I move a lot. From one country to another, from one rented room to another, and, as my day job sometimes requires me to do, from one gallery to another. As a true blue Taurus, I don’t really like moving. I do, however, like seeing other people move.
Okay, that’s a rather lame segue into this blog post about three ongoing exhibitions I caught today. I can’t help it. All three have this mobility thing going on in varying ways. Brian Gothong Tan’s Milk And Honey, the Fetterfield festival’s Performance In Frames: Video Mobiles, and the group show Videologue: Beijing-Singapore-Tokyo — they like to move it, move it. Groan.
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After spending the past three years doing videos for the National Day Parade and the Youth Olympic Games and working with theatre companies, Brian Gothong Tan returns to his visual art roots with Milk and Honey. Seeing as it opened last week during Art Stage mania, it’s one of those shows that should be getting more attention than it’s gotten so far. In this multi-media installation, Tan pulls out the stops, incorporating everything from photography and drawing to installation and sculpture to documentation and video, as he fashions a space where one can meditate on this idea of Singapore as modern day parallel to the Biblical Israel, the promised land from which the show’s title is derived.
Divided into three segments, the show greets the viewer with a selection of objects that serves as both autobiographical and geographical signposts – sketchbooks filled with Tan’s ideas, a small moss-covered ceramic sculpture of a body, plastic bottles filled with water collected from the country’s various reservoir, busts of saints and Buddha (reflecting his years growing up in the Philippines and his current Buddhist disposition, and including one of his own sculptures). All leading up to a building model reminiscent of a jail, filled with or surrounded by seemingly random cut-outs of objects, artworks and personalities that include some of the country’s political figures.
The centerpiece is an installation of a black building that doubles up as a table and, upon closer inspection reveals images of skulls (in reference to an Alfian Sa’at poem describing HDB blocks as columbariums). It’s surrounded by a sea of pyramid-like paper foldings echoing either durian spikes or metronomes gone silent, and flanked by portraits: photographs of people representing the “four” races, their faces painted black and white; and minimalist, cartoon-like drawings of people in isolation.
Finally, it wraps up with a three-channel video installation showing the figures of Stamford Raffles, Emperor Hirohito and Lee Kuan Yew, their glowing eyes belying a sense of hollowness. In a loop, it gives way to an image of a floating body, a glimpse of the tail of an SQ plane.
Despite the obvious symbolisms that have been packed into this show, one’s experience is not diminished. While Tan’s political and social critique perhaps blends too smoothly with his personal stories to rather calming effect (not helped by the fact that the room is filled with New Age music), it’s in stepping out into the contrasting silence of Goodman Arts Centre that a sense of irony hits you. Not hard, but enough to make you go, “eh?”
Regarding mobility, there is, of course, the obvious allusions brought up by the show’s title (Exodus as migration, as foreign influx), but even more so it’s evident in Tan’s very practice, the result of which is seen in the exhibition’s very production. Tapping into his experiences outside of visual art, i.e., theatre and film, there is a sense of wholeness in this well thought out show that perhaps others should take note of.
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Over at The Substation, there’s an interesting counter-argument being made against the puritanical idea of performance art as something not simply meant to be seen but to be experienced. That the art form simply does not “work” if you’re in that same space and time as the performance. That you have to be there.
What if the performance comes to you in little video screens?
Performance In Frames: Video Mobiles consists of nine performances captured on video, which are attached to backpacks. During weekdays, they’ll all be hanging up on the gallery walls. But on Saturday, they’ll be strapped on volunteers who will be wandering around as a kind of supplementary performance during live performances by other artists as part of the Fetterfield festival. If you can’t go to a performance, the performance will go to you.
It’s more than a gimmick – it’s a statement in this day and age where you can go to Youtube on your laptop, iPad or iPhone to check out, say, a performance by Marina Abramovic or an excerpt of a Pina Bausch dance piece.
The works themselves reflect their very materiality, too. Some explore questions of space itself, such as Jacklyn Soo’s continuous running action in Run Coney Island Run, Jeremy Hiah’s small image crawling on fours in a darkened space in Aliennation, or Lynn Lu’s walking the line, which features her walking on a tightroap.
Some deal with the technological permutations of this situation, like Urich Lau’s Life Circuit – Headshot (the artist wearing a headgear gadget with two screens for eyes), Teow Yue Han’s Screened video overlapping his own facial expressions with those of others on chat websites.
Others create works of the highest production values and clear-cut narratives that blur the boundaries between performance and film, like Yuzuru Maeda’s trademark bodysuit performance in Arranged (Zentai 65) and Ezzam Rahman’s two highly enjoyable short works – the surreal, tender Biography and a shorter Dadaist piece where he directs other people to perform. (In fact, his works here seem ready for the short film circuit and yet, I can imagine them to be still captivating when seen strapped on to someone out on the streets).
The two final works offer some kind of rebuttal to the issue of live performance art as an intimate experience – Andree Weschler’s The Venus In Furs sees the artist, all covered in hair, facing the screen-as-mirror, and in Ayano Hattori’s Intimate Strangers, she whispers testimonies about stalkers both in Japan and in Singapore. Imagine if the latter was the one wearing her own video, as a stranger peers at it listening to the confessions – it kinda loops in upon itself right?
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And then there’s Videologue: Beijing-Singapore-Tokyo, the latest in the seemingly endless run of exhibitions at LASALLE (they’ve got like, six shows right now!).
Comprising a series of video artworks (and one video documentary) by eight artists, it’s premised on the exchange of ideas coming from or interrogating different sites within the three countries.
Blurred boundaries seem to be a recurring thread in the selection – Shen Shaomin’s docu I Am Chinese looks at the lives of descendants of Russian refugees at the border between China and Russia, who are ostracized as outsiders within their country of birth. Co-curator Urich Lau’s Converse Construct: After Walther Ruttmann – Version 3.0 takes its cue from a 1920s experimental film about Berlin with a series of stylised shots of non-stop construction in Singapore and China, where one does not really know which one’s from where. Lau’s “partner” video, Unfinished – 2 by Li Ning, is a poetic look about abandoned buildings somewhere in Shandong province – the nakedness and incompletion the perfect setting for its two main naked protagonists, a sort of modern day Adam and Eve engulfed in the loneliness of this modern day relic of stunted growth.
As a counterpoint to Lau’s and Li’s tragic, sombre vision of urbanity are the whimsical, surreal videos: Back To Eden (picture) by Teow Yue Han, which follows two children playing dress up as they explore their surroundings, and Han Tao’s Scent, featuring two Indonesian men literally getting a whiff of theirs.
A more politically-informed set of videos form the final grouping. Tetsugo Hyukutake’s series of short works that look at seemingly mundane places in Japan that are, until now, deemed controversial for their significance during World War II. Not to mention an eerie portrait of General MacArthur and Emperor Showa seemingly breathing – a sensation that finds echoes in Lim Shengen’s slowly undulating waves in East Coast Park, Singapore (after Sugimoto).
Finally, there’s co-curator Cheng Guangfeng’s Bridge – a performance of him standing at the border of a broken bridge between China and North Korea playing Auld Lang Syne on the violin. Like the twisted remants of the bridge, his playing is unsure and often out of tune – a valiant effort at reaching out but imperfect nonetheless.
(Milk and Honey runs until Sunday, Jan 22, 10am to 8pm, Goodman Arts Centre Gallery. Performance In Frames: Video Mobiles runs until Jan 26, noon to 9pm, The Substation Gallery. Live Fetterfield events take place on Jan 21 and 28. Check out their FB page for details here. Videologue: Beijing-Singapore-Tokyo runs from Jan 20 to Feb 19, 10am to 6pm, at ICA Gallery 2 at LASALLE.)
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