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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