Gilbert & George. They Shot Them!, 2014; photomontage; 254 × 453 cm. Courtesy of Arndt gallery and the Artists.

The twenty-six photomontages of Utopian Pictures at Arndt Gallery in Singapore, by the British artistic team Gilbert Prousch & George Passmore, gleefully parody that lofty ideal. Each photomontage presents utopia’s flip side and depicts a fiercely hostile, turbulent environment of dire warnings, threats, and nonsensical graffiti in a provocative mishmash of garish colors, as though cataloguing the battle scars of a city splintered into factions. Defiant voices (“Anti-fascist zone,” “No racists in working class areas,” “Toffs out”) clamor to be heard and clash with the heavy hand of authority amid sinister undercurrents of racial, class, and sexual exclusions.

Gilbert & George. Hakenkreuz, 2014; 191 × 226 cm. Courtesy of Arndt gallery and the Artists.

Gilbert & George. Homo Riot Homo, 2014; 191 × 226 cm. Courtesy of Arndt gallery and the Artists.

The irony is heavy and unmistakable, of course. It seems cheekily fitting that Gilbert & George have chosen, for their first solo exhibition in Southeast Asia, to stage Utopian Pictures in the conservative city–state of Singapore, whose infamously repressive laws have been simultaneously lauded and disparaged by people living in and outside the country. But one doesn’t need to travel that far to see such aspects of authoritarian rule in action; Gilbert & George have asserted that the divided reality of the city can be found in its entirety in the gritty East End of London, where they live and work.

Gilbert & George. God Guides Us, 2014; 151 × 191 cm. Courtesy of Arndt gallery and the Artists.

Unlike the rhetoric of the literary vision of utopia that imagines a future surpassing the general living conditions of the present, the chilling pluralities in the photomontages of Gilbert & George ground us strictly in the unfiltered, raw hues of urbanism. The stark pronouncement of ”God guides us” is surrounded by St. George’s dragon, which has the English flag for wings and is incongruously matched with the warning, “Alcohol control zone,” bordered by the white squares containing red “prohibited” signs. On large grids demarcated into sections, scrawls of “Homo Riot Homo,” “Nationalists make me sick,” and “The only good fascist is a dead one” capture the decay and rot of London, of humanity stripped down to its ugliest. This is no blueprint for the future, but rather a showcase of the cracks evident in the system. The artists’ works appear to imply that laws exist only to be defied; it is as though restrictions on aberrant behavior result in a proportionate amount of the very behavior these laws are trying to prevent.

Gilbert & George. Vomit, 2014; 226 × 317 cm. Courtesy of Arndt gallery and the Artists.

Through it all, the artists themselves are two silent sentinels ever present in their own canvases, their faces covered by masks, paint, balaclavas, or medieval armor as they preside over the dizzying images of chaos and rebellion. Their stares are blank but nonjudgmental even as they actively insert themselves into the estrangements and anxieties in the extraordinary schisms that exist in this era. They exist not as complicit or disapproving figures but as part of the hieroglyphs of their montages, like repeated motifs that ghost through every slogan, threat, or warning; they are as dissonant as the seemingly endless number of labels defining the multilayered social reality we live in.

Utopian Pictures is on view at Arndt Gallery at the Gillman Barracks through April 12, 2015.

 at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York City

Yee I-Lann’s solo exhibition Picturing Power at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York, is an emphatic act of subversion. Her black-and-white photomontages, made from two centuries of archival images of the Dutch and British colonization of Malaysia, present a reengagement with reality through a new language of alterity. For Yee, the exposure and visibility of the past create a vocabulary that focuses on emancipation and justice.

In Picturing Power: Wherein one surreptitiously performs reconnaissance to collect views and freeze points of view to be reflective of one’s own kind (2013), shrouded black figures posed as 19th-century photographers are juxtaposed with a comic scene of colonizers standing below large, overturned tables. Set against a stark white background, these incongruous figures symbolize colonial suppression. In Yee’s work, recurring images of tables represent transactions, power, and control. The inversion of these objects becomes a strong metaphor for the reversion of power from centuries of repression. More importantly, the dark, haunting, ghost-like figures appear to be voyeurs looking into the past and upending memories of hard times and the subjugation of the colonized. Here the artist’s language demands a heightened level of representation that is both humorous and a clearly articulated negative critique.

In Picturing Power: Wherein one nods with political sympathy and says I understand you better than you understand yourself, I’m just here to help you help yourself (2013), hundreds of native Malaysians line up in quiet acquiescence behind one of their oppressors, portraying life in the colonies at the time. Yee’s ironic titles, dripping with sarcasm, compel the viewer to visualize an era of dogmatic coersion. Picturing Power: Wherein one cultivates cultural codes, the noble endeavors of mankind and thereby puts them in their place (2013) presents the native woman whose long tresses transform her into the stereotypical mythological enchantress. Seated against a backdrop of spice plantations, which were the most lucrative colonial trade, the figure—with her lengthy, unruly hair—is symbolic of the classic temptress who had to be controlled.

While the eight images from Picturing Power use historical mimesis to expose colonial inequities as a constructive expunging exercise, Tabled (2013), from a previous exhibition titled Suspended Histories, has a conciliatory tone. Images of current life in Malaysia, representing entrepreneurship, freedom, and mobility, are printed on dinner plates referencing blue China from the Dutch and British colonial periods. Neon-colored outlines of embracing figures in The Sun will rise in the East and deliver us from this long night (2012) seem to suggest reconciliation as the best path toward retribution. At the end, the viewer is left with the indelible mark of history on Malaysia and the strength of its people to move on.

Yee I-Lann: Picturing Power runs through April 13 at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York.

Bansie Vasvani is an art historian and critic. She lives in New York City.