The Circus of the Fantastic

Drawing Circus by Lim Shing Ee

In an art world dominated by provocative, strident imagery embedded with heavy political content, the works of Lim Shing Ee come as a pleasant relief. It’s a mad, mad world we live in, but in some ways, it can also be immensely fun. A dose of childlike play is what the works of Lim offers the world-weary urban dweller. A dose, for it is the economy and subtle restraint of Lim’s works that elicit so much wonder and joy.

This sense of a poetically contained delight and quiet internal rapture is best seen in Lim’s earlier works in ink and paper, featuring the fantastical creatures and objects that have become recurring motifs in her oeuvre. Her works in the two-dimensional form are a testament to the deftness and confidence of an artist working with a medium so soft, delicate and yet all the more unforgiving at the same time. In Drawing Circus, the artist’s solo exhibition now running at Sculpture Square, we witness as the artist materialises her imaginative realm as a complete, immersive environment, transmogrifying the chapel gallery into a Circus of the Fantastic.

The “Fantastic” appears to the most accurate term to describe the imagery employed by Lim. In fact, innumerable comparisons can be established with fantastic art works throughout art history as well as in contemporary culture, ranging from the rich, wondrous and unearthly creations of Hieronymus Bosch to the delightfully bizarre creations of Hayao Miyazaki. Crucially, the fantasy of Lim’s world is not uncanny to the point of being grotesque. In fact, there is a magical realism that persuades us of the imagined world’s veracity and appeal. It is an imagined yet familiar landscape existing on the very fringes of visible reality.

As previously mentioned, the hallmark of Lim’s work is its economy. The visual detailing is minimal and the images are generalised to the point of arbitrary formlessness. We see splats of liquid-like forms splattered on the ground and cartoon-like cloud forms suspended indifferently above our heads. Little mouse holes that seem to lead to another world adorn the walls. A huge, black fork tongue unrolls from a porthole window. Despite its monstrous proportions and menacing connotations, it appears like an innocuous playmate in Lim’s whimsical playroom. Other strange, flat and three or four-legged forms idle sporadically around the gallery space. We also see a brown, two-legged and faceless creature sit placidly atop a wooden, plant-like structure. It seems to be staring ahead at the long string stretched across the gallery, which suggests the vague possibility of flight. But evidently, the furry critter is still and does not appear to be contemplating flight… or is it?

Lim’s minimalism works in an enchanting way that imparts an air of stillness to the environment that is however, pregnant with a latent sense of possibility. While her furry critters are faceless, nebulous and ostensibly static, a potential for animation and narrative is always suggested in subtle ways. In fact, within the framed drawings lined up along the right side of the gallery, we witness the performative tensions of the circus act manifested in the little gestures of this family of strange animals. Precarious balancing acts can be seen in a number of these portraits. The spotlight is on them as the one-legged critter takes on the tightrope while its four-legged siblings balance themselves atop one another. In other drawings, balloons, blown to one side by the strong gales, appear on the verge of take off into the boundless world beyond the paper.

Perhaps it is the visual simplicity of the installation that leaves so much room for imagination to wonder in free play. The simultaneous formlessness and veracity of the world and the constant interplay between stillness and movement create an ethereal environment reminiscent of the world of a hypnagogic mind. This is a world that lies tentatively between the blinding light of wakefulness and the absorbing depths of sleep.

Detail of drawing

But the simplicity and sparseness of this world also does feel a little empty and incomplete. Something seems to have been lost in the transporting of this strange world from its origins in ink and paper into the cavernous interiors of the chapel gallery. The interactions with the architectural features of the chapel gallery, while present, appear feeble and at times, tokenistic. As we meander and revolve around the denizens of the gallery space, it becomes progressively clear that this Circus of the Fantastic appears more intimate and persuasive within the compact parameters of the two-dimensional world.

Nevertheless, Drawing Circus is a work that will still enchant. While its minimalism may not endear particularly to those who complain of the work’s seeming pointlessness, to those willing to walk their imaginations along the tightrope or send it aloft on the flying trapeze, this is a world that will charm in small but delightful ways.

Drawing Circus is currently on display at Sculpture Square from 6 February to 7 March 2010. Admission is free. Exhibition images taken by Lim Yingxi and courtesy of Sculpture Square.

Herb & Dorothy Vogel, Who Look

Visiting a gallery can be a thoroughly bewildering experience, particularly for one who writes about and for art. More often than not, this bewilderment arises not as a result of a work’s ineffability, but from the sheer mental clutter of semantical information which confounds one to a state of temporal aphasia. Particularly for one conditioned to approach each piece of work from a more academic perspective, the mental baggage is, at times, onerous. It is practically impossible to judge a work purely for what it is.

And this is why I’m in awe of Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, the eponymous subjects of the documentary, Herb & Dorothy. Over thirty years, the married couple have amassed one of the most important and valuable collections of contemporary art based on whatever means their humble income could afford them. Herbert Vogel, a former postal clerk and his wife, Dorothy, a former librarian, had a total of 4782 pieces of contemporary art works cramped inside the small dwellings of their one-bedroom New York City apartment – a feat that would potentially confound generations of physicists. Their voracious appetite for art collecting amounts to an obsession but what astounds more are the raw, aesthetic instincts that make them such curatorial visionaries, for many of the artists who they supported have gone on to become the whos-whos of contemporary art. Think Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Donald Judd, Chuck Close and Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

Perhaps it is pertinent to qualify “curatorial visionaries” in this particular instance. In fact, the word, “visionary” can be considered inapt, for a visionary is in all sense, a strategist. For Herb and Dorothy, collecting is never a calculated investment. They never did equip themselves with elaborate forecasts of the contemporary art scene. They just collected. They collected as long as they liked it and as long as it was affordable and could fit into their apartment. It seems almost like a bad habit they can’t give up!

Herb and Dorothy Vogel, with their cat

I would call them “collectors of the purest form”, for that is who they are – an ideal. For them, the process of viewing, appreciating and collecting art is unadulterated by the mental baggage of academia or the shrewd, economic pragmatics of art dealership. In the words of artist Lucio Pozzi, Herb and Dorothy “only look, look and look”. In fact, I must highlight that there are little enlightening gems of artistic insight that are uttered by the couple throughout the documentary. Instead, all we hear are trinkets of mundane emotional expression, as the couple enthuse over how “lovely” or “beautiful” a work is. This has an unexpected comic effect at times, given that the objects of the Vogels’ adoration often come in the form of the most esoteric works of Minimalism and Conceptual Art, such as a tiny segment of a rope frayed at both ends. But the intensity of Herb’s gaze upon a work tells you that his compliments are not mere pleasantries that mean nothing. The aesthetic eye through which the couple regards each work of art is one that predates language. They have no need for the linguistic ammunition that art writers equip ourselves with for their appreciation of art is decidedly pre-verbal. As artist Richard Tuttle puts it in the film, in the Vogels, “something goes from the eye to the soul, without going through the brain.” The Vogels’ communication with an art work does not go through any intermediary. It is a direct and pristine form of emotional resonance.

I really hate to be waxing lyrical about abstract and romantic notions of the aesthetic eye. Afterall, some would regard the Vogel’s success as a case of mere serendipity. But the film’s characterisation of its subjects creates such a vivid and endearing portraiture of the odd couple that it is hard not to embrace them for what they appear to be.

Director Megumi Sasaki infuses an easy-going simplicity into the treatment of the film’s unexpected heroes of contemporary art, alternating the most quotidian scenes of the Vogels’ unspectacular daily routines with old footage documenting the evolution of the New York City arts scene as well as interviews with established names of the art world. We learn a bit about the Vogels’ childhoods and livelihoods and the turtles, fishes and cat that form the totality of their domestic lives. We watch with quiet fascination as the straight, vertical frame of Dorothy Vogel travel along the sidewalks of New York City with her hunched and diminutive husband, with slow but steady steps. They take the elevator and carefully navigate their way through darkened corridors to locate the studio where another one of their many artist friends awaits to welcome them again like old pals. The couple is a classic example of the American underdog. Amidst the shifting, turbulent winds of cultural change over the years, the Vogels remain the only constant. They still collect everything they like and can afford. In the sixties, their financial limitations often meant that the more popular, mainstream works of their time were completely out of their reach. But through the power of their collective intuition, they have built up a world-class collection of eccentric objects then made by unknown artists which have now assumed a quasi-mythical status in contemporary art.

A valid criticism of Herb & Dorothy is the fact that the film doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere. Even the contents of the interviews appear repetitive and superficial over time. At times, the repeated emphasis on the couple’s various eccentricities also risk reducing them into caricatured oddballs. There is just so much more we want to know about the Vogels. In essence, there really is not much of a narrative arc that actually traces their developmental progress. But perhaps there isn’t much of a development happening in the first place, for the defining hallmark of the Vogels appears to be their unchanging consistency. They just… collect – in the same way in which Sasaki just films in a way that is as uncritical and as indiscriminate as the subjects she portrays.

Herb and Dorothy Vogel at The Gates in Central Park, New York City

There is a particular scene in the film that precisely sums up the nature of the documentary and the Vogels themselves, in which we see the couple on site at the unfurling of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s land art work, The Gates at New York City Central Park. As the couple walk through the tangerine gates, they marvel at the work’s sublime beauty and casually ponder about the nature of the piece. Should we call this a “happening”? Is the art work the gates itself, or what? It strikes me as the first time that I witness them actually questioning a work on a discursive level, albeit only as a casual thought. It must, however, be highlighted that the Vogels are not ignorant about art at all. In fact, both have always been avid readers of art history. But while we hear them briefly explaining terms such as “Minimalism” at some points in the film, most of the time, they sound like they are merely reciting definitions from textbooks. They seem to have absorbed themselves completely into the art world and bought all its arguments, without a single strand of doubt. They don’t dispute. They don’t question.

But these are the Vogels. They rely not on the repository of art-related knowledge that they store in their minds, but their most visceral aesthetic insights whenever it comes to buying a piece they like. To the Vogels, the beauty of Minimalism does not lie in the intellectual richness and complexities of the discourses that revolve extrinsically around the work, but the intrinsic charm of the work itself. They have no interest in artsy intellectual masturbation. All they need is a visceral, almost animal instinct towards the aesthetic. In the words of the some of the artists interviewed, Herb and Dorothy are the “mascots” of their “habitat” that is the art world.

Herb and Dorothy Vogel at the National Gallery of Art

The Vogels have never sold a single piece throughout all those years of incessant, compulsive collecting. In 1992, they donated a vast majority of their entire collection, which is worth millions today, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the very place where Herb gave Dorothy her first art lesson. And indeed, what is most moving about the Vogels is not their unbelievably altruistic act of philanthropy that has defined their legacy but the underlying narratives about love. Herb and Dorothy is a love story about an extraordinary bond between two individuals which has produced one of the greatest and purest expressions of the love that has ever existed between art and humanity.

Herb & Dorothy was an event of the Design Film Festival 2010, which ran from 20 to 30 January 2010 at Sinema Old School.

Change We Can Believe?

The production staged by The Necessary Stage (TNS) for the annual M1 Singapore Fringe Festival, is by any measure, a deeply problematic piece of theatre. The promotional posters for the play radiate uneasily with pro-government utopianism, with the main cast leaping with joy at the Marina Barrage, against the city skyline that has been so often been emblematised as the definitive image of first world Singapore. Even the blurb appears to have been ripped off a government pamphlet, sprinkled with cringeworthy phrases like “traditional family” and “alternative lifestyles”.

I felt guarded even during the post-show dialogue. Was this another one of the trickeries of contemporary art – leftover gimmicks from last year, along the lines of that mysterious painter and those illuminating zoological curiosities? A member of the audience curtly questioned why they were even reiterating pro-government rhetoric that we hear blared into our ears on a daily basis, particularly since the stage has always been viewed as the domain of alternative expression. Do we really need to be educated about the threats of “socially irresponsible behaviours”? Or is that even the playwright’s intention?

But perhaps it is this bewildering nature of ______ Can Change, written by Haresh Sharma and directed by Alvin Tan, that is the production’s ultimate value. The more perplexed and undecided it positions itself to be, the better. Even as it unapologetically preaches pro-government rhetoric, the play is essentially a deeply subversive piece. Among the droves of the educated, progressive and possibly more affluent members of Singaporean society seated comfortably before the stage, self-assured of their liberal qualifications and quietly relishing their membership within the nation’s forward-thinking, open-minded culturati, many were left visibly confounded and unsettled. Their formidable bastion of liberal values had been given a slight, unexpected jolt, by a series of anecdotes affirming conservative, pro-government stances no less. How is that remotely possible?

The festival publication describes the production as a series of three plays about change. But it is really just two short plays and a powerpoint presentation, with the cast playing multiple characters in each play. The bold experimentation and politically charged content characteristic of TNS is curiously absent. In fact, structurally, everything unfolds in such a straightforward, simplistic and predictable fashion typical of an educational school play that the whole experience becomes a little too surreal for comfort.

The first play, Singles Can Change, features Siti Khalijah as Gillian, a young, independent single who eventually reassesses her views towards marriage after meeting a bachelor, played by Chua Enlai, at an event organised by the Social Development Unit. She not only marries, but becomes a complete convert, becoming a kind of pro-family ambassador. In fact, by the end of the play, we see her seated amidst a panel, taking questions from the audience, cheerfully affirming her belief in the traditional family.

It is followed by the next play, Homosexuals Can Change, in which we watch Rodney Oliveiro’s character experience a personal, familial and spiritual crisis as he struggles to confront his sexual orientation. Distressed by the pressures from his mother, played by Nora Samosir and his crisis of faith, he is determined to become heterosexual, even if it requires measures as drastic as electro-therapy. He eventually abandons his boyfriend for a girl, much to the relief and approval of his mother.

The last play, Marxists Can Change, is essentially a chronological presentation of TNS’ history from its troubled days of being branded as a Marxist group to present times when it is deemed to have been “rehabilitated” from its socially deviant ways.

The change that occurs in each of the three works fundamentally involves a conflict between personal choice and social duty. And what seems to triumph eventually is the deliberate social engineering so often employed by the establishment. While many of these decisions involve deeply personal choices, “the government can help steer these choices”, as a line in the play goes. This is social engineering at its most efficient and bizarre, in which personality switches can occur as quickly as a powerpoint transition.

While Tan has explicitly stated that the play is decidedly non-satirical (and in fact it does appear at times that it consciously avoids being so), it is difficult to take his words seriously when parts of the play are so painfully cringeworthy. Powerpoint presentations dominate the show and it is tough not to cringe at those with the logo of a government statutory board emblazoned on it and the transparently euphemistic language used.

The challenge is made even more daunting by flawed delivery, particularly in terms of the acting which comes across, at times, as unconvincing and one-dimensional, particularly in the case of Singles Can Change. The image of a pregnant Gillian seated in a panel amidst the snug comfort of her husband and aunt, with an unbearably placid, contended smile on her face is far too caricatured to be taken seriously, whatever the intentions of the playwright. It also doesn’t help that the plays are narratively weak. Each seems to holler, “Yes we can!” with unfounded optimism, without actually illuminating us on the hows. All we see are heated arguments followed by an abrupt time-lapse during which change has miraculously happened off stage.

However, to take another perspective, the perplexing, incongruous mingling of (perceived) satire and anti-satire serves the play well in unexpected ways. After all, it is the play’s deliberate problematisation of itself and its messages that forms the core of its criticality. As an audience, we are left bamboozled by the play’s utter indecision of itself, constantly reassessing our prior interpretations, reconsidering the propriety of our last laugh, readjusting our lenses and eventually reexamining some of the fundamental beliefs that we hold on to so tenaciously, enabling a deeply self-reflexive process that endures beyond the play.

In fact, despite the fact that many of the messages insinuated have previously been repeated ad nauseam, some of them genuinely inspire reflection and reassessment, to the extent that we begin to recognise a partial legitimacy in the conservative assertions we previously abhorred so vehemently. The production’s greatest success lies in how it has managed not only to refashion conservative attitudes as alternative, but as one that warrants thoughtful consideration. After all, isn’t it generally true that children bring joy to the family? And while not all will agree with the trite “happy family” ending in Homosexuals Can Change, the sequence that shows the mother heartbroken and devastated by her son’s coming out is genuinely poignant. Are the post-Stonewall practices of the liberal West entirely viable within a more conservative Asian context?

For a production determined to engage its audience on such a deeply critical level, sensitive acting that leaves sufficient imaginative room to enable multiplicitious and even conflicting readings is of paramount importance. Perhaps this is where the second play fares slightly better than the first. There is a degree of nuance in Oliveiro’s delivery such that even as he concludes that his switch to heterosexuality was successful and ultimately beneficial, we remain ambivalent and undecided. (Is he genuinely happy or was that a tinge of regret that I had noticed?)

______ Can Change is a play entirely directed towards the liberal, open-minded culturati of Singapore. While aesthetically bland and narratively flawed, its very existence provokes self-reflection and conversation on every level, questioning what it truly means to be a liberal. For a play that can be too easily dismissed as simplistic if not for TNS’ reputation, it serves as a timely reminder that the “enlightened” segment of the population has perhaps guarded the liberal-conservative divide with a little too much complacency and zeal that it has at times become culpable of the bigotry that it so fervently persecutes.

______ Can Change was an event of the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2010, which is taking place from 13 to 24 January 2010. The production played at the National Museum Gallery Theatre from the 13 to 16 January 2010.

Java’s Machine Mystified

Java, the War of Ghosts (2009), Installation

The title of the exhibition is assertively paradoxical – Java’s Machine: Phantasmagoria. “Phantasmagoria” was originally used to refer to a modified magic lantern, invented in eighteenth century France that projected ghostly images for amusement. It connotes a disembodiment and abstraction that belongs to the realm of the fantastical and shape-shifting. The machine, conversely, is firmly rooted in the concrete, material world, amidst the mechanical drone of everyday urban life.

The artist, Jompet, harped on enthusiastically over how his works were conceived as a celebration of postcolonial cultural mingling in Javanese culture, a syncretism worth celebration for its “unruly beauty”. This left me puzzled, for what strikes me most about Jompet’s mysterious phantom beings is a quiet voice of futility, a painful inadequacy and the incompleteness of the assimilation. It asserts not the savage poeticism of cultural shape-shifting, but its own self-doubt and uncertainty, like a moulted animal uneasy in its new skin. Are we interpreting the works via two highly disparate postcolonial cultural lenses?

Much of Indonesian contemporary art has attempted to negotiate for a postcolonial cultural identity that emerges from the juxtapositions, contestations and eventual reconciliation of disparate cultural histories. Java’s geographical position, in particular, has made it a nexus of cultural interchange historically. It is particularly difficult to appreciate the strange beings and happenings in Jompet’s works without understanding the cultural context it situates itself within.

Love song for new Java (2009), Single channel video

Java’s civilisational history is culturally complex, having went through the reigns of powerful Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms in its early history prior to the advent of Islamic influences and the subsequent colonialism by the Dutch. While a huge majority of the population are presently adherents of the Islamic faith, their ethnic religion, known as Kejawen, is a synthesis of influences from Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. It is the open-ended, inclusive nature of Kejawen that fascinates me. Contrary to our expectations of the word “religion”, Kejawen’s emphasis is not on dogma or eschatology. It is a life-based, as opposed to a death-based religion, that emphasises subjectivity and introspection. While it concerns itself primarily with the mystical and metaphysical and eschews the earthly, Kejawen is essentially a highly flexible and open-ended set of beliefs. Consequently, instead of viewing the new and contradictory as an adulteration of cultural purity and thus vehemently resisting them, the Javanese attempts syncretism, integrating them into the cosmological order of existing, long-standing mythologies, traditions and worldviews.

Jompet’s works address two major cultural-historical shock points that directly interrogates and challenges the universality, sustainability and ontological authority of the existing Javanese spiritualism – the Dutch colonialism and the advent of modern technology. The methodology of syncretism, it suggests rather obliquely and paradoxically, is familiarization via mystification through a series of esoteric rites and rituals.

War of Java, do you remember? #2 (2008), Single channel video

In War of Java, do you remember? #2, we see a visual landscape reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, in which industrial workers are physically and mentally enslaved by the gears of the industrial machinery. There are several reasons why the advent of industrialism qualifies as a major cultural shock point, particularly in the context of Javanese spiritualism. The machine is, in every sense, a puzzling alien. It is a phantom object that emerged from the abyss of the human imagination, with neither autonomy nor sentience, and yet is capable of becoming a surrogate to human labour. Where can it fit in the Javanese spiritual universe?

Jompet’s video projection may appear like an antagonistic inversion of the relationship between man and machine as explored in Chaplin’s film, but the intention, I believe, is otherwise. In the work, a singular figure appears to be in a trance, moving erratically amidst a convoluted landscape of mechanical harshness. He brandishes a whip and in his trance, he flagellates and appears to attempt to tame the surrounding machines. The ritual appears like a rite of passage, to mystify the machine, blunting their mechanized nature and assimilating it into the provincial Javanese spiritual world. I don’t think Jompet intended for this to be interpreted as a retaliatory effort to subordinate the machine, but more of a mutually generative process of reembodying the alien as a spiritual being, reconstituting the cold, hard steel surfaces as the organic flesh of the reembodied factory. Such ideas will probably come across as strangely esoteric to the uninformed viewer, which is inevitable, given that self-indulgence is probably the defining quality of a trance.

Video projection of Java, the War of Ghosts (2009)

The centrepiece of the exhibition is the installation, Java, the War of Ghosts. We see a group of uncanny, phantom beings, lined up in a fashion akin to a military parade. Their bodies are absent, instead all we see are vacant military apparel, guns and drums suspended in midair. On the wall is a video projection featuring the silhouette of a man lashing his whip, with the sound synchronised with the beating of the drums at the parade on the ground. The apparel itself is a heterogenous composite, with parts largely inherited from the Dutch military apparel. The mechanical and electrical parts that support the installation are left plainly exposed, almost like a deliberate revelation.

It is difficult to identify any celebratory sign in an installation which strikes me as deeply bizarre. The phantom soldiers appear vaguely like cultural vanguards, safeguarding traditional culture, but yet they are essentially mere puppets, suspended on strings and controlled by a shamanistic being projected on the wall. Under the clinical glow of the white wall gallery, the installation at times appears like a badly propped horror set. Like the deliberate, persistent flagellation that is a recurring motif in Jompet’s works, the installation brings to mind not the kaleidoscopic beauty of syncretism, but the painful incongruity of a willed assimilation and deliberate amalgamation. Like an exquisite corpse forced into existence that is far too strange and exquisite to be believable.

New myth for new family (2009), Installation

At the corner of the exhibition space lies a constructed tree that charts the cultural genealogy of Java, as part of the installation, New myth for new family. Little metallic winged creatures lie perched on the branches flapping their wings discordantly, each bearing a name of a family member of the genealogical tree. At the roots are Adam and Eve and at the top, we see the Javanese king. The “myth” in the title refers to the reauthoring of history as instructed by the king at that time to enable a coherent, cogent historical worldview that justifies his authority and that can accommodate the existing cultural realities of that time.

With dried leaves scattered at the foot of the barren tree, the image is anything but celebratory. But neither does it exude any explicit sign of vehement antagonism. The tree stands aloof amidst the cacophony of the flapping mechanical spare parts, seemingly equally undecided about the meaning of its existence. Like the other works in the gallery, it remains mystified, strange and distant – culturally, intellectually and emotionally. Something seems to have been lost in translation.

Java’s Machine: Phantasmagoria is currently on display at Osage Singapore from 14 November 2009 to 7 February 2010.

The Confounded Composer

(from left) Tammy L Wong as the mistress, Sonia, Leslie Tan as Wendell and Tan Kheng Hua as Madeleine

The narrative set up is dubiously derivative. The tormented, condemned artistic genius. The charismatic rogue and his multiple scandals. The secrets and betrayals. The sexual escapades.

The plot of The Composer, written by Ken Kwek and directed by himself and Tan Kheng Hua, sounds like a mish mash of the most recycled staples of Broadway and Hollywood. The eponymous character, with his multitudes of temptations, bears a suspicious resemblance to the scandalous film director, Guido Contini of Nine while the raunchy premise, hedonistic flirtation and liberal, sexual banter is characteristic of urban relationship dramas in the likes of Sex and the City and Closer.

Better known as the cellist of part of the internationally acclaimed T’ang Quartet, Leslie Tan plays Wendell Ang, the eponymous composer, in an overhyped acting debut. The play opens in a cell, where the musical genius is held for the murder of his wife, Madeleine, played by Tan Kheng Hua. The play unfolds as a series of interrogations between Wendell and his deceased wife, as the latter presses on, almost self-abusively, for every detail of her husband’s multiple extramarital affairs.

The play has its moments and noteworthy performances, but as a whole, it falls flat not because of its unoriginal plot, but its confused direction and unfulfilled potentialities. In all honesty, a part of the plot’s premise vaguely excited me. At the centre of the play is a composer, a musical genius, which can only mean that music will, in one way or another, play a central role. While not expecting an extravagant, lavish musical song and dance, music and choreography take a surprisingly peripheral position in this production. All we see is the dimly illuminated, lone cello and the occasional performance. As a dark, sexual drama, the sleaze factor is disappointingly controlled and the flirtation vapidly tame. Where are the sordid details and raunchiness we have been made to anticipate? Even as a melodrama, the much hankered for sentimentality remains undelivered.

It is difficult to ascertain where the play is really heading and most of the time, it seems that it is equally undecided about itself, lost in limbo among the different genres that it ambitiously attempts to take on. It vacillates precariously between being a more gritty, warts-and-all portraiture of base human desire and a theatrical, sensitive and measured articulation of human psychological complexity and eventually ends up feeling incomplete and unsatisfying.

A large part of the play’s anaemia probably also comes from the lacklustre performance by Leslie Tan. The Composer works best as a character study, but the deliberate and awkward motions of Tan and his perpetually (and stubbornly) pained expressions and speech results in a character that comes across as insipid and one-dimensional. Particularly with the utterly gratuitous lit cigarette brandished in his hand like an indispensible prop, Tan appears more like an addict, rather than a tortured, guilt-ridden wunderkind. There are times when he attempts to play the irresistible rogue and pull a Clive Owen, but they often fail to charm. The musician seduces better with his music, than his utterances, apparently.

The best moments of the play come from the ladies, some of whom are severely underused and too often relegated to becoming human props adorning the set. Tan Kheng Hua is bitterly spiteful with the right amount of vitriol as the betrayed wife. The only letdown is the apparent lack of chemistry with her stage husband, who appears to be in a different play altogether. Wendell’s first mistress, Sonia, played by Tammy L Wong, provides a refreshing foil to Madeline’s dark sophistication and wariness with her unguarded innocence and youthful idealism. While the rest of the ladies are largely forgettable, undeveloped and redundant, the most heartbreaking performance of the play comes from Lez Ann Chong, the young actress who plays the college student, Anne, whose life is devastated by a moment of passion with the teacher and composer she so worships. Chong exudes a charming simplicity as the adolescent girl determined to be taken as more serious than she is. She melds innocence with a willed maturity and intelligence, silently relishing the covert thrill of participating in a tryst and of her venture into the dangerous terrain of adult emotion. When she forcefully withdraws herself away from the relentlessly advancing Wendell, she does so with a look of shock and a defeated voice. It is a moment of self-reckoning, a belated acknowledgement of the horror of innocence lost through foolish adventurism.

Two particular things annoy me about the production, both of which happen to be my pet peeves. First, cigarettes. On stage no less. How much can a lit cigarette illuminate character really? More often than not, the only unintended outcome is its glamourisation. Second, I also take a particular issue with the tokenistic injections of local references. While not abundant, scattershot references stick out like a sore thumb for a narrative that is conceived to be universally accessible, rather than culturally bounded.

The Composer is essentially one of the most conventional treatments that we can expect from such a plot set up. There are visible efforts at differentiation, reinvention and experimentation but they are too often negated by excessive caution and indecision, characteristics that are unfortunately becoming symptomatic of local experimental theatre.

The Composer played at the Esplanade Theatre Studio from the 16 to 20 December 2009.

Musing Spaces

East & West Series: Globalisation (2008-2009), Justin Lee, Fibre glass

The National Museum of Singapore has come a long way. My faint memories of the museum before its redevelopment and rebranding appear more like ghastly images from a cluttered and badly propped movie set for an ancient horror  tale. It almost reeks of a dusty, antiquated past, with its artifacts forcefully resuscitated from a medieval oblivion, like zombies displaced in space and time.

Museums started out as intensely private, personal collections of curios opened only to a privileged audience. In fact its precursors were the cabinets of curiosities that emerged in the sixteenth century. Even as museums eventually became institutions of public character that documented national consciousness, it has never quite demolished its alienating air of exclusivity, until its belated contemporary update recently. With each gingerly embalmed artifact encased in glass enclosures and protected by all kinds of contraptions, the image of a private, inaccessible vault of prized possessions belonging to some dignitary persisted in many museums for most part of history.

Like many other museums in the world, the revamp of the National Museum of Singapore in 2006 marked a watershed in local cultural history. The newly revamped interiors are the result of a classy melding of the old and the contemporary. More importantly, the extensive usage of new media and interactive technologies as well as the increased emphasis in fostering communal dialogue, have significantly allowed it to shed its authoritarian and aloof facade, to emerge as a fluid and participatory intellectual and cultural space. The museum is no longer just the possessive custodian of national treasures as it does not concern itself purely with the artifactual, but also with the generative possibilities of the human interactions that occur within and beyond its physical boundaries.

Without this context of a more open-ended and flexible museum space, it would not have been possible for the four site-specific art works on display now at the museum to materialise. The exhibition, Lost in the City, features the works of emerging young local artists. The works are strategically situated at various accessible areas of the museum, at times integrating into the museum’s architectural space. The physical, cultural and sociohistorical bodies of the museum are central to our appreciation of the works, particularly since the museum is a repository of the knowledge, experiences and memories of the large city it resides within. The works that leave the deepest impressions are those that articulately interrogate and contest its immediate surroundings, effectively constructing a new understanding of the tensions between a nation undecided about its existence and the museum that assumes its existence and documents its sociohistorical consciousness.

National Columbarium of Singapore (2009), Michael Lee, Bristol board

Michael Lee’s National Columbarium of Singapore confronts us with a particular urgency, particularly against the backdrop of recent political events concerning our perpetual identity crisis as a nation.

This is where most people make a mistake…I have tried to explain that we are different. We are a city. We are not a country.

- Minister for Law K Shunmugam, at the New York State Bar Association International Section’s meeting

The model-and-text installation consisting of constructed models of demolished, fictitious and unbuilt architectural structures suspended from the ceiling incisively highlights our anxieties towards our identity as a nation as constructed by official history and government rhetoric. While “city” and “country” constitutes a physical, geographical and demographic space, the “nation” is entirely an imagined community, perceived as homogenous and as possessing a set of values that are embraced by each individual in the community. These terms are often erroneously used interchangeably and carelessly, often to served various political ends.

The nation is a politically charged concept. Who determines its nature? The people or the establishment? Singaporean nationhood, as articulated by the officials, has been notoriously arbitrary, mutating according to the whims and fancies of those in power, to be brandished as a political instrument whenever the need arises. Consequently, the physical city or country is often employed as rhetorical muscle to legitimatise and concretise the abstract ideological constructs of nationhood. This can clearly be seen in the binaristic ideological categories of the “cosmopolitan” and the “heartlander” so often raised in public rhetoric. The former gains materialisation in the national imagination via images of the iconised city skyline while the latter is intractably associated with the unruffled comforts of the HDB estates. Architectural imagery are central to the conceptions and justifications of these questionably monolithic categories.

National Columbarium of Singapore (2009), Michael Lee, Bristol board

Lee’s provocative installation piece appropriates the reliance on architectural imagery to challenge this pigeonholing of national identity. This is the columbarium of not just a physical city but a nation. Represented in the text and models are the physical structures, demolished, fictitious or unbuilt, that have fallen through the slips of national imagination and official history simply because they do not adhere to the officially articulated constructs of nationhood. Inscribed along the glass atrium stairwell are written records of these architectural structures, which include their lifespans, physical location and an interesting anecdote from various stakeholders. The installation integrates so seamlessly with the museum that we assume these nondescript texts to be, in accordance with the historical authority of the museum, entirely factual until we come across the incredulous. When did Singapore ever have a National Snow Factory or a Singapore Pencil Tower?! This melding of fact and fiction critically challenges the authenticity of official history as chronicled by national museums.

The demolished buildings are represented by 45 scaled models that are suspended from the ceilings like spectral beings making their way to the celestial realm, wrapped in an air of mystery, nostalgia and frustrated possibility. Like the unbuilt and the fictitious, they are the rejects of national history. (Were they too ugly, frivolous or deviant?) Collectively, they represent the death of a nation expressed as a plurality.

Located some distance away are Justin Lee’s fibre glass sculptures in his work, East & West Series: Globalisation. The work could very well have been a part of an exhibition called Lost in the Museum instead. Positioned at the glass passage that connects the old, colonial building with the new extension of the museum, Lee’s sculptures appear lost in the transitory passages of time.

East & West Series: Globalisation (2008-2009), Justin Lee, Fibre glass

There is a small army of stout, diminutive Chinese warriors, modelled after the Terra Cotta Warriors of China. But unlike their derelict, crumbling originals, they are modern and fashionable, tuning in to the latest hits on their headphones. And there are the svelte Chinese court ladies flanking the army of little men. One poses elegantly like the next Miss Universe, while her contemporaries show off their latest purchases – a handbag and a notebook, both coloured red. Their ethnicity is grossly exaggerated. Their eyes are slanted and slit-like, invoking the racial slur of the chink. The facial expressions of the warriors are painfully strained and the rigid angularity of their form conjures the image of a population terrorised into submission. Farther away, two cranes appear lost among disposed Coca Cola cans, trapped within a pool of red, crass commercialism. Red, the auspicious colour of the Chinese is subverted here as the colour of vulgar decadence.

East & West Series: Globalisation (2008-2009), Justin Lee, Fibre glass

These mutated replicas of historical artifacts are cleverly situated at a location of immense architectural and historical significance. The Glass Passage is notably the only “modern intrusion” allowed by the Urban & Redevelopment Authority during the redevelopment of the museum, designed to blend into the old neo-Palladian architecture. With this new structure, one is able to view the exterior façade of the museum’s historic Dome from within the museum walls for the first time, enabling a clear, illuminating view of a historical past via a contemporary lens.

Such interactions between interior and exterior spaces, private and public realms, the old and the new and the East and West in Lee’s work comprehensively capture the intercultural interactions that characterise globalisation, where both provincial and imported ideologies are constantly being reviewed, contested and occasionally, assimilated. The artist’s take is frustratingly ambiguous, but that only serves to reflect our collective uncertainties about the exact value of globalisation.

Full Moon & Foxes (2009), Genevieve Chua, Video Installation

Full Moon & Foxes, Genevieve’s Chua’s sequel to Raised as a Pack of Wolves, continues the artist’s examination of female adolescence. What puzzles me about the inclusion of this video installation in this exhibition is the irrelevance of site-specificity to this work. Situated in the enclosed and darkened room, the work essentially exist in an insular world of its own, bearing little or no association with its exhibition site or the Singaporean city.

The three panel video projection is essentially a montage of photographs and videos of female adolescents in the depths of the forests. References to nature are recurrent in her works, which essentially serve as compelling metaphors of the primitive, irrational and unfamiliar impulses that overwhelm us during adolescence.

Nature, ironically, is presented as uncanny and even artificial. The forest is a dangerous and claustrophobic space, appearing more like a subterranean world in which the girls can find no escape. The video unfolds like a horror movie – the bodily movements, if any, are slow and lobotomising, while the fading into blackness between each image insinuates an implicit, insidious danger. The surreal lighting and colours collectively contribute to an unsettling sense of artifice – the forest is no longer the domain of nature, for it has been transfigured into a theatre of concentrated adolescent awareness.

The brilliance of Chua’s works lies in a precise use of metaphors to articulate the most abstract ideas concerning the unknown. Here, the sinister full moon symbolises fulfilment – a coming of age fraught with fear, uncertainty and terror.

The work as it appears above would appear complete and satisfying on its own. Unfortunately, a set of barely visible arrows along the walls lead us to a hidden part of the installation, where we are invited to put on headphones to listen to a playlist of music that probably belongs to an “emokid”. It is almost akin to shoving teenage angst up our ears. In other words, emotional overload.

From Green to Brown to Black to Brown to Green (2009), Joo Choon Lin & Chun Kai Qun, Stop motion photography installation

Situated at the back of the Baroque staircase is a stop motion photography installation by Joo Choon Lin and Chun Kai Qun. Tucked away in the corner, the work resembles a child’s backyard experiment. In fact, it is this child-like quality in Joo and Chun’s previous works that creates a fascinating and original visual language. Their collaborative piece, From Green to Brown to Black to Brown to Green, which consists of a stop motion animation by Joo and a diorama by Chun, unfortunately, comes across as incoherent and childish. The animation shows the plight of a community of creatures whose homes are threatened by urban development.

From Green to Brown to Black to Brown to Green (2009), Joo Choon Lin & Chun Kai Qun, Stop motion photography installation

While the diorama was used as a scene in the animation, its physical presence in the installation adds little value to the work. The installation is built to resemble a construction site and consequently a safety barrier is erected in front of the work. This proves to be a bad move as it ultimately deprives us of the chief source of satisfaction dioramas provide. We are put at a distance from the diorama and our inner gluttons for the finer details are left utterly dissatisfied.

Lost in the City is positioned as an exhibition in which the artists “play out their responses to the city”. However, it is difficult to conceive of an overarching narrative that the exhibition brings across due to the fact that there are effectively only four highly disparate works on display. Curatorially, the exhibition appears as lost as its title suggests. The collective effort at engaging with the complexities of city life comes across as anemic and this inadequacy stems from the fact that there exists so much more room for more critical and engaging works to be displayed.

Nevertheless, at least three out of the four works are illuminating pieces of art works by themselves. And the dynamic interactions that some of these works achieve with its environment is an encouraging testament to the museum’s potential as a viable site where art, ideas and conversations can be generated.

Lost in the City is an event of the Singapore Art Show 2009 and is currently on display at the National Museum of Singapore from 21 August to 3 January 2010. Admission is free.

The Finer Things

Bathing in the last light of Polaris (2004), Thomas Doyle, Mixed-media sculpture

Size matters. Even the most mundane and insipid object can inspire awe by its magnification. In this sound-bite society where our mental spaces are cluttered by an overload of innumerable, incidental, incoherent and ultimately inconsequential pieces of information, we have become so desensitised to the subtleties of our aesthetic realities that only the spectacular, sensational and scintillating can capture our attention. Given this contemporary condition, going big has become the predominant strategy for practically all fields of cultural production.

At the present moment, the Burj Dubai has dwarfed the Taipei 101 at 818 metres. Several kilometres away lies The World, a man-made archipelago of islands constructed to resemble the world map. At the other side of the world, land artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude are moving one step closer to their ambition of wrapping the universe as they attempt to suspend 5.9 miles of silvery fabric above the Arkansas River. And next month will see the release of Avatar, the film with the largest budget in the history of cinema, directed by budget buster James Cameron of Titanic fame no less.

But as much as the gargantuan thrills us visually and imaginatively, its diametric opposite, the miniature, is similarly able to excite us and inspire awe. And that seems to be the assertion put across by Eniminiminimos: Artists Who Make Things Small II, the exhibition curated by Michael Lee that is now running at the Jendela at the Esplanade. It presents itself as the antithesis to the ongoing “size fetish” in the contemporary world and unsurprisingly, some of the works displayed are so infinitesimal that they are only visible under the magnifying glass. Works like these inevitably reinforce a personal opinion of mine that these days art can only be horrifically big, or ridiculously small. Nobody bothers about anything in between. This leads to the bigger question – what’s with this perpetual obsession with superlatives of scale anyway?

Essentially, our understanding of scale is an ontological necessity. It is via this cognizance that we conceive of our own relative position within the larger cosmic order. In the same light, we create forms with anomalies in scale as a means of reconciling the tensions that may emerge in our attempts at comprehending our cosmic place.

The Sagrada Família: In construction since 1882 and projected to be completed only by 2026

The monument and the miniature, despite being polar opposites, fundamentally arise from our negotiations with our perceived smallness in the universe. As much as it would be poetically symmetrical for our proclivity to create small forms to emerge from an egocentric perception of greatness and vice versa, contemporary realities point to a dominant consciousness of our pathetic insignificance and our perceived displacement from the centre of the universe, particularly in a time when increasingly advanced space technologies paradoxically only serve to emphasise the sheer magnitude of the unknown. Estranged in the wilderness, we gaze into the canopy of stars with an overwhelming, ineffable sense of awe that is uneasily melded with a latent terror – the terror of an ultimately unknown, formless and boundless universe that is beyond the comprehension of our mortal minds. In the words of Immanuel Kant, it is the sublime which is “absolutely great”.

To cope with these unsettling anxieties, artists either choose to monumentalise or to miniaturise. The former strives for transcendence by attempting to surpass our human limitations and imagined boundaries via an ambitious, vertical conquest while the latter attempts containment, painstakingly reinforcing boundary and delineation. The former sets his sights on the impossible and thus feels perpetually unaccomplished and unfulfilled while the latter emphasises completeness and an immaculate attention to detail. The former is often fuelled by an impetuous anxiety that is coupled by a tentative hubris while that latter is cautious, controlled and calculating. Despite being driven by radically different temperaments and divergent methods of transcendence and containment, these two stereotypes of artists are identical in the way they both attempt to control and author a reality that remains so perturbingly unknown.

Dissolution of entities (2006), Thomas Doyle, Mixed-media sculpture

Perhaps the works that manifest most explicitly this consciousness of our inherent smallness in the cosmic order are the two sculptures by Thomas Doyle. There is a quiet desperation that characterises the intricate worlds of Doyle’s art. In Dissolution of entities, we see an adult and a child being consumed by the ground. They are frozen in time, permanently embalmed in their striding postures. Only parts of their bodies are visible. The child, in fact, remains mostly hidden in the detritus of nature. Meanwhile, in Bathing in the last light of Polaris, an estranged man is in mortal peril, as he clings onto a piece of driftwood to stay afloat in a vast, open sea. The tactile complexity of the surrounding waves renders the man almost imperceptible as he appears consumed by the seething ferment of the waters.

The estranged man actually brings to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where all the powers of the universe have appeared to be concentrated upon the sadistic punitive torment of the guilt-ridden mariner. The works of Doyle represents our most primal and irrational bodily fears pertaining to the caprice of the natural world – the fears of shipwrecks, bottomless pits, being swallowed by quick sand, being buried alive and being crushed by rocks. The miniature size of the work creates a compact image that is all the more intense. It appears like a distant nightmare from our childhoods, utterly far-fetched but profoundly traumatic.

Houses (2006), Suki Chan, Balsa wood and paint

The work is aptly placed in close proximity to Suki Chan’s Houses and Chun Kai Qun’s Nevermind Nirvana, which both possess deep similarities with Doyle’ works thematically. Chan’s work features the similar motif of objects being consumed by their environment. The miniature houses in her installation appear to be sinking into the gallery floor, in an uncanny subversion of the home as a place of familial comfort. In fact, only a tiny edge of the roof is visible for some of these houses. The desolate landscape is deeply reminiscent of the cataclysmic disasters around that world and possesses an almost alarmist caution on the potentiality of an apocalypse.

Nevermind Nirvana (2009), Chun Kai Qun, Diorama installation

Meanwhile, an apocalypse seems to have already occurred in Chun’s dioramic installation. The work is eerily morbid and screams of the expressionistic angst characteristic of Chun’s works. Essentially a forest ravaged by what seems to be a series of disasters, the gore only gets more explicit as you examine the glut of visual details at close proximity. What appear to be the flames of a group of candles are actually miniature human figures on fire. From a distance, the shades of mahogany used on the landscape are uncannily surreal and reminiscent of swollen, infected flesh. The haphazardly rugged landscape also serves to reinforce this image of bodily decay.

Nevermind Nirvana (2009), Chun Kai Qun, Diorama installation

Instinctively, there is an uneasy psychological dissonance as we consider each detail of Chun’s diorama. With each human flame materialised as a physical, tactile object, the miniatures at times gives the semblance of perfectly harmless toys, which coexists disturbingly with the context of abject human decay and violence. At times, the diorama resembles an altar, with the human subjects assuming the roles of sacrificial martyrs – an interpretation that becomes sinisterly accurate when one learns that the work’s inspiration came from the “suicide woods” at the foot of Mount Fuji. This is nature in its most untamed, capricious and violent form.

While numerous similarities can be drawn among the three works mentioned above, the rest of the works in the gallery appear a little lost in a world of their own, as each of them addresses very different concerns.

The Specimen Bottle Series (2007), Tan Seow Wei, Mixed-media drawing installation

Tan Seow Wei’s The Petri Dish Series, previously seen and reviewed at Valentine Willie Fine Art, is seen here with The Specimen Bottle Series. While the human subjects in the former work are unconscious objects of voyeurism, those in the latter are entirely conscious of the public scrutiny and thus appear rigidly inanimate, vacantly suspended in a specimen bottle and devoid of human agency.

Poetic Crime Series - Tomb Raiders (2009), Tang Kwok Hin, Comics’ books, glass, MDF and anti-theft eye

Tang Kwok Hin’s Poetic Crime Series quite simply, poeticises crime. Encased within glass enclosures are miniature cutouts of human figures from comic strips, supposedly bank safe robbers and tomb raiders, in action, valorised like modern Robin Hoods. The use of the enclosure creates the appearance of a human menagerie. With parts of the glass enclosure obscured, one is only able to peer into the enclosure from certain angles and through peepholes. The presence of this restriction in fact further piques our curiosity and excites our latent temptations towards participating in this fictional realm of glamourised crime.

Poetic Crime Series - Bank Safe Robbers (2009), Tang Kwok Hin, Comics' books, glass containers and mirror

Events (2008), Justin Wong, Flash animation

A similarly comic turn can be observed in Justin Wong’s flash animation, Events. Playing on a small television screen, the animation is as deadpan as its nondescript title. The animation features sequences of peculiar face-offs between big and small people, symbolically representing the contestations of power between the dominated and the dominator, the slave and the master, the human and the omnipotent. A particular sequence even shows a “blow job”, with a little man appearing like a phallic object that thrusts in and out of a giant’s mouth, in an ultimate display of emasculation and submission. With the figures all dressed up in corporate attire, the sequences unfold like uncensored, contemporary updates of fairytales and mythologies, with each sequence often ending with a gory twist that inverses the power dynamics between the big and small people. In one of the ten “events” featured, a cavalcade of little men are seen supporting the body of a giant and lifting him away as a hostage, almost like a scene from Gulliver’s Travels. The body of the giant eventually proves too heavy for the little men to handle and comes crushing down upon them as blood splatters. Ouch.

A Sparrow in the Studio (2008-2009), nofearsam921, Digital video

Such a sense of play can also be seen in nofearsam921’s A Sparrow in the Studio. In his video, the artist attempts to recreate Joao Onofre’s Vulture in the Studio, except that finding a vulture to play the part was a remote possibility for the artist who works in Taiwan. Instead, he roped in a sparrow as a surrogate and recreated the studio in a miniature form. The bewildered sparrow finds itself clumsily enormous in the new environment, ricocheting around the room and often crashing onto the invisible fourth wall. The work addresses issues of mimicry and simulation, but for most of us, it was simply good fun and amusement.

The World Unexposition 1945-2008 (2009), Michael Lee Hong Hwee, Model installation: Shown here is Rem Koolhaas' unbuilt Hyperbuilding.

In Michael Lee’s The World Unexposition 1945-2008, proposed architectural projects that were never realised are recreated as white paper models. With each model created according to the same scale of 1:1000, what we witness upon the plinths is akin to a miniature, autonomous universe alternative to our own. We approach the white phantom-like models with a particular ambivalence. We regard the spectral figures with poignancy as they lay elevated on the plinth like stillborns with a quiet indignance at their miscarriage. Simultaneously, we are excited by the “what ifs” that come to mind with the sense of possibility the imagined cityscape provides.

The exhibition succeeds in expanding the ways we consider the notion of the miniature, compelling us to consider beyond the rigid considerations of physical size and proportion, to contemplate it in terms of the “attitude and strategy of detailed representation”. The intricacies of the miniature necessitate prolonged audience engagement, as we slow down our pace and examine each nook and cranny in detail. They demand a unique form of physical interaction that is deeply experiential, immersive and personal.

Seatings (2005-2009), Cornelia Erdmann, Digital drawing on slide film

My only qualm with the exhibition and its direction is how it appears as primarily an aesthetic exercise in regarding the miniature. With the exception of the works of Doyle, Chun and Chan, the comparatively disparate concerns of most of the other works meant that there was hardly any contextual material available for the audience to engage with the broader issues examined in the works. Some of the works exist more effectively as part of an artist’s retrospective than as a singular piece among works by other artists. Chow Chun Fai’s Repainting Infernal Affairs, for instance, may appear esoteric to one who is unfamiliar with Chow’s oeuvre. The artist’s concerns with regards to the myths surrounding image production and urban life, previously seen at a comprehensive exhibition at Osage Singapore, are inadequately surfaced in a single, representative piece. Meanwhile, Cornelia Erdmann’s Seatings and Daily Desires are such enigmatic art pieces that it is hard to regard them as any more than pretty small things.

But of course, such flaws are literally too minuscule to take anything away from a largely satisfying venture into the world of the miniature. We emerge from Lilliputland feeling a little bigger and with a newfound sensibility for the finer things in life.

Eniminiminimos: Artists Who Make Things Small II is currently on display at the Jendela at the Esplanade from 6 November 2009 to 3 January 2010. Admission is free. Exhibition images courtesy of the curator.

The Menagerie Collapses

Modern Journeys - Flying West (2006), Oil on canvas

He watches on wistfully as the bright, gleaming world of white cumulus clouds passes him by in blitheful indifference. He rests his head on his hand, supporting his massive headgear and the onerous weight that comes with being the “Monkey King”, a title that he had, in the callous hubris of youth, bestowed upon himself. And here he is, still king, tucked away in an airplane cabin as he sets off on yet another journey to the West. He fidgets uneasily in his newly tailored apparel. The seamstress had just realtered them to fit his ever shrinking frame but he still finds them uncomfortably oversized. But his sartorial woes are of the slightest of his priorities when compared with the imperial concerns of this humanoid royalty.

Jaded, he gazes vacantly into the abyss of the world beneath, quietly thankful for such moments of tranquil privacy. He contemplates his future and indulges in a fleeting fantasy of a career switch. But his fatigued mind can no longer accommodate dramatic shifts in his life. It was too troubled by his worldly problems – the pecuniary woes, the unfinished project about the celestial peaches and the recent, puzzling clinical diagnosis of his “anthropomorphism” from the doctors…

The Monkey King is certainly not the only one with the bizarre pathological condition of anthropomorphism, for he has the company of the rest of the denizens at the gallery, all of which are the uncanny creations of local artist David Chan. The show, Hybrid Society – Schizophrenia, appears more like a menagerie of genetic accidents, than an exhibition of contemporary art. The animal-human hybrids on display manifest the most rigid, unfamiliar and unsettling form of anthropomorphism – one not of a seamless integration of man and animal, but a violent yoking together of animal and human anatomy and behaviour.

Androgenie - Baby Rabbit (2009), Mixed media

Anthropomorphism is hardly an original or refreshing concept. In fact, it is so overused in animation today, it is trite to the point of utter banality. But the cute, cuddly critters of today’s animations or the divinely intelligent creatures of mythologies are hardly qualified “anthropomorphs”. Yes, they are visibly animal, but they are hardly human. They are predominantly caricatures, too simplistic for the honorific entitlement to humanity, with their particular animal characteristics singled out for exaggeration, embellishment and exoticisation such that they provide the illusion of humanity.

The works of Chan are decidedly different. They are far from the congenial, smiling mascots of amusement parks. In fact, they strike us as so immediately bizarre and even grotesque that we feel a latent sense of terror. They are so strange not because of their distance from us, but because they are so profoundly human.

Three paintings from Urban Species series (2009), Oil on linen: (from left) Mr Humble, Miss Sincere and Miss Patient

The Monkey King in Modern Journeys – Flying West, expresses an emotion hardly seen even in the most sophisticated of anthropomorphic animated characters – urban existential restlessness. In the Urban Species series, Miss Patient reveals a suppressed ennui and a threateningly imperious dissatisfaction. Meanwhile, Miss Sincere appears simultaneously vulnerable and devious. The serpent gently wipes the tears off the rugged surface of her skin with a handkerchief, in an ambivalent expression of emotional betrayal accompanied by an insidious resilience and an implicit cunning.

The animal-human hybrids in the works of David Chan can hardly be regarded as caricatures, for the range and complexity of emotions expressed are so completely human. They are the true “anthropomorphs”, complex amalgamations of the animal and the human. They perturb the human viewer so immediately and viscerally as they are explicit transgressions of the animal-human boundary that we have tried so hard to magnify and reinforce over centuries of cultural progress. The latent terror lies in how these mutant creatures appear to have decoded the most sophisticated and nuanced of human psychology, and mastered it thoroughly no less!

(from left) Chimerative (2009), Aluminium, fibreglass, hand painted and Centauree (2009), Aluminium, fibreglass, hand painted

Consider the professional feline mother in Chimerative. Dressed in a corporate attire and seated upright in an expression of calm, unwavering regality, the chimera has one hand firmly clasped around her briefcase handle and the other placidly wrapped around her infant child. The polished sheen of the fibreglass emphasises her state of perfection as the monument of female power. She is, disturbingly, the apotheosis of the modern superwoman. Despite being perched at the peak of the professional world, she manages to keep her child in the snug comfort of her arms, effectively demonstrating her mastery of the art of advanced maternity – an art that we thought was exclusively human! Similarly, in Centauree, we see the lion-centaur clearly in a position of dominion and control, with his hands unyieldingly gripping his whip and reins, in an inversion of the slave-master relationship. Here, the beast is the virtuoso of flagellation!

An Inevitable Extinction (2008), Oil on linen

The little freak show that has been assembled at the gallery may at times appear deeply shocking as it destabilises a crucial component of our worldview. Some of the works deconstruct the animal Other and forcefully assimilates the animal and the human. The animal, which we only conceive as physical artifacts divorced from their natural environment (which in fact constitutes a crucial part of their animality), has been historically captured, contained, confined, classified and commodified by a human population desperate to differentiate itself as superior sentients. What frustrates this differentiation even more in the works of Chan is the determination to conflate the two seemingly distinct worlds, or to subsume the human under the animal. In the words of painter Francis Bacon, “We’re just a part of animal life”.

Sweet Suffocating Love (2008), Oil on canvas

In this sense, a process reverse to anthropomorphism can be observed to be happening in some of these animal-human amalgamations. Instead of humanising the animal, Chan is effectively animalising the human, not via the active gesture of projecting animal attributes upon human subjects, but through the passive process of observing the progressive shedding of the cultured facade of humanity, to expose the animal personalities that reside within. It seems that what drive the complex and intricate tapestry of human behaviours are the most simple, primitive and universal animal impulses. As seen in Miss Patient, the human art of hypocrisy is positioned as essentially a sophisticated extension of the animal facility at beguiling and luring the unsuspecting prey.

Sweet Tug of War (2009), Oil on canvas

Thematically, the arguments that the works seem to be putting across, as a collective, are not particularly lucid or cogent. What defines the animal and the human? How are they different or does any differentiation exist at all? Different works appear to offer contradictory explanations to this conundrum.

As the whole, the show seems determined to be slightly more intelligent than it appears. The works are evidently trying to be more than just artifacts that shock and awe. Notably, there are some sporadic inputs of intellectual content but very often, the methods and contents of the amalgamations appear scattershot and incoherent. With the saturated colours characteristic of pop and the repetitive use of kitsch, appropriated imagery, Chan’s works may not appeal entirely to those seeking profound intellectual stimulation. As a comprehensive exegesis on the animal-human dialectic, it is sorely inadequate. Its tactics may even come across as cheap and the imagery unbearably carnivalesque.

CEO of Categories (2007), Mixed media (oil on canvas)

Conversely, the show is a visual thrill for those simply looking for fun, amusement, shock, terror and an exuberant sense of play. Some of the works may appear disturbingly uncanny, but what underlies their creation is an irreverent spirit of appropriation, satire and word play with metaphors. The artist even extracts images from the austere realms of history and religion for transfiguration and experimentation. We see Sir Stamford Raffles with the head of a dodo bird in An Inevitable Extinction. And in Sweet Tug of War, we see two “baby-birds” emerging into existence on a circular canvas that resembles a sacred mandala.

Most memorably, there is also the beloved Ganesha, the Hindu diety with an elephant head, putting his multiple hands to economic use by literally multi-tasking as a “CEO of Categories”. On a fittingly corny note, the elephant tycoon could certainly afford to lend a helping hand to his anthropomorphic neighbours, such as the troubled the Monkey King, who is evidently in worse shape than Ganesha with his delightfully protuberant tummy.

Hybrid Society – Schizophrenia was on display at Art Seasons Gallery from 3 October to 11 November 2009. Images courtesy of Art Seasons Singapore.

The President’s Young Talents: A Review

In the previous article, I’ve touched briefly on some of the works of the artists featured at this year’s President’s Young Talents (PYT) exhibition, largely in relation to the institutional context of contemporary art in Singapore. I think it’s only appropriate to devote a separate piece to the review and discussion of the exhibited works in their own terms, to do justice to the totality of ideas that is examined by the artists.

Donna Ong

I did not mention much about the works of Donna Ong in my commentary as her works are not particularly political, whether in relation to the politics of art or contemporary society. Her works engage with broader philosophical concerns and universal human impulses, particularly, the impulse to collect.

Dissolution (2009), Donna Ong, Found chinese paintings, acrylic, CCTV cameras, 22 inch television screens (Image courtesy of SAM)

The artist’s oeuvre reflect her sensibility as a collector. Ong’s works are effectively collections of everyday objects, assembled into an installation to convey particular narratives. A collector’s preoccupations are starkly different from that of a keeper of historical archives or a social documentarian, as seen more in the case of Felicia Low, another artist featured at this year’s PYT.

Landscape Portraits (In A Beautiful Place Nearby) (2009), Donna Ong, Single channel video, hardware, sewing equipment, metal plates, cork and plasticine

There is an exacting obsessiveness inherent to the seemingly benign act of collecting, which arises out of the intensely private nature of this practice. The collector is often torn by the conflicting impulses to claim her finds as her exclusive possessions and to disclose the magnitude of her collections to the awe of her audience. Through the act of exhibition, the collector embellishes and illuminates her works, attempting to elevate her fortuitous discoveries as mystified beholders of a truth that lies beyond their material exteriors. Through that gesture, she allows stories and anecdotes to emerge organically from the abyss of the thingness of each object.

In Landscape Portraits (In A Beautiful Place Nearby), Ong displays two rows of miniature, intricate metallic objects that flank the visitor walking into the long corridor of peculiar artifacts. The metallic creatures, assembled from screws, bolts, nuts and other hardware appear curiously organic, like sea urchins buoyant with a latent sense of life. Arranged according to scale, they diminish in scale towards the entrance of the corridor, eventually reduced to nothingness, which relates to the spiritual concept of nothingness as examined in Zen Buddhism. The work essentially reflects the artist’s overarching concern on looking at everyday objects with a greater sense of imagination, to conceive an organic but abstract and spiritual idea of objects that lies beyond their material objecthood.

Landscape Portraits (In A Beautiful City Nearby) (2009), Donna Ong, Glassware and lights (Image courtesy of SAM)

This exploration into the physical and spiritual states of existing is similarly explored in another similarly titled piece, Landscape Portraits (In A Beautiful City Nearby), displayed in a room opposite to the abovementioned work. In the work, an array of glassware is arranged to form a sparkling diorama placed amidst the flickering luminance of the surrounding miniature lights and hypnotic sounds of bells. The translucency of the material and their disappearance and reemergence seem to connote the tenuous fragility inherent to the state of the physical.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Netherlandish Proverbs

The centrepiece of Ong’s gallery space is Dissolution, an elaborate installation which layers several acrylic sheets, each incorporating cutouts of found Chinese ink paintings, to form a composite image of a “three-dimensional” Chinese landscape painting. Ong draws her inspiration from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, where multiple narratives are occurring within the same two-dimensional pictorial space. While the assorted characters in the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel exist within the same pictorial world, they are mostly absorbed in the perceived solipsism of each of their insular, private realms. Their physical proximity to one another, exaggerated by the densely constructed composition, further highlights their mutual indifference. To each of the denizens, “other minds” do not exist.

Ong’s Dissolution espouses this ontological conception of perspective as explored in the works of Bosch and Bruegel. Particularly, the artist literalises and materialises the notion of separate worlds unfolding in different planes within the same space through the layering of multiple acrylic sheets to assemble a complete, composite world. Furthermore, she complicates the notion of perspective through an examination of the differentiation between Eastern and Western perspectives.

A surveillance camera (right) capturing live footage of the installation to be projected on the television screen (left).

Located in front of the acrylic block are surveillance cameras that project the footage captured on the television screens opposite the set-up. The two-dimensional realm of Chinese landscape painting is reformatted into a “Western” optical space of three-dimensionality via the layering of acrylic sheets, which are subsequently conflated into a flat image via the lenses of the camera which has a distinctively Western originary. In this light, Dissolution illustrates the contemporary conundrum of ontological confusion that arises as a corollary of cultural mingling. This “dissolving” of cultural parameters jeopardises our worldview that emerges directly from our cultural originaries.

Felicia Low

Gallery set-up for The Stimulus and the Conversation (2009), Felicia Low, Performance workshops (Image courtesy of SAM)

Felicia Low’s gallery space reflects a similar fascination with narratives that emerge out of physical artifacts. But while Donna Ong collects, Low documents and archives. The drawings, writings and other hand-made works seen displayed in the gallery do not constitute Low’s art work, for her piece for the PYT, The Stimulus and the Conversation is a series of performance workshops. The physical artifacts are, instead, the remnants of her art. But as the visible traces of her creative act, they reflect her interests in documenting, coordinating and piecing pieces to form a whole. Unlike the collector, the social documentarian retains the innocence and unassuming quality of her artifacts. They are not prized, exclusive possessions. She does not regard them individually, but instead conceive of each piece as an integral part of a larger tapestry.

In her performance workshops, The Stimulus and the Conversation, Low creates an artwork that she employs as a stimulus for her participant’s art works, engaging participants from varied demographic groups in creating works surrounding the theme of “family”. The stimulus is a light box with photographs of members of the artist’s extended family. Each individual is photographed at frontal full body length. But the family portrait is incomplete, with the missing figures labelled variously as “Estranged”, “Missing”, “Unavailable at the time of shoot”, “Out of town”, “Emigrated” or “Distant”. The unphotographed are represented by black, hollow silhouettes. The labels and silhouettes, while appearing perfunctory and nondescript, add a relatively bleak and dark impression of modern familial relationships.

The Stimulus

This positioning of the art object as a “stimulus” is one that deserves further examination. A stimulus is defined as something that “incites to action or exertion or quickens action, feeling, thought, etc”. It is a trigger or a catalyst towards generating a certain desired response. And it does seem that many contemporary art works today serve more to stimulate than to engage, the latter being a process of drawing in the viewer and the former, one of driving in the audience a particular and specific image or message. The latter is often rich in content, lushly detailed and exists almost as an autonomous universe of its own, while the former is usually visually minimal, conceptually compact and asserts itself without embellishment, like a urinal on a plinth or a print of a Campbell soup can. As in the case of Low’s art work stimulus, there is no glut of visual details as we would find in a triptych by Bosch. The essential content that is of the greatest social utility and that provides the food for thought lies in the “conversation” instead. This fact is further reinforced by the sheer buffet of creative products that emerge from the performance workshops.

The collection of amateur works on display includes innocent professions of patriotism (“I like Singapore very much. Singapore is a good country because Singapore have many thinks.”), expressions of ennui and angst towards school (“I want to leave school behind.”) and other enlightening words of wisdom on life. The works actually bring to mind the community mail art project initiated by Frank Warren, PostSecret, where individuals send in anonymous, homemade postcards containing their deeply personal secrets for publishing. While Low’s endeavour here is not as perturbingly confessional and satisfyingly cathartic as Warren’s more ambitious project, the personalised, self-made nature of the products of her workshops bears deep similarities to it.

As a whole, Low’s work can be considered a form of Relational Art, largely regarded as the new “ism” of the art world.

Twardzik Ching Chor Leng

Twardzik Ching’s gallery space for her work, Lifeblood, is indubitably the most barren. Located around the middle of the generally empty space is a tall, algae-stained, cylindrical column of water and beside it, a wooden staircase. A single light bulb illuminates the water from the base of the colour, creating an eerie, green glow.

Lifeblood (2009), Twardzik Ching, Acrylic tank, PVC pipes, wooden staircase, Singapore River water (Image courtesy of SAM)

The set-up appears to resemble a kind of modern shrine, particularly since the water concerned is not anonymous. The water comes from the Singapore River, the primal site where modern Singapore came into being. Ching’s works have always engaged with the material land in her previous works, literally interpreting the notion of “land” as often used in national rhetoric. The materials of the land in Ching’s works are used as a concrete, physical metaphor for the nation that comes directly from nature, in contrast to the self-made, state-endorsed and artificial national icons that emerge as emblems for an imagined community. These natural objects are, unquestionably, the most representative objects of Singapore simply because they are what literally constitute the physicality of this country.

This attention to the strictly material and physical that Ching displays is one of particular fascination to me. In an artistic and literary tradition where the discourses on “self” often concern themselves with the abstract, psychological and philosophical, the notion of the self as a physical body and the importance of acknowledging and coming to terms with our physicality has been comparatively neglected. Likewise, while so much have been said about nations as imagined communities, there has been less exploration into the concept of the nation as a physical entity. As compared to the Jordan River and the Ganges, in which their physical bodies are vested with a profound, spiritual value, the Singapore River lies on the peripheries of our national consciousness. Nationhood is instead feebly conceived through constructing an artificial communal iconography.

At the top of the flight of stairs is a tap that controls the pipe from with the water flows out from. Above the tap are the words, “You are in control”. The viewer is encouraged to step up and control the flow of water. But despite this element of interactivity, I remain rather alienated from the work. The water remain as it is – a body of liquid without any sense of social or cultural history. Despite the shrine, there is nothing particularly mystical or sacrosanct about that algae-stained cylinder. But perhaps, this is telling of my personal estrangement and our collective apathy towards our nation’s material land and a reflection of the way we conceive of Singapore – a purely abstract, esoteric and imagined entity.

Lifeblood (2009), Twardzik Ching, Acrylic tank, PVC pipes, wooden staircase, Singapore River water

As mentioned in my previous article, the initial plan to pump the water directly from the Singapore River, with the pipes forming a kind of umbilical cord from the womb of the nation, did not materialise. Water from the river was instead transported to an installation of acrylic tanks at the 8Q courtyard to be piped up to the gallery. Interestingly, the tank installation appears like a satire of the bureaucracy that made the realisation of the work so problematic. The water is compartmentalised into a large system of tanks, symbolically representing the bureaucratic machine of the state and its uncompromising systems of hierarchy and control.

Vertical Submarine

Subversion is a game for the artist collective, Vertical Submarine, who sees themselves as pranksters, instead of anti-establishment activists. Their works are delightfully comical plays with language and part of the amusement arises from the deliberate attempt at stoic seriousness.

A View with a Room (2009), Vertical Submarine, Installation (Image courtesy of SAM)

The separation between text, image and reality is the key concern of Vertical Submarine’s work, A View with a Room. The title itself is an inversion of the popular phrase, “a room with a view”. A long, wordy paragraph of text describing a room is imprinted on the wall. Located discreetly among the letters is a peephole that would probably not be noticed by the casual viewer. Through the peephole, we see an image of a room. A view with a room indeed. A walk through a closet would bring us to a physical installation of a room. The room and every object within it is painted in complete monochrome. The communist emblem of the hammer and sickle pattern the entire floor. The clock hands are moving in reverse. A Milo can and a bottle of Borges olive oil can be seen on a grey cabinet. Only a part of a sofa and a television playing Battleship Potemkin are visible, as the remainders have been swallowed by the walls. Like in a photograph, the sofa and television are, literally, cropped.

What a strange, anachronistic communion of puzzling objects of such varied cultural and historical origins! The room screams of Gothic excess and looks as if it could only be the residence of an eccentric cultural polymath from the macabre works of Edgar Allan Poe.

The complex installation by the artist collective is a provocative examination of the relationship between text, image and reality and the autonomy of each of these separate worlds. The eponymous room of Vertical Submarine’s installation represents a reality adulterated by the prescriptive influences of image and text. Text and image are never adequate surrogates of reality.

A View with a Room (2009), Vertical Submarine, Installation (Image courtesy of SAM)

Notably, the image seen through the peephole is not that of the actual installation – it is merely a photograph. The image is an artificial reality constructed through the act of framing. What exists outside the frame, like the other half of the television set, does not exist within the universe of the image. Similarly, the room is painted in black and white as a symbol of the adulteration of reality by the black and white realm of text. The work does seem to propose that words have the most control over the way we perceive a space, particularly with the lengthy paragraph imprinted on the gallery wall that bombards the viewer with a string of adjectives. Words, after all, are signs that have been in existence for centuries. Each word is a loaded repository of cultural significations accumulated over the lengthy passage of history. In that light, describing a place in words involves not just mere description, but the constitution of a new space pieced together by the universe of signs each word carries as its baggage.

As the audience, we emerge from our magical ride into the closet with a renewed consciousness, skepticism as well as a playful sense of imagination towards the reality that confronts us each day.

And there we have it – a comprehensive review of the works of the artists at this year’s PYT. Perhaps, I’ve been a little verbose in detailing my experience of the works at this year’s PYT. And that is usually a sign of a show with substance.

The President’s Young Talents Exhibition is currently on display at SAM at 8Q from 15 August to 27 December 2009. Usual admission charges apply.

The President’s Young Talents: Art and its Contemporaries

This post comes a little belatedly, given that the voting for this year’s President’s Young Talents has just ended. This means of employing the popular vote to determine the winner of the People’s Choice Award is a first for the biennial event since its inauguration in 2001. Incidentally, this year’s exhibition also marks the first time a single artist or collective will be identified as an official winner of the showcase and leave with a bag of cash and a sponsored overseas residency.

Lifeblood (2009), Twardzik Ching, Acrylic tank, PVC pipes, wooden staircase and Singapore River water (Image courtesy of SAM)

I’ve always been a little perturbed by the introduction of competitive elements in an exhibition of contemporary art. And the notion of designating a singular, absolute winner becomes all the more unsettling given the context of a national, state-endorsed artistic talent showcase. The President’s Young Talents (PYT) Exhibition, fortunately or unfortunately, is not the Singaporean equivalent of Britain’s Turner Prize. Affixed to its name is the austere regality of the presidential label, which has also made its cameos at other high-profile national awards and events. The risk here, naturally, is the creation of a national prescription for cultural tastes which is in essence antithetical to the nature of contemporary art in which alterity, criticality and multiplicity are its defining hallmarks.

Such concerns can be said to be the result of my slightly overwrought imagination, since PYT, despite the state endorsement, thankfully does not wield that much influence as a legislator of cultural taste. And if we are to put aside our prejudices towards state-supported artistic fanfare, the works at this year’s PYT are really not as commercialised and ostentatious as feared. In fact, the works by Donna Ong, Felicia Low, Twardzik Ching and Vertical Submarine collectively form a respectable sample of contemporary art in Singapore that reflect and enrich the established discourses surrounding “contemporaneity” in Singapore art.

Locating the Contemporary in Singapore Art

In Contemporary Art in Singapore, the seminal publication by Gunalan Nadarajan, Russell Storer and Eugene Tan, a particular comment on the unique contemporary nature of Singapore by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is highlighted.

Almost all of Singapore is less than 30 years old; the city represents the ideological production of the past three decades in its pure form, uncontaminated by surviving contextual remnants. It is managed by a regime that has excluded accident and randomness: even its nature is entirely remade. It is pure intention: if there is chaos, it is authored chaos; if it is ugly, it is designed ugliness; if it is absurd, it is willed absurdity. Singapore represents a unique ecology of the contemporary.

There is much truth that holds in Koolhaas’ observations of our neatly pruned bonsai city. For authored chaos, check out the Swing Singapore mass parties. For designed ugliness, there’s our national mutant, the Merlion. And as for willed absurdity, we have bar-top dancing. But even within a tightly controlled cultural climate where the vagaries of spontaneity are quickly suppressed, a sense of the contemporary can emerge. As Eugene Tan elaborates, art in Singapore rarely presents itself as “overt forms of political protests”, but functions primarily through the adoption of “conceptualist strategies” and “institutional critique”.

These dual strategies of conceptualism and institutional critique are strikingly visible in the works of the represented artists at this year’s PYT. The fact that some of the artists also exhibit their previous works within their gallery spaces, creating a miniature retrospective of their works, also help largely in creating a broader conciousness of the kind of artistic frameworks they, as well as their contemporaries, are working within.

A Localised Conceptualism

Conceptualism in the West in the 1970s had left an indelible mark upon Singapore contemporary art and its influence persists till today. Evolving within the stranglehold of a culture averse to uncertainty and adventurism, as well as a lack of official funding, conceptualism in Singapore has emerged out of an economy of means and developed via the strategies of dematerialisation, deformalisation and improvisation. It keeps itself understated, unstructured and unspectacular, modelling itself based on everyday activities of walking, chatting, eating, drinking, reading and… stacking.

Conceptualism in Singapore: (from top) Amanda Heng walks the chair in Let's Walk (1999), Lynn Lu practises fortune-telling by reading from the I Ching in A Guide to Life's Turning Points (2009) and Heman Chong attempts the art of stacking in Stacking (2009)

Felicia Low’s performance workshops in The Stimulus and the Conversation has its local roots in the workshops of performance artists such as Tang Da Wu during the infancy of contemporary art in Singapore. The conceptualist positioning of these artworks as “workshops”, or as innocuous everyday events were effective strategies at their deformalisation, as a means to avoid the unnecessary state intervention and sensationalistic press coverage that the official designation of “performance art” invites.

Also of interest is the communal and collaborative nature of Low’s art-making process, which aligns her works with the social sculptures of Joseph Beuys as well as the do-it-yourself installations of Sol LeWitt, in which the artist leaves a set of written prosaic instructions for his audience to create the artwork. But Low’s approach is pedagogical, not instructional. Her background in arts education enables her to work more collaboratively with her audiences without any differentiation in status between the artist and her audience. The sense of experimentation, spontaneity and diversity is consequently more evident in the creative products that emerge from her workshops.

Like the conceptualist artists of the West, the informal, time-specific and site-specific nature of the works also mean that the public can only know about them through documentation in the form of photographs, written texts, recordings or performance artifacts. Low’s works also manifests such a symptom, as her gallery space is effectively a showcase of the physical remnants of her performances.

The issues explored by some of the represented artists, remarkably, also reflect that most of them, whether consciously or unconsciously, are largely operating within a conceptualist paradigm. Issues of the artifactual nature of the art object, as explored by Low, as well as the relationship between text, image and object as examined by Vertical Submarine’s A View with a Room, are notably the constant fixations of the conceptual art movement between the 1960s to 80s.

Inevitably, it does seem to me that the conceptual art movement as well as its subsequent manifestations has been deeply ingrained into local art and subsequently led to the emergence of a localised variant under a particular socio-political landscape. Initial manifestations of this local variant continue to resurface today, in forms such as Low’s performance workshops, in which authored banality, designed informality and willed simplicity are its defining characteristics. But evidently the field today has largely diversified with the nation’s cautious and gradual liberalisation, creating room for conceptual works such as Vertical Submarine’s elaborate installations, which are undeniably louder, bolder and much more complex.

Institutional Critique as Political Gesture

Alongside with conceptualist strategies, institutional critique, defined as a work’s engagement with the institutional structures of art and power that governs it, has become representative of local contemporary art. Given that explicit forms of political protests are bound to raise the alarm for state intervention, political discontent is often expressed as an undercurrent, securely under the guise of the meta-discourse of institutional critique.

Twardzik Ching’s ambitious endeavour in Lifeblood to pump water directly from Singapore river to her gallery at 8Q is immediately reminiscent of one of Singapore’s most emblematic works of institutional critique – Lim Tzay Chuen’s audacious and foolhardy proposal to relocate the eight-metre tall, 70-tonne Merlion sculpture to the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. What a storm it would have started if he had aimed for the bigger fish at Sentosa.

The bureaucratic obstacles faced by Lim is mirrored in the case of Ching’s work and both artists failed to achieve their original intentions. The eventual work that is exhibited at 8Q is a compromise – the water is not pumped directly from the river, but instead transported from the river by vehicles that deposit it into a water tank installation at the 8Q courtyard to be piped up to the gallery. The artist laments that the entire project took six months to materialise, a result not of the work’s physical complexity, but of the impenetrable layers of bureaucracy imposed by the government’s network of statutory boards.

Mike (2005), Lim Tzay Chuen, Singapore Pavillion at the 51st Venice Biennale

In comparison, Lim’s attempt to take our national icon on a holiday did not even result in a compromise. Represented at the biennial instead was a sign that deadpans, “I wanted to bring Mike over”. It may appear a little appalling how this apparent debasing of a state-created national icon can gain the official support to be exhibited at one of the most prestigious international art events. The comparative ease with which Lim sneaked in political commentary into the Venice Biennale can be attributed to the positioning of the work as a form of institutional critique.

Lim’s works have been known to engage in the most questionable and absurd forms of institutional critique even prior to Mike. In an earlier project, Lim presented an eventually rejected proposal to UOB to slightly rotate Salvador Dali’s Homage to Newton, located in front of the UOB building, and subsequently rotate it back to its original position a year later as an artistic “intervention”. Likewise, Mike was positioned as an institutional critique into the workings of biennales and the associated issues of national representation at such events.

Essentially, institutional critique is a profoundly political gesture. But it manages to evade the grip of the censorial society by apparently confining its politics to that of the art world. By positioning itself as a self-reflexive meta-discourse, concerned with the seemingly parochial issues exclusive to the realm of art, it appears less of a threat to the national order as compared to explicit and specific political works. But of course, the reality is that the politics of the art realm can never be divorced from the politics of government and society. Works that are positioned as examinations into the systems of the art world inevitably reflect that tensions and anxieties that characterise the larger society.

In this light, Mike was not just a critique of the politics of national representation at biennales, but of a state’s anxieties towards its own projected image. After all, the Merlion was a deliberately constructed national icon that originated as the logo for the Singapore Tourism Board. It effectively started out as nothing more than an economic apparatus.

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970)

Likewise, while many of Ching’s public land art projects are deliberately designed to contest artistic traditions and to exist beyond the institution of the museum, their concerns also lie beyond the ideologies of the white cube and the art world. Works such as Landing Space, Borrowed Nature as well as Lifeblood may ostensibly bear immediate affiliation to the land art projects of Robert Smithson or Walter De Maria, but they also concern themselves with the broader social-cultural issues of national identity and our emotional estrangement from our physical land, that effectively represents the symbolic nation. Under the guise of institutional critique, Ching has actually managed to put forth a deeply political statement on our national identity crisis. Her works powerfully highlight how our concept of nationhood is so perilously tenuous that it seems impossible to conceive of a notion of “Singapore” beyond its physical land. Is Singapore no more than the sum of its geography?

This can similarly be observed for the projects of Vertical Submarine, particularly with their work created for PYT, A View with a Room. Their installation setup is particularly peculiar as the eponymous room is deliberately concealed from the view of the audience. Instead, the visitor has to open a closet, enter it and walk through a passage covered with paper to reach the installation. The uninformed and unadventurous visitor that dogmatically refrains from touching museum objects would thus never experience the serendipity of discovering the hidden installation. In this light, the work is an intriguing critique of the norms of museum-going, where interactivity and a sense of adventure is suppressed by established codes of conduct.

Moving from one installation into another: (from left) Paper Room (2003) and A View with a Room (2009), both by Vertical Submarine (Image courtesy of SAM)

A View with a Room, aside from its primary concern with regards to the relationship between text and image, is most explicitly a form of institutional critique towards our social conduct within the sanctum of museum spaces. But as with Twardzik Ching’s and Lim Tzay Chuen’s works, the work’s subject of critique extends beyond the realm of art – it is effectively a critique of a socio-political culture that is essentially averse to any forms of subversion, where even the most tacit of social rules have evolved into dogma.

Beyond the Contemporary

Twardzik Ching's previous land art projects include Landing Space (2002) (top) and Borrowed Nature (2003) (bottom).

As I’ve attempted to illustrate in relation to the representative sample of contemporary art at this year’s PYT and as previously articulated by Eugene Tan, contemporary art in Singapore today seems to adopt “conceptualist strategies” and “institutional critique” as its defining hallmarks.

These dual strategies appear to be the most viable modes of subversion within a tightly controlled field of cultural production, because they enable artists to avoid the problematic label of being “Political”, with the capital “P”. But of course, these identified strategies are by no means permanent or representative of all forms of contemporary art in Singapore, particularly given the constantly evolving and diversifying state of art and the social and cultural forces that shape it.

Perhaps many artists are uncomfortable with the notion of grouping their works according to specific categories or movements. But the truth is that the artist is never a free vagabond roaming an unpolluted realm of cultural freedom. They are often susceptible to the broader institutional forces that drive the art world, whether or not to their conscious knowledge. Identifying and validating these broad trends in local contemporary art are, in fact, essential to our understanding of the places that art in Singapore is heading towards, or of whether it is actually heading anywhere at all.

The President’s Young Talents Exhibition is currently on display at SAM at 8Q from 15 August to 27 December 2009. Usual admission charges apply.