Archive for November 2011
Rain, gloom and ghosts …
The constant rain hereabouts the last couple of weeks hasn’t done much for the spirits.
It makes one remember people – absent people. And think sad thoughts …
And what are melancholic moods without melodramatic verse, lol ?
Give me the green gloom of a lofty tree,
Leaf and bough to shutter and bar
My dream of the world that ought to be
From the drifting ghosts of the things that are.- Yuan Mei, “The Secret Land.” (Translated by L. Cranmer-Byng.)
On that note, Hokusai’s series of prints, Hyaku Monogatari (first published in 1831), of things that go bump in the night:
Shunen (‘Haunted Revenge’)
Sara-yashiki (‘The Plate-mansion Ghost’)
O-Iwa-san (‘The Ghost of O-Iwa’)
Kohada Koheiji (‘The Ghost of Koheiji’)
Warai-Hannya (‘Laughing Demon’)
Happy hols from The Great Pineapple !
While I’m raiding the iPhoto library – a picture of yours truly.
Season’s greetings to friends, readers and general lurkers ! And a great big shoutout for having made 2011 so .. surprisingly rewarding. I mean it. Thank you. 谢谢. Terima kasih. நன்றி. शुक्रीया. ありがとうございます. 감사합니다. Danke schön. Merci beaucoup. Muchas gracias.
Best of 2011: The Jusdeananas Random Singapore Art Mashup
A smattering of pictures that didn’t make it into the previous roll-call: art and art-related stuff in and around Singapore in the past eleven months.
Best of 2011: The Jusdeananas Annual Singapore Art Roundup
Ok, its coming on December: people are preparing to decamp for the hols, the Orchard Rd. belt is now visible from space at night, and top ten lists of the year’s best everybloodything are popping up like OWS sub-movements ..
Time to deck those halls, folks.
This year I thought I’d try sumthin’ new: my own list of top ten art moments. After all, this marks the first full year I’ve spent at home in quite a while, and 2011 – fortuitously – produced quite the bumper crop for art lovers hereabouts. There was the inaugural Art Stage fair; the 3rd Singapore Biennale; the OH! (Open House) event; a whole slew of impressive shows at the SAM, including Its Now or Never II, Negotiating Home, History and Nation, and Video, an Art, a History; as well as the arrival of several major new players on the local gallery scene, such as Art Plural and Ikkan Sanada.
The art gods were working overtime this year.
A couple of preliminary notes: I’ve unfortunately had to restrict the list to pieces either (a) by Singaporean artists, or (b) which spoke to uniquely local issues. Its not an ideal situation, I realize – also, that second one is highly debatable – but the alternative presents too dauntingly wide a field. For instance, I saw certain works by Judd, Oldenburg, Vito Acconci and Pierre Huyghe for the first time this year, which I loved, but it didn’t seem quite .. apropos to put them in a list for 2011 (the Judd piece, say, dated from the ’60s). I also considered expanding the list to include Southeast Asian artists in general, but, again, it made little sense. While what I saw locally by contemporary regional artists was pretty damned good, it represented but a fraction of what was available in their home countries; I’m sure critics there can come up with far more comprehensive and intelligible lists of their own. I know this runs counter to the new spirit of globalized plurality which seems to characterize our little red dot and its burgeoning art scene in the new millennium (the catch-all colloquialism here being “foreign talent”), but this is Singapore after all. I hate to admit this, buuuut … I was afraid that if the parameters got too broad, the final tally might not have erm, included too many Singaporeans. How’s that for xenophobic insecurity eh ? (Notabilia, don’t bite my head off.) Finally, this should be borne in mind: I saw a whole lotta stuff this past year, but there’s plenty I missed, so if there’s something you think should’ve made the cut but didn’t, feel free to drop me a line, or just leave a note on this post. (One caveat: if you’re planning to write in recommending the ArtScience Museum, please don’t bother. It’s absence from the present discussion is both deliberate and, I hope, conspicuous.)
Anyways, enough prattling. Below are my picks – “my” being the operative word. Write-ups supplied where available, otherwise I’ll get round to it when I’m free (or not, which is entirely possible).
In no particular order, here’s the first ever Jusdeananas Annual Singapore Art Roundup:
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1. THE MERLION HOTEL (2011), TATZU NISHI. Displayed: Singapore Biennale 2011 Open House.
From an earlier write-up on this blog:
However, at its most immediate and intelligible, the Merlion Hotel probably serves best as a symptom of the new Singapore. And just what is this new Singapore ? Flush (the world’s fastest growing economy as of 2010), fancy (now boasting two fabulously glitzy resorts with the country’s first casinos), and demographically and sociologically evolving at light speed, the population on the whole growing from some 3 million to 5 in the last two decades –a jump of 66.6% in 20 years – but with the number of resident aliens positively ballooning from 0.3 million in 1990 to 1.3 million in 2010. (See here for figures.) In other words, a playground for the wealthy, both local and foreign. In fact, the iconic Marina Bay Sands resort, located just across the bay, is prominently featured both on the wallpaper – along with the Merlion logo and founding father Sir Stamford Raffles – and as part of the panoramic view from the bathtub. The triple towers, exemplar par excellence of the new, moneyed, swingin’ Singapore, thus become enshrined in the country’s repertoire of emblems, their signalling of new economic trajectories taking its place alongside our most cherished historical images in a gesture of symbolic suturing.
(Read the full version here.)
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2. EXPENSE OF SPIRIT IN A WASTE OF SHAME (1994), SUZANN VICTOR. Displayed: Negotiating Home, History and Nation, Singapore Art Museum.
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3. TAMAN NEGARA (2011), LOO ZIHAN. Performed: Singapore Survey 2011: Imagine Malaysia, Valentine Willie Fine Art.
From an earlier write-up on this blog:
It consisted of Loo alternately standing stock-still, and moving between two pillars … Accompanied by several chamber pots filled with water, he would, at regular intervals, drink from these pots, or transfer the contents from one to the next …. Apparently the piece … was a reference to (an exorcism of?) an old childhood trauma. The exact intent behind it was not entirely clear to me just from watching, but I loved it. Performance art was proscribed by the authorities after the hijinks of Josef Ng, Shannon Tham and Vincent Leow back in the early ’90s. Ng, as most people might remember, snipped his pubic hair at a public performance in Parkway Parade, and Tham chewed up and threw up a copy of The New Paper … while Leow, a year earlier, had taken a leak in front of his audience — and then guzzled it back down … The consequence of all this was, of course, official disapprobation, and censorship: the National Arts Council condemned Ng’s act, the artist was fined 1,000 SGD, and, most unfortunately, funding for performance art of all stripes was embargoed – a ban lifted only in 2003, nearly a decade later …… Are we now witnessing a return to the sort of in-your-face stunts that performance artists of a previous generation espoused ?
(Read the full version here.)
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4. AN EXILE REVISITS THE CITY (2011), GREEN ZENG. (Exhibition.) Displayed: The Substation Gallery.
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5. RAW CANVAS (2010), JANE LEE. Displayed: Collectors’ Stage, Singapore Art Museum.
From an earlier write-up on this blog:
The work is phenomenal. As it appeared at the SAM, Raw Canvas was an absolutely mammoth web of thick, solid skeins of paint (I think – other materials/additives were probably involved), which by some trick of the trade were made to adhere to the surface of an entire wall, transforming a simple structural element into a towering, ceiling-to-floor exercise in stereoscopic synesthesia, a play on the perceptual tensions between two-dimensional appearance and resolutely tactile, three-dimensional reality. In that sense, Lee’s work deconstructs, literally, the painting as an object. The interrogation of the traditional medial supports of paint and canvas is effected at the level of their sheer physical facticity: paint moves from being a tool of utility (the means of pictorial creation) to being an obdurately material existence in its own right, insisting on its own auratic presence as a three-dimensional object in space, the shift occurring not merely as aesthetic affect or formal inflection, but as manifest ontological redirection.
(Read the full version here.)
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6. ALL LINES FLOW OUT (2011), CHARLES LIM. Displayed: Singapore Biennale 2011 Open House.
From an earlier write-up on this blog:
The video in particular was engrossing, especially when the camera tracks slowly down the length of various canals and rivers at the level of the water’s surface (below). The effect is compelling and creepy all at once, providing an alien, bottom-up perspective on the island’s urban landscape, literally capturing a worm’s eye view of everyday terrain most people are otherwise unaccustomed to …… The process of defamiliarization was echoed in the two installations nearby, which hung from the ceiling like a couple of supersized beehives, left there by mutant insects as a testament to their existence …… The act of repression and return, then, may be located in Lim’s excavation of “often unseen part[s] of Singapore”: the uninhabited waterways, canals and storm drains of our city-state, rendered from a distinctly unsettling perspective, the slowly gliding camera seeming closer to the experience of some form of marine species, rather than the thrashing movements of a human being in the water; the stuffed drainage socks suspended in the middle of a gallery space, an item of utility that most people may be unfamiliar with, and taking on an even more eerie aspect for their mode of display.
(Read the full version here.)
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7. MULTIPLE PERFORMANCES (2011), MARK WONG, KAI LAM, ZAI TANG & YUZURU MAEDA. Performed: dream: borderlands and other territories, Goodman Arts Centre.
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8. ADINANDRA BELUKAR (2011), GENEVIEVE CHUA. Displayed: Singapore Biennale 2011 Open House.
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9. ? (?), ?. Displayed: privately.
From an earlier write-up on this blog (the painting in question is the one on the left):
In that sense, the painting is, above all, citational. It quotes from the trans-spatial archive that is the contemporary discipline of art history; it references repositories of localized memory in the inscription of those narratives — teasingly, ambivalently — into its iconographic negotiations. But the main locus of referentiality, of course, is the inclusion of Titian’s painting, a nod to the forces of globalization as much as the art historical archive. The nebulous space of the composition, anterior to the painting within a painting, reproduces the reproduction: the presence of a dog and the tiled grid of the floor in both; the slant of a shadow across the wall gestures at the bisection of Titian’s work, by the partition draped in green fabric; even the samfoo-ed getup of the young girl, though ostensibly standing in stark contrast to the nudity of the Venus figure, alludes, in its pristine whiteness, to the smooth, creamy expanse of flesh that is the goddess at her erotic best. That the position of the young girl’s head also, coincidentally or otherwise, obscures Venus’ obscuration of her own pudenda with her hand — a gesture notorious in the annals of art history for its risque titillation — also perhaps further sediments the two spaces in the painting in a mutually constitutive embrace.
(Read the full version here.)
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10. ARTISTS IN THE NEWS (2011), KOH NGUANG HOW. Displayed: Singapore Biennale 2011 Open House.
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11. (The honorary spot.) HE IS SATISFIED FROM MONDAY TO FRIDAY AND ON SUNDAY HE LOVES TO CRY (2009), CHUN KAIFENG. Displayed: It’s Now or Never II, Singapore Art Museum.
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Lost Love: Maurizio Cattelan
Artist Maurizio Cattelan. Image from Ben Lewis’ site.
The worst thing about having left NYC ? (Well, aside from my top twenty list …)
All the damned exhibitions I’m missing out on.
Italian artist slash trickster Maurizio Cattelan is currently the focus of a solo show at the Guggenheim. His first stateside ? – I’m not sure. What I am sure about is that I’m not gonna be there.
To make up for the lost love, here are pics of a Cattelan piece I saw in the Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution 1968 – 2008 show held at the MOCA Chicago last year – titled, quite simply, All (2008).
In this work, Cattelan portrays the expressive power of death in an openly tragic manner. Using the white Carrara marble commonly used in the Renaissance era (early 14th – late 16th century), Cattelan reflects on the mass persecution and slaughter of innocent people as a recurring theme throughout human history, drawing particular attention to present-day wars and other conflicts. (From the wall label.)
Ann Hui, Triumphant – Once Again.
Ann Hui and her Best Director trophy.
My sincerest congratulations to Ann Hui and the cast of her latest film, A Simple Life 桃姐, for their wins at the 48th Golden Horse Awards on Saturday. The film netted Hui the Best Director award, while her leads, Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau and veteran actress Deanie Ip, were named Best Leading Actor and Actress respectively, representing a near-sweep of the top prizes between them.
For her role in A Simple Life, Ip also won the Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice Film Festival this year; the Hong Kong media had a field day hooting about the territory’s “first movie queen crowned at Venice” – “香港第一威尼斯影后.”
There’s a very special place in my heart for Hui’s work – she’s right there behind Antonioni, Ozu and Bong Joon-ho.
I can’t wait for the film to arrive in Singapore.
While A Simple Life lost out in the Best Film category to the 4-hour long Taiwanese epic, Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale, two of Hui’s films have previously had the honour: Summer Snow 女人四十 in 1995, and Ordinary Heroes 千言萬語 in 1999. The latter, in fact, reaped an even bigger haul back then – it took five Golden Horse awards, including those for best film, director and actress.
Here’s my favourite Ann Hui moment though: The Way We Are 天水围的日与夜, from 2008, which I consider her crowning achievement. It’s a quiet little film, where nothing much happens. A young boy waits for his final-year grades; his mother works in a supermarket; she befriends a co-worker, an elderly woman who lives alone; they interact; some family drama unfolds; the kid does ok in his exams; son, mother and friend sit down to a home-cooked meal. That’s it. The lack of plot development or narratorial excitement is the film’s greatest strength – in the manner of an Ozu film, it simply ambles from one small scene to another, the emotional punch delivered as cumulative affect. As a review on HK Cinemagic sums it up: “The way we are, the way we live; an ode to the salt of the earth.”
Click on the link below to watch it in full. (Cantonese dialogue and Chinese subs only though, sorry.)
Jane Lee: Ripoff or Genius ?
Turned Out II (2011), Jane Lee. Image by Allison Meier for Hyperallergic.
More award-related controversy: two homegrown art acts, Jane Lee and Vertical Submarine, were honoured by this year’s Celeste Prize jury. Lee won in the Painting category for one of her trademark three-dimensional, near-sculptural works, titled Turned Out II (above), and Vert Sub – a.k.a. Yang, Koh and Loke – won the Installation Prize for their A View With a Room (2009).
Lee’s piece stirred a faint sense of deja vu. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it … until, reading the comments over at the Celeste Network’s site, I spotted a couple of pretty irate individuals who basically accused Lee of ripping Eva Hesse off. Even then though it still didn’t quite come to me: which Hesse work exactly was I reminded of ?
A Google search cleared that up: Ringaround Arosie (1965, below), a multi-medial extravaganza of “varnish, graphite, ink, enamel, cloth-covered wire, papier-câché, unknown modeling compound, masonite, wood.”
Ringaround Arosie (1965), Eva Hesse. Image from Hauser & Wirth.
Yeah, sure, Turned Out II does sorta strike an .. evocative note, but I’m perfectly willing to buy that Lee’s claim that she had no prior knowledge of the Hesse piece. (These things do happen.) And anyway, I’m biased: this is the woman responsible for Raw Canvas (2010, below), which appeared in an earlier incarnation at the 2008 Singapore Biennale, and again in the SAM’s Collectors’ Stage exhibition in January this year. (Read my review of the latter here.)
The work is phenomenal. As it appeared at the SAM, Raw Canvas was an absolutely mammoth web of thick, solid skeins of paint (I think – other materials/additives were probably involved), which by some trick of the trade were made to adhere to the surface of an entire wall, transforming a simple structural element into a towering, ceiling-to-floor exercise in stereoscopic synesthesia, a play on the perceptual tensions between two-dimensional appearance and resolutely tactile, three-dimensional reality. In that sense, Lee’s work deconstructs, literally, the painting as an object. The interrogation of the traditional medial supports of paint and canvas is effected at the level of their sheer physical facticity: paint moves from being a tool of utility (the means of pictorial creation) to being an obdurately material existence in its own right, insisting on its own auratic presence as a three-dimensional object in space, the shift occurring not merely as aesthetic affect or formal inflection, but as manifest ontological redirection. In other words, the texture and physicality of the densely knotted field of protuberances here, by its deployment of paint as a sculptural statement, seems to supersede at once those questions of representation and mimesis which attended the rise of abstract painting on the one hand, as well as the discursive reorientation of post-war painting towards the processual paradigm made possible by Pollock’s painterly gestures and Harold Rosenberg’s panegyrics on the other – developments which, despite their break with existing praxis, essentially retained the phenomenon of a flat(-tened) layer of paint on a surface. Raw Canvas, cleverly, occupies the interstitial space between the appearance of two-dimensionality and the actuality of the third dimension; it approximates the appearance of painting, but constitutes the pictorial surface instead with a field of indecipherable tactilities of solid, sculptural paint traces.
It was awesome.
‘Genius’ is perhaps putting it a little strongly, but Lee certainly is very, very good at what she does (ignorance of Eva Hesse’s work notwithstanding).
Raw Canvas (2010), Jane Lee.
“stored in a jar: monsoon, drowning fish, color of water, and the floating world”, Tiffany Chung
Artwork of the day: Viet-American artist Tiffany Chung’s stored in a jar: monsoon, drowning fish, color of water, and the floating world (2010 – 11), which was included in the Singapore Biennale earlier this year. (My previous post about Martin Creed made me realize what a backlog of images I have, and just from the past year alone …)
The piece was on display in the National Museum, one of the Biennale’s four venues. The basement gallery was rendered a deep, dark pitch-black, a reversal of the typical white cube aesthetic. The transformation of the space was stunning, I thought, but combined with the low lights overhead, it wasn’t exactly the most propitious of conditions under which to view art – as evidenced by the difficult time I had trying to eyeball Chung’s exquisite miniatures of floating homes. Little models of floating communities, complete with green spaces and rowboats, were laid out on plates of glass suspended from the ceiling, the entire setup indeed resembling the sort of water-borne “alternative” architectural modes envisioned by Chung:
Tiffany Chung’s work monitors the dramatic effects of economic development, urbanisation, and consumer culture in her native country of Vietnam. Inspired by her experiences of the historic 1978 Mekong River floods – an event that has haunted her into her adulthood – Chung has constructed an alternative model of urban development where ‘floating life’ is a way of life. Based on a principle of horizontal planning rather than the grand vertical structures found in modern cities, Chung’s project draws upon traditional architectural forms in the Mekong region and other parts of Asia to propose alternative modes of sustainable living.
As artistic representations, Chung’s prototypes are beautifully realized – not unlike Michael Lee’s delicate paper models at the Old Kallang Airport site. Seemingly set adrift in mid-air in the dim glimmer of the space, the tiny houses and aquatic parks are also supported by miniature flotation devices, a fact made clear only upon close inspection. Beyond that, however, there didn’t seem to be any acknowledgement of the problems that comes with real-life usage. The label refers to the piece as an “alternative model of urban development”, or “alternative modes of sustainable living”, but without some accompanying proposal as to how these habitations will function in real life, they remain quite simply in the sphere of representation, falling somewhat short of the claims that they present a viable solution to urban overcrowding – and its myriad practical difficulties, which really require more than the spectatorial impact of art to address adequately. This deracinated character of the work – its failure to transcend the visual register, a failure brought into focus by its own contradictory claims – seems to bear out Guy Debord’s prognostication: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Here, the subsumption of “social relations” by the image, in a twist on the Marxian commodity fetish, is betrayed by the disembodied nature of a work that purports to offer a model of “sustainable living” but stands as an appeal only to the gaze; the inversion represented by the visible “in societies where modern conditions of production prevail” is signaled here on a formal level by the almost oneiric quality of Chung’s levitating miniatures, their spectral silhouettes on the ground (above) as prominent as the objects that cast them, insubstantial entities doubly displaced from the realm of the real.
(The full text of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle is available over at the Marxists Internet Archive.)
The Anti-Signature Art Prize Prize, part III: The Signature Art Prize
A review of the APB Prize that I penned for local arts e-zine, The Muse, titled And the Award Goes to the Dullest Painting in the Room.
I mean every word of it.
Lama Sabakhtani #01 (2010), Christine Ay Tjoe (in collaboration with Deden Sambas).
The Anti-Signature Art Prize Prize, part II: And speaking of Martin Creed ..
Martin Creed’s contribution to the Singapore Biennale this year, Work No. 112: Thirty-nine metronomes beating time, one at every speed, 1995 – 98. (His titles speak for themselves.)
I love the order of it: the metronomes lined up in a strict row like so many infantrymen, the mechanized sound playing out a rapid, staccato melody ..
