For Art’s Sake!

Have you dropped by the Singapore Art Exhibition at SAM? You should. There’s a great number of interesting works on display right now. What’s more, you’re given a chance to exercise your democratic right to vote — for your favourite artwork! Imagine that!

It’s supposedly an “Art Buffet”. So we suggest you pace yourself and not rush through it. But if you’re impatient, I’ll point out some seven of my favourite works. Have a look, and see if you agree with me or not.

Thanks to SAM for the photos! (It’s not polite to take pictures inside a museum, you know…)

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Massive Attack by Dawn Ng

This one comes from the artist who made that visually striking paper plane installation at the recent Blackout event. More paper planes! But this time a whole squadron emerges from underneath the skirt of a wind-up Methodist Girls School student wearing a bike helmet, and transforms into SQ planes. This nostalgia-laden, tongue-in-cheek triptych collage work is kawaii!

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Blink by George Wong

It’s a photograph of the National Stadium taken without digital manipulation and just relying on exposure – two stadium lights drowning in a sea of pitch black. Pitch black? Get it? Snort snort. There is, of course, a commentary on the whole “blink and you’ll miss it” affair regarding Singapore’s iconic landmarks. But more than that, I’m drawn to its poetic simplicity.

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Inside Out by Eunice Ng

One instance where a museum gathering cobwebs is more than welcome. The site-specific installation made of PVC emulsion is found at a corridor connecting two galleries on the first floor. It would probably have made a stronger impact if the “web” spanned the entire corridor (it’s not that long, but unfortunately, it doesn’t). A delicate-looking work that, I’m sure would have resulted in a more visually arresting piece if the artist had been given more time and space to flesh it out maybe?

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Space Drawing (Kaliningrad) by Sai Hua Kuan

If you think this video piece is da bomb, imagine it on a scale bigger than a TV screen. Actually, you don’t need to if you caught the London-based artist’s version of Space Drawing at the Esplanade Tunnel last year. It was easily one of the best stand-alone works I saw in 2008 and the best use of that particularly tricky venue, with video projections of the rope whiplashing and slithering along the walls and columns of the space. It does the same thing here, in and around what looks like an abandoned house. Remember to put on those headphones.

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Earth (((radio))) by Ho Tzu Nyen

Lest I be accused of being his publicist, let me just add that this version of the video will have, instead of music from The Observatory (like the one at Arts Fest) or sound artists (like the one to be shown at the Venice Film Fest), `80s fare like Metallica and Guns N’ Roses for that aural oomph. Gives a totally different dimension to the work.

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Eat Me by Wang Ruobing

It’s a room full of books. 1,268 to be precise, all borrowed from our libraries. On various themes, topics and formats (I even saw a Seamus Heaney somewhere!) somehow linked to environmental issues. Hence, the choice of books specifically in various shades of green – alluding to blades of grass? Another version was also set up at Oxford University. (Hmm, why is it Singapore always gets the later versions?). This one appeals to the bookworm in me. And while it may seem unexciting at first glance, all this artwork needs is a bench in the middle and you can stay the whole day.

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No More Tears by Jason Wee

Ah so rich in puns this one… 8,000 shampoo bottlecaps, closed and opened, assembled to form a “pixilated” image of, as Wee quipped during the media conference, his “father” (and well, everyone else who’s holding a pink IC card) – MM Lee Kuan Yew. A smaller version (here we go again!) of the project was shown in New York (5,000 bottle caps). The title of course, refers to the Johnson’s baby shampoo – neatly tying up layers of meaning involving the nation’s perpetually infantile “nanny state” image and allusions to that historical moment in 1965 when Singapore broke away from the Federation and LKY reportedly wept.

How about you? What’s your SAE pick?

The Substation just announced it’s looking for a new artistic director (or “s”?).

So let’s see… Kuo Pao Kun and T Sasitharan, then Audrey Wong and Lee Weng Choy. Tough shoes to fill ey?

Any thoughts on who’s best suited for the job?

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UPDATE!

On a somewhat related note, we’ve just been told that The Substation is now selling back issues of FOCAS (Forum on Contemporary Art and Society) — at $50 for issues 1 to 5! That’s, like, the price of a beer each!

Ain’t that a sweet deal? Hurry while stocks last!

Tags: Audrey Wong, contemporary art, FOCAS, Kuo Pao Kun, Lee Weng Choy, T Sasitharan, The Substation

Have you ever heard of the Goosebump Method of Art Criticism?
It’s when you measure the impact of a particular work – a painting, a movie, a play – by the frequency and intensity of your goosebumps.
It’s a lesser known method compared to say, the Gag Method or the Walkout Method, which while fairly common in France, is non-existent in Singapore.
But Goosebumpism is a pretty cool way of gauging a play. Instead of saying it was good or bad, you just go “I had goosebumps!”
Your critics can’t really say anything after that because, well, how can you contest that? That they didn’t have goosebumps?
I’ve had my fair share of these while watching plays. Like Finger Players’ Poop. But your Resident Art-Throb didn’t have a blog then, so I didn’t have a chance to scientifically assess it.
Today, however, I’ve just come back from two wonderful productions (yes, Noor Effendy Ibrahim, my sadistic streak continues) so I thought I’d try it out on them.

The Goosebump Review of T.H.E. Dance Company’s Silence
At least four instances. Two of which were pretty intense, lasting somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds.
Particularly, during the scene where they were dancing to Radiohead’s Pulk/Pull and the eerily beautiful scene Winds, from the far side of the moon, where the dancers were slowly weaving in and around this massive centerpiece. A minor one during the Philip Glass piece sequence.
Seriously though, you should try and go catch it (Sat, Aug 22, 8pm at the Esplanade Theatre). It’s an ambitious and beautiful work that’s matched by the super-committed and intense performances by the dancers. Good decision to stage it at the Theatre. The lighting design was fantastic, swathing the stage in blinding light one moment and enveloping it in shadows the next.
Overall, the piece breathed. As did the pores on both my arms.

And now for something completely different.

The Lord of the Rings Review of T.H.E. Dance Company’s Silence
They were wearing green ponchos at some point, which made them look like hobbits.
The 10m-high tower prop was, as every Tolkien fan would recognize, a metaphor for Barad-dur.
Swee Boon’s unique choreography saw them crawling around a lot, making awkward animal-like movements, which allowed the dancers to unleash the Gollum within.
Very precioussssss work. Now can someone else aside from the Esplanade sponsor them please?

Okay, back to goosebumps.

The Goosebump Review of Cake’s The Comedy of the Tragic Goats
One instance. Not mine though, but my girlfriend’s.
Me? Nada. But I was still completely enthralled by their new production, which is also on as the same time as Silence.
And guess what, no dialogue!
In RAT-speak, it’s two Mr. Beans doing extremely black comedy and extremely physical theatre to tell the story of two detainees suspected of killing a dictator.
Admiration goes out to the two actors (Rizman Putra and Najib Soiman) who went all out, and to visual artist and first-time director Mohd Fared Jainal who found the right vehicle for his debut.
It’s hilarious, it’s brutal, it’s politically loaded, it’s humanising. I’m putting this down as one of my favourite plays this year.

Once, you watched a group of them rehearsing.

Not stopping until each step and spin

And leap was flawless. “They can’t possibly

Be human,” you said. “They keep forcing

Their bones to bend, contorting and pushing

Themselves to the brink of their abilities.”

You admired them for achieving what you can’t,

Brave souls offering their dances to the public.

It’s a chunk-sized excerpt from Pas De Deux, a Tagalog poem I wrote some years back. A friend of mine emailed an English translation last week.

It’s a delightful coincidence, since I just caught a full-dress rehearsal of Silence on Monday night at the Esplanade’s rehearsal studio. And it was exactly how I felt – awe, disbelief, admiration – while watching Kuik Swee Boon’s T.H.E. Dance Company.

They’re re-staging it the Esplanade Theatre on Friday and Saturday, with a few tweaks here and there, particularly a new ending.

I’ve already written a preview profile on Tuesday’s paper, pointing out, among other things, the import of such a move by Swee Boon and gang’s gusty decision to do so, on a symbolic level.

But it’s another thing to watch them this close performing a piece stripped to its essence, i.e. bodies in motion.

Technique-wise, they sure have come a long way from their first official production, Old Sounds. To hear them panting and straining themselves “to the brink of their abilities”. To feel the thudding and squeaking of their obviously tired bodies on the floor, to see those determined looks on their faces as they execute well, what us normal human beings can’t. And with such passion at that.

I started off with an excerpt of my poem about bodies and dancing. I’ll end with an excerpt of my favourite section from Silence. Swee Boon says it’s called Wings From The Far Side Of The Moon.

So what’s the international verdict on the Singapore contingent to Edinburgh?

I can’t seem to find any reviews of daniel k’s Q&A or spell#7’s Tree Duet, but there’s a handful for TheatreWorks’ Diaspora.

Some interesting turns of phrase: “excruciatingly turgid” (Guardian, you wound us!), “astonishingly hi-tech”, “too much presentification and not enough presencing” (wah, so cheem, quoting Gramsci!), “really good… and also frustrating”…

Except for Guardian’s rather scathing review, it seems like a hit and miss thing.

But don’t take my word for it. Check out the links:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/aug/18/diaspora-edinburgh-festival-playhouse-review

http://ed.thestage.co.uk/reviews/715

http://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/article/20040-diaspora/

http://festivalinsider.blogspot.com/2009/08/diaspora-review.html

http://www.musicalcriticism.com/concerts/eif09-diaspora-0809.shtml

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UPDATE! TheatreWorks’ Tay Tong added a couple of more links with Diaspora reviews. Click on the Comments whatchamacallit. Woot.

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UPDATE! Paul Rae of spell#7 has also sent us a link of a review of Tree Duet in the Comments whatchamacallit. (I think I shall call it that, a whatchamacallit.) Wonder how the audiences there reacted to the “tree on a hill by way of bloated stomach” part?

Anyway, since it’s just one of the many mini-reviews in the link from The Herald, here it is in full:

“Tree Duet (****) is part of the Singapore Showcase currently in Edinburgh. If Diaspora (an Edinburgh International Festival event shown at the weekend) was a massive spectacle incorporating a large orchestra, video and performance, then this offering by spell#7 is an altogether more modest affair in terms of hi-tech equipment and on-stage numbers. But Paul Rae and Kaylene Tan – with pianist Shane Thio playing works by Toru Takemitsu – conjure up a truly profound, far-reaching reverie on how trees are rooted into the fabric of our imagination as well as into our eco-system.”

Just came back from Jonathan Lim’s delightful “supernatural musical” H Is For Hantu.

I came out with a nagging thought after painfully watching actor Ghazali Muzakir trying to convince the lacklustre crowd to clap and sing along with him ala dikir barat – with little success.

Is it me or does anyone else think that audiences here have this kind of “prove yourself to me first” mentality? 

I get that in many ways, it’s a market. There’s a product (a play) and there’s a consumer (the viewer).

But isn’t theatre also a communal experience? Shouldn’t it work both ways? Actors offer what they can as actors, the same way audiences offer what they can as audiences.

Don’t you think it’s more fun and meaningful if you step inside a theatre without thinking “Okay, I paid money for this, now go and entertain me”.

Instead: “Okay, let’s begin the engagement.”

Just got news that filmmaker and visual artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s short film Earth will be screened at a short film section at the 66th Venice Film Festival this September.

First Cannes and now Venice? In one year? Power bro! When’s Berlin?

Earth, by the way, was the 43-minute film that was show in his collaboration with The Observatory at the recent Arts Fest – one of my favourite productions in the lineup.

This time around he’s collaborating with Japanese sound artist Yasuhiro Morinaga and Italian “electro-acoustic composer” Stefano Pilia. Yasuhiro, incidentally, did the sound for Malaysian filmmaker Chris Chong’s film Karaoke, which was screened at the same time as Tzu Nyen’s HERE at the Directors Fortnight at Cannes.

That was the super-burning question on the cover of a certain daily’s arts and lifestyle section.

This oh-so-thought-provoking query loomed in all-caps over the art work in question: five life-sized casts of horses in various states of agony and collapse by Berlinde De Bruyckere.

Titled In Flanders’ Fields, it’s inspired by images of horses that were killed or brought down during the First World War.

It’s part of the National Museum’s new show A Story of the Image: Old and New Masters from Antwerp.

Now I have no idea who thought up of that crap of an opening page teaser, but don’t you think it was a cheap shot?

Here you have what I think is a pretty strong and moving piece of artwork. And then they go spoil the moment with such an outdated question.

The moment I read it, I was like, Uh-oh, they’ve used up their “Is This Art?” headline quota for the year. I’m pretty sure every year they dig it out of their folder marked Cliché Headlines.

Okay fine, I remember using the headline “Is This Dance?” in my story about Jerome Bel and Pichet Klunchun a couple of years ago. But hey, at that point the idea of dance performances with very little or no dancing at all was quite new in Singapore.

But the same daily keeps posing the same question whenever they’re faced with an artwork that isn’t “pretty” or unconventional.

Come on la, the same headline was used when Vincent Leow drank urine in front of people as part of his performance art many, many, many years ago.

IS THIS ART? ARE YOU LIVING IN THE PAST?

What’s 20 years old, has 18 heads, leads a mysterious, nomadic existence and er, has great aesthetic sensibilities?

The Artists Village, of course.

Fresh from last year’s “retrospective” at the Singapore Art Museum, my favourite local arts collective is back with the new group show Drawing As Form.

And guess what, the definitive TAV book’s finally out!

The monograph was supposed to have come out last year, but you know how these things go…

Aside from essays exploring the various facets of the collective, the thin but handsomely made volume also contains a sizeable amount of old newspaper clippings on the group’s exploits since the late 1980s as well as some rare photographs from artist/photographer/archivist Koh Nguang How.

Digression No. 1: Props to Nguang How for letting me use some of his old pics of Tang Da Wu for the National Day supplement TODAY did recently. I spent around two weeks looking for anyone who had a photo of the TAV founder. And guess what, the NAC, NHB and The Substation have no photos of da man. What gives?

Digression No. 2: SAM’s Seng Yu-Jin recently told me that Da Wu was irked that I had described him as “elusive” during a previous story I did about TAV. But after going to two successive exhibition openings last weekend where everyone kept telling me he might be appearing (he did not), it’s not as if it was an unfounded assertion right?

But that’s not going to stop me from waiting. Mr Tang, sir, I’m still looking forward to shaking your hand within the next decade.

Digression No. 3: Kai Lam’s duct-tape portrait of JBJ rocks.

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Anyone who thinks TAV is dead should think again. I bumped into two spankin’ new members who are taking part in the show (and another one at The National Museum’s coming Lost in the City exhibit).

Meet Chun Kai Qun, 27, and Joo Choon Lin, 25.

They’re flashing their V-signs because, well, I told them to. But also, because they’re also going to Japan for a residency with the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum this month.

The two have known and hung out with TAV folks for some time now, but it was only early this year where they were invited to join the group.

Kai Qun’s TURFF is an installation that includes some “drawing tools” he has created, including mini-crossbow-like contraptions that fire pencils – alluding to Andre Breton’s statement about blindly shooting people in the streets being the simplest surrealist act.

Choon Lin’s Drawing Becomes Still, meanwhile is a sink-like sculpture-meets-stop-motion animation piece – where she silk-screened her drawings on water.

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The exhibit’s title is an allusion to the second-ever TAV show in 1989, The Drawing Show.

But drawing a clearly-defined link between past and present does not seem to be the main objective of Drawing as Form – unless you’re to see it a continuation of the original show’s enquiries into the inherent possibilities of what constitutes a “drawing” or the “act of drawing”.

While some works do require a leap of faith to situate it within the exhibit’s thematic framework, some pieces fit in perfectly in my opinion.

The body as “writing instrument” is clearly seen in the two performances.

Lee Wen did Zen for Head, Clay and Leg. The piece was first performed in Korea last May and references Nam June Paik’s Zen for Head, a Fluxus performance in 1962.

Instead of using ink, Lee used a block of clay – and pushed it across the canvas with its head.

Urich Lau, meanwhile, spent three, yes, three hours at the back area of Sculpture Square drawing. Video Demonstration: Webcam Lucida 1.0 takes off from the camera lucida optical device of yore, where he draws images of two models, which are digitally projected onto the wall behind.

Cheng Guangfeng’s Draining Energy extends this metaphor to the viewer, whose eyes dart back and forth in following the angular patterns created by the electrical cable installation – you as viewer are “drawing” the image in real time, up to the “Eureka!” endpoint of the lightbulb.

Jeremy Hiah’s The Drawer Drawing, meanwhile features a scroll of surreal drawings – but I was more tickled by his tongue-in-cheek linguistic approach, appropriating the word “drawer”, a word used incorrectly (or is it an anachronism?), to pertain to both the artist and the actual piece of furniture.

By the way, Drawing as Form is not the only exhibit this year to tackle drawing. There was one at Osage Gallery early this year, and just a stone’s throw away at NAFA you’ve got Australian artists also examining the same issues.

Drawing as Form runs until Aug 28 at Sculpture Square, 155 Middle Road.

Tags: contemporary art, Singapore, The Artists Village

One of the more lowkey, bite-sized exhibits at the Singapore Art Show is up at LASALLE College of the Arts’ Earl Lu Gallery.

Traces features the works of Claire Lim, Tay Wei Leng and Hafiz Osman.

It’s a charming albeit tenuously linked show laudably put together by Charmaine Toh under The Art Incubator residency programme.

The two-month residency was held in June and July where the three artists got some mentoring and hosting help from fellow young artists like Ho Tzu Nyen and Jason Wee and institutions like Osage Gallery and Objectifs.

The press release talks about Wei Leng’s “photographic reflections”, Claire’s “interpretation of the forming and passing of memories” and Hafiz’s “examination of the temporal nature of materiality.”

In Resident Art-Throb-speak, it roughly translates to: Wei Leng taking photos of people inside their houses, Claire creating a bat-like thing surrounded by jellyfish, and Hafiz momentarily becoming a farmer with an appetite for X-Files.

Claire’s Hippocampus (not the actual part of her brain that takes care of long term memory but the artwork) is a, er, very fibrous installation made from a cabinet, lots of thread and an assemblage of interesting drawings straight out of either a natural history catalogue or Sandman.

E.g. creepy crawly spiders, a cross section of a brain containing seahorses, and some kind of plantlike creature with see-through molars.

At some point, the 31-year-old artist (and ex-conservator at the Heritage Conservation Centre) imagined these images “coming alive”. The result was having these mini-sculptural things surrounding the main piece – which to me looked like jellyfish.

“Imagine your brain like a giant museum,” she told this RAT, before saving me the trouble of making some uncomfortable comment.

“As you can see, my brain’s a bit messy.”

Slow Cool Breezes, meanwhile, is the title of Wei Leng’s photography installation, which in some ways echo her previous project of taking photos of people in their homes in Hong Kong.

Enveloped by audio recordings of interviews, an enclosed space shows a series of photographs being projected side-by-side, mixing both exterior shots of places she remembers in Singapore and interior ones of households.

Having been away from Singapore for a long time (Wei Leng has been living in Hong Kong since she was 19), the 31-year-old photographer said she was keen on getting a sense of what Singapore is today.

She went to around 17 to 18 homes and basically spent at least three hours photographing people going about their lives – helping her get a more “layered” sense of her country.

She’s also one of the recipients of the Arts Creation Fund, for her project on “Chinese identity in Singapore/Malaysia”.

Wei Leng says it’s part of a bigger project of hers, which could be why I felt that the piece seemed to be exploratory rather than a definitive statement.

The most interesting and fully fleshed-out (concept- and execution-wise) of the three works for me was Hafiz’s three-pronged series consisting of an installation (Hillview), postcards (Goodviews) and video documentation (16 Crop Circles).

Hillview, an estate that has been “en bloc-ed” and is now a vacant plot of land, was the take-off point for Hafiz, who created 16 crop circles at the place to represent the 16 HDB blocks that were taken down. He added that there’s a “mysterious” block that was never built.

Cue: eerie music.

(Personally, I think he should’ve waited until the grass was at least waist high, but then again, we’re in Singapore and not in an M Night Shyamalan movie.)

Anyway, the grass he mowed was collected and transformed into an “half-hill” on-site installation – but if you’re bringing kids, please do tell them not to run over it. It looks solid, but it’s not.

Hafiz, 29, told me that this whole idea of entire buildings (and their residents) being “abducted” by the Government’s housing policies was a result of conversations he had with Tzu Nyen, his mentor.

It takes on a very human angle with the final piece of the puzzle. His handrawn postcards contain messages from these “abductees” – of which 80 per cent had moved to Goodview Gardens on their sentiments about their old homes.

Cue: sentimental violin music.

Cue: exit music.

(Traces runs until Aug 22 at Earl Lu Gallery, LASALLE College of the Arts.)

Tags: Singapore Art Show