FOST Gallery is delighted to present ‘1998’, featuring the early works of Ian Woo leading up to his first solo show at LASALLE Gallery in 2000. The works in the show span a five-year period, 1997-2001, when Woo returned to Singapore from England, and before embarking in 2006 on his doctorate between Singapore and Melbourne. We could regard these paintings as bearing the gestures of a young painter in transition, marks that, Woo now thinks, reveal the intimacy of anxiety, doubts and forms presented as sets of questions to the viewer. Is it a painting about pictures? Are they things in a house? Can we call them still lifes? Is the artist making a picture about what he cannot explain and see? These early paintings provide an insight into the development of Woo’s thinking around abstraction. The paintings in ‘1998’ have been selected by Sherman Mern Tat Sam and who also wrote the exhibition essay.