisiting the ancient theory of the four humours as a contemporary framework for understanding mood, atmosphere, and artistic experience, the exhibition explores how artworks generate their own tonal worlds, creating encounters that unfold through feeling as much as through meaning.

Today, the word “humour” is most commonly associated with comedy and wit. Yet its origins lie in an older understanding of the body, where four humours—sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic—were believed to shape temperament and character. While modern medicine has long discarded these classifications, their underlying intuition remains familiar: that every person moves through the world with a particular disposition: a distinctive colouring of experience.

For Loke, this intuition extends beyond people to artworks themselves. Rather than treating mood as a purely psychological state belonging to the viewer, Fo(u)r Humours proposes that artworks possess their own atmospheres: forms of attunement through which they disclose themselves. Warmth and coolness, agitation and stillness, exuberance and restraint become ways of understanding how works of art communicate before language, interpretation, or narrative take hold. The exhibition shifts attention from subject matter to sensibility. Tone, atmosphere, colour, rhythm, and disposition become central to how a work is encountered. Mood, in this sense, functions as an inner weather—one that shapes experience and allows meaning to emerge before it is fully understood.

Organised around four invisible zones corresponding to the classical temperaments, the exhibition unfolds as a landscape of moods. These spatial groupings are not rigid categories but atmospheres that visitors move through, suggesting that mood itself has a geography.

Across the exhibition, the participating artists approach mood through markedly different visual and material languages. Anna Du Toit's (b. 2001, Singapore) Naturalized / Spathodea campanulata, luminous depictions of African tulip flowers explore the tension between flourishing and decline, while Marla Bendini (b. 1986, Singapore) transforms busking tips and reclaimed copper into delicate blooms that preserve traces of generosity, labour, and human connection. Chiew Sien Kuan's (b 1965, Singapore) sculptural works consider restoration as a form of care, reimagining musical instruments and found materials as sites of memory and repair.

Immanuel Koh's (b. 1985, Singapore) Neural MONOBLOC Black series reinterprets one of Southeast Asia's most ubiquitous objects, transforming the familiar plastic chair into an uncanny hybrid of furniture, sculpture, and organism. Lu Pingyuan's (b. 1984, China) Theophany series of masks draws on conversations with artificial intelligence to speculate on the creation of new myths and contemporary belief systems, while John Low's (b. 1958, Singapore) atmospheric Chinese ink paintings hover between image and language, inviting viewers into a mode of looking that precedes interpretation.

The exhibition also reflects on its Singaporean context. In the tropics, where heat and humidity are ever-present, the language of mood acquires a distinctly local dimension. Humour dissolves into humidity, and atmosphere becomes physical. Bodily states, emotional registers, and environmental conditions intermingle, shaping how we inhabit both artworks and the world around us.

Rather than offering a nostalgic return to an obsolete system, Fo(u)r Humours uses the language of the humours as a point of departure for considering mood as one of art's most fundamental qualities. Bridging viewer, artwork, and world, the exhibition proposes attunement as a way of understanding how meaning emerges through atmosphere, sensation, and tone.

Fo(u)r Humours opens on 11 July at Cuturi Gallery Singapore, 61 Aliwal Street, Singapore 199937 and will remain on view through 12 September 2026.