Genevieve Chua marches to the beat of her own drum. This perennial quiet achiever describes herself as a “near-abstract painter” but uses a range of other media (computers, installation, photography) to explore, in her own words, “diagram, palimpsest, syntax and the glitch.” Her work is neither didactic nor really discursive, but invites us to consider how fine art communicates, and how that differs from mass and machinic communication. Underlying Chua’s practice is a tension between the tactile or sensual becoming of the art work and the increasingly inorganic ways art works are made. Over the years she has hit many notes that resonate globally – concerning e.g. the vitality of non-human life, and the circumspect revision of abstraction – but never in pursuit of art-world trends. Viewed over the long term, though, the consistency of her investigations gives her work a depth that is appreciable as she enters mid-career. Chua’s idiom is formalist. Recent works additionally play on the human urge to invest abstract forms with nuance, idiosyncrasy and error, a kind of painterly analogue for the development of so-called “natural language” models. There’s surging art-world interest in Asia’s “neglected” modernists, including women artists. What’s much less common are artists like Chua, engaging with that heritage practically, in critical but hands-on ways, discovering what modernist forms and ideas can do and say in the present.