The House is Opening soon. And it’s going to be occupied.

It’s official: OH! Open House is happening at Tiong Bahru in February. Details below; image courtesy of OH!.

The Big OH! Fundraiser … or, Alan Oei’s Atas Lelong.

So OH! Open House held its annual fundraiser earlier this evening, at a swanky shophouse residence on Emerald Hill.

Alas, I walked away empty-handed.

This is how it works: tickets were sold at 50 SGD a pop, for which one received three balloting slips. At the event itself, a number of artworks by local and foreign artists were put on the block – so to speak – and if one was interested, one dropped a slip into a little plastic bottle with a red cap (yes, the sort that Chinese New Year comestibles come in) for that particular piece. At the end of the evening, the big draw was made, and if your slip got picked, you walked home with the art.

Gloriously simple.

As is typical though, the luck of the draw sailed right by me. And my slips. All of which, by the way, I used to ballot for a single work.

Was hedging my bets. Didn’t pan out. <insert frowny face>

The highlight of the evening, though, was the silent auction for Zhao Renhui’s print Changi, Singapore, from his As We Walk on Water series. A different edition of the piece is also in the running for the Sovereign Prize this year; the hammer price tonight ended up somewhere in the mid-3000s, well within estimates.

On an even more upbeat note, OH!’s site has been updated for their upcoming edition in February (click on the link above). Teaser: word on the grapevine is that one of the stops on the walkabout this year will be an actual temple – in fact, Singapore’s oldest temple dedicated to the worship of the Monkey King, the Qi Tian Gong, in Tiong Bahru. Artists Gilles Massot and Mark Wong are collaborating on a piece to be installed within the temple itself. Doesn’t it sound awesome ? – By golly, I’m excited.

Pictures below, including artworks up for the ballot.

Kitchen Works (2011), Mark Wong Wenwei.

“Kitchen Works was part of the site-specific Sounds Like Home series that I created for OH! Open House 2011: Marine Parade. It is a three-dimensional still-life composition with an aural dimension. The hidden multi-speakers breathe life into the still-life to spread some good vibrations, infusing the found objects with a playful vitality, and both mirroring and supplementing the bustle of activity in the environment around.”

Braque Kopi (2012), Stephen Black. Bottom image courtesy of OH!.

“One moment in Tiong Bahru: Light, Life, Toast, Coffee and Cubism …

For OPEN HOUSE, Black is theorising and attempting to create new foods which combine art, local tradition, sustainability and local resources.

Entitled FOOD RECORDINGS, the piece is a humble homage to one of the most revolutionary and poetic art events to occur within the past 20 years: Conceptual food artist Ferran Adria’s with the 2007 Documenta.”

 Memory Box 001 (2011), Jying Tan.

“This work presents a personal desire of belonging. Often, how we defined our sense of belonging is through the memories of a personal space/structure where we call home. I created a set of mini-furniture and housed it in a box; in a way that it secures and preserves memories within the space.”

Presenting Mary and Anne (2012), Marc Gabriel Loh.

“In the dark recesses of his mind they lay waiting for him to return. His secrets.”

Speak More Dialects, Speak Less Mandarin (2012), Green Zeng. Image courtesy of OH!.

“SPEAK MORE DIALECTS, SPEAK LESS MANDARIN is a recreation of a campaign poster launched in 1979 to promote the SPEAK MANDARIN CAMPAIGN. However the poster shuffles the word arrangement of the campaign slogan to provoke the viewer to examine issues related to the SPEAK MANDARIN CAMPAIGN.

This artwork is also a study for MOTHER TONGUE, the main artwork which I will be creating for the OH! Open House 2012. MOTHER TONGUE explores the use of the Chinese language and its relationship with the Chinese dialects in post-independence Singapore. The artwork also studies the Speak Mandarin campaign initiative and and its connection with the problems facing the bilingual policy implemented in Singapore in 1979.”

Keeping (2011), Cindy Salim.

“My work explores the relationship between domestic objects, fragility, and the transitory moments and experience.I would like to preserve the temporality by taking the form of casts. In the OH! Open House event, by placing the cast object in a domestic place, it presents the continuance of the traces of the physical objects and lets the viewers draw their own meanings.”

Item No. 27 (2011), Ang Song Nian.

“I think I have a fear for chaos. Arranging objects and placing them in systematic orders while creating my photographs have become an important part of my art making and practice. Questioning the relationship of human interventions and invasions on environments, I hope to engage through an archaeology of presence through the analysis of personal belongings and interiors.”

Home for Dinner (2011), Cindy Salim. Bottom image courtesy of OH!.

“My work explores the relationship between domestic objects, fragility, and the transitory moments and experience.I would like to preserve the temporality by taking the form of casts. In the OH! Open House event, by placing the cast object in a domestic place, it presents the continuance of the traces of the physical objects and lets the viewers draw their own meanings.”

Diagram (2011), Patrick Storey.

“Stick House is a study for an installation work yet to be built. It is an edited and altered photoshop document of a photograph taken in Bintan, Indonesia. Representative of my long term interest in how architectural frameworks can shape the experience of our surroundings. Neutralizing the environment of the subject of this image allows us to see the constructed spatial object large without its place to focus on the austere utility of its construction and its essential orientation.

For my inclusion to Open House Tiong Bahru, the sculptural installation work will rely on specifically directed inclusions of images from the neighbourhoods [sic] long history as well as including its contemporary ambient sounds into the artwork.”

The Spaces Between (2011), Race Krehel.

“This piece is a precursor to the OH! Open House exhibition as it will explore creating an interactive light projection mapping that is a narrative of negative space.”

Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder (2011), Isabelle Desjeux.

“I am setting up a laboratory in the bathroom that is made from the leftovers found in labs. This includes recycled ideas, recycled images, and some salvaged material. Any energy also comes from recycled leftovers. this artwork is made using images recycled  from a medical facility for ophthalmology, i.e. images for the eye. The image used for the artwork will be the same as the one for the “inverted microscope” in the bathroom’s sinks.”

Ice Cream (2008), Sokkuan Tye.

“This piece was done in 2008, as part of the first documentation of Sophie Black called “See You In The Dark”. Sophie Black was borne of my love for the harmonious contradictions in people and things – the same way I appreciate black and white. She is my alter ego, an expression of my conflicting self. She is at once sinister and sweet, ever ready to blush and break into childlike giggles. Her long black hair expresses her wildest ideas, her extended eyelashes reveal desire, and her pale skin reflects her unpretentiousness.”

[top] Jindoyun (2011) and [bottom] 72 Transformations (2011), Gilles Massot.

“The opportunity to create an installation in the Sun Wukong Temple at Tiong Bahru comes as a great follow up of the work done on the 9 Emperor Gods festival for the exhibition Transport Asian two years ago. In fact, my involvement with the 9 Emperor gods festival began right there in that Tiong Bahru temple. And the same day that this current project was confirmed, I received the confirmation for another 9 Emperor Gods show in Paris in October. Some people will call that ‘coincidence’. I much prefer the word ‘synchronicity’.

Alan Oei’s contribution, a series of 5 drawings of notable personalities who passed away recently. Forgot to note the title ! Images above courtesy of OH!.

[top] With Zhao Renhui’s big draw of the night. [middle] Changi, Singapore (possibly 1970s), Zhao Renhui. Image courtesy of OH!. [bottom] Bids for the piece at the start of the evening.

“The Land Archive houses the collective memory of our landscape. TLA manages an extensive archive of documents from private memoirs, historical maps and photographs to oral history interviews and audio-visual materials, some of which date back to the early 19th century.

In the 1960s, Singapore gorged the soil from its tiny hills and ridges and used it to reclaim land. The island is virtually flat today, forcing the government to buy sand from Malaysia and Indonesia to continue with its reclamation efforts. In the early stages of each land reclamation project, when the imported sand sits for some time, huge desert-like landscapes begin to dominate the eastern and western coasts of Singapore, mainly Tuas, Punggol, Marine Parade and Changi. When these deserts started appearing in the 1960s, they took the place of beaches that locals used to frequent. making do with what they had, Singaporeans flocked to these reclaimed spaces on the weekends to walk towards the new shoreline, in the hopes of reaching the beach they once knew.”

Tan Kheng Hua, emcee for the evening, announcing the winners of the ballots.

Alan Oei (center), the driving force behind OH!, with Matthew Phan and Shuyin Yang.

A fortuitous shot of a number of the artists. Mark Wong in mid-ground; next to him, partially hidden, is Race Krehel. Standing, in mid-motion, is Marc Gab Loh. The seated lady in light blue is Jying Tan.

Yours truly casting his ballots.

Ballot bottles at the ready.

Open Call for Open House

Singapore’s very own annual art walkabout is back !

The next edition of the wildly popular OH! Open House event is happening in February – and they’re looking for volunteer guides.

I don’t think I’m allowed to give away too much, but if being part of this uniquely local art experience sounds like it’s up your alley, feel free to give the organizers a holler: hello@ohopenhouse.com.

(My review of the previous OH! walkabout here.)

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.

[Review] Open House 2011

The queues were crazy. Getting our tickets took some 15 minutes, and then waiting for the tour to actually begin – we were herded off in groups of 10 or so – had us in line for an hour and a half. By the end of which I seriously needed a drink ..

Though this year’s Open House was quite a treat, so it was all good. Dubbed an ‘art walkabout’ – the event’s tagline is “Come Walkabout. Art Walkabout.” – it got its participants walking into the heart of Marine Parade for a dose of home-inspired art, and then some. The impulse behind OH! was to bring art out of galleries and museums and to the masses; one of the organizers remarks: “Open House is on a mission to make art a part of our lives, our homes. Most Singaporeans live in HDB flats, that’s where we needed to go.” (Qtd. in Corrie Tan, “Art Invades Homes in HDB Estate”. Straits Times, January 14, 2011.)

And indeed that’s where MP, SY, their friend MY and I headed to late last Saturday afternoon. After the protracted wait at the community center, where the tour started, we were off to the first and second homes at 32 Marine Crescent, located side by side on the same floor. Our first stop slipped right by me: there were several instances of staged and doctored photographs alluding to (apparently mythological) sightings of dolphins off the Katong coast, as well as a manufactured ‘dolphin bone relic’ (below). I think the artist in this case was Zhao Renhui – at least the bone object was his – but I wasn’t paying much attention; the works would not have looked out of a place in a museum, and didn’t engage much with their very unique domestic setting, which I expected would have been the point of this singular opportunity to display works in not just a quotidian space, but one that is utilized, lived in, indelibly a part of someone’s most intimate everyday experience.

At apt. no. 1.

The art in the second home, which belonged to a friendly yoga instructor who was on hand to greet us, proved to be more compelling. Local artist Terence Lin had a piece titled The Perforated Night, which was essentially a piece of black fabric with holes cut out, masquerading as a curtain (below). According to our guide – an amiable young architecture student, whose name unfortunately I didn’t catch – it appropriates the inherent voyeurism of HDB living, where the high-density character of such neighbourhood estates ensures that simply looking out the window means gazing into someone else’s home. What especially struck me about this piece was how it insinuated itself into the very fabric (haha) of the living space, albeit imperfectly of course. Here was what I had come to see: art that interacted with their everyday surroundings, deploying inventive formal strategies to speak cogently to the idea of the ordinary and the familiar. In another part of the apartment, artist Jes Brinch recreated the contents of an entire room, from the furniture to soft toys to books strewn about in supposedly careless fashion, upside down on the ceiling (below). A mirrored floor inverted the upturned space, thus visually righting the imaginary. Only Apparently Real III was a clever, highly amusing installation, although the most interesting thing about it was its site-specificity. I suspect it would seem .. paltry in a traditional display environment. (The flip side: situating this piece in, say, the showroom of a furniture or interior design concern would render it far more witty, even brilliant, no?) Terence Lee contributed another work, Bed, here. The painting of a floral-patterned bed with pillows and bolster was rigged up to resemble a TV screen (below), and hung on the wall of the home owner’s bedroom directly confronting – what else <lol> ? – her bed. This piece functions on a couple of levels. For one, it rehearses one of the most common domestic rituals, TV-watching, both formally and display-wise, approximating the appearance of a television set and being positioned on a wall at eye level, thus bringing together our experience of TV- and art-viewing at once. Bed also reflects its immediate surroundings – an empty bed – through the gesture of quasi-imitation, in what could be construed as an oblique comment on the egocentric act of inscribing our personality into our belongings. In other words, what Lee has done here is to paint a bed, not specifically the owner’s (which looked very different); putting both in a direct encounter within the most intimate of spaces highlights this disjuncture, or what is at stake in our choice of personal objects.

The Perforated Night (2011), Terence Lin

Detail of above.

Detail of Only Apparently Real III, Jes Brinch

Detail of Only Apparently Real III

Bed, Terence Lee (2005)

Home No. 3 brought more surprises. In a stairwell next to the apartment, Teng Yen Ling painted anamorphic projections of various objects and animals, ranging from bikes and chairs to a cat to an entire elevator (below). She very helpfully provided vantage points, marked by little X-es on the ground, from which to negate the element of distortion when viewing, but as it turned out people were so charmed by the line renderings that they started interacting with the art as if they were real: sitting on the chair, which was painted on some stairs to allow for an actual occupant; standing in the doorway of the elevator as if just emerging from within. The sheer unexpected whimsy of Teng’s Secret Landing (2010) made it a surefire crowd-pleaser, but also seemed to be the point of the work:  located in an otherwise completely utilitarian and often overlooked public space – how many people even take the stairs, unless one’s living on the first couple of floors ?- the paintings defy strict trompe l’oeil representation, yet invite the viewer to interact with them in very practical and prosaic ways by dint of their life-size scale and their appearance in a setting so closely allied with the business of day-to-day living. (You can just imagine actual bicycles and birdcages and a lift lobby being right there on the landing …)

Secret Landing, Teng Yen Ling (2010)

Detail of Secret Landing.

Detail of Secret Landing.

Detail of Secret Landing.

A number of Indonesian artists were featured in the apartment itself, a reflection of the home owners’ tastes, whose personal collection they were. There was In Between by Nurdian Icshan (below), which included a figure of the artist on a flight of brick stairs, with his head up against an imaginary wall. However, it had been positioned against a bookcase, humorously giving a very personal and expressive work of art the character of a bookend. Desziana, one of the few female artists represented in the couple’s collection, had produced three rows of little fabric houses, which when lit up from the inside brought out figures of trees and potted plants otherwise difficult to discern on the surface of the material (below). The diminutive quaintness of the piece was disarming. On the one hand, the tiny structures sans windows and doors reminded me of fellow Indonesian Rudi Mantofani’s Rumah-Rumah Cokolat, one of my favourite paintings (below); on the other, the uplit homes definitely channeled the surreally and enigmatically warm yet remote interiors of Todd Hido’s Homes at Night photographs (below).

In Between, Nurdian Icshan

Untitled, Desziana

Rumah-Rumah Cokolat (2005), Rudi Mantofani

1941 [from Homes at Night], Todd Hido

The next stop was dominated by Messy Msxi’s Ten Years in Training series (below). Comprised of paintings, videos and found objects, I found Msxi’s quirky figures a little too derivative of contemporary Japanese visual culture – say, Yoshitomo Nara’s big-eyed people; her moniker was also something of a turnoff, literally screaming cuteness … I guess I’m one of those annoyingly arch postmodernist-wannabes whose idea of acceptable sincerity can only ever be irony. However, an installation set up in a back room (clearly used for storage) was a lot more compelling: a TV had been placed in one corner, playing what looked like footage of the artist’s work, and certain objects pertaining to the theme of athletic training and competition had been inserted into the mess of the home owner’s personal stuff, looking for all intents and purposes like every other article or gewgaw in the room. Even more than Terence Lee’s curtain or television-imitating canvas, here was a work of art that convincingly passed itself off as no more than another everyday object or occurrence, effectively effacing the line between artifice and actuality. While it isn’t hard to figure out which the pieces in question are, it seems as if the employment of the found object has been extended to its logical end here – re-embedded in its natural environment, as simply one more anonymous thing among a jumble of things.

Ten Years of Training for Every Minute on Stage, Messy Msxi

Detail from an installation in Messy Msxi’s Ten Years of Training series.

Detail from an installation in Messy Msxi’s Ten Years of Training series.

Finally, at the last apartment of the evening, we witnessed the culmination of what I took to be the unspoken theme of this year’s OH!: art both in and of the home. The living room of the apartment was screened off by a white sheet punctuated by little peepholes, behind which an actress, moving among what one assumes is the home owner’s furniture, performed various acts like playing the piano, reading, and toying with a little dog (yes, there was a live one involved; below). I forgot to note the title, but it was the brainchild of two artists, Clare Marie Ryan and Marc Gabriel Loh, in collaboration with the owner. It was also the sole performative piece of the event, involving a human – and canine – body interfacing with a domestic space in all its multifarious dimensions. So far we’d seen a number of works which spoke directly to their unusual settings; here, at our finishing stop, was an actual body inhabiting a lived space, rehearsing household rituals and mundane experience as a means of performance art. To put it another way, by incorporating the human body into the realm of art, art and actual experience were brought a step closer -  even more so than the use of found objects, or visual simulation, or the utilization of everyday space ..

At apt. no. 5.

At apt. no. 5.

At apt. no. 5.

Of course, my interest in trying to discern an aesthetics of the domestic probably occluded from view other less dominant themes in the show. For instance, there was also a definite engagement with the larger community of Marine Parade and Katong – or the neighbourhood estate as a form of collective memory. The photographs which posited an ersatz history of marine and social life in the area, for one, as well as Lynn Lu’s Tremor, which consisted of a tray of vibrating crystalware perched on a small table beneath which a device emitting sound on a continual loop had been placed, thus ensuring the constant vibration of the glasses (below); our guide informed us that it reflected the fact that the estate often feels the effects of seismic activity in Indonesia very keenly. Local artist Mark Wong’s numerous sound installations in the various apartments, produced by hidden gadgets and creating an ambient soundscape as part of the art-viewing experience, also deserves greater notice, but that unfortunately is a little beyond the scope of the present review (below).

Tremor (2011), Lynn Lu

Label of Mark Wong’s Sounds Like Home, Edition 1: Anthea (in apt. no. 2)

OH! may be said to fall under rubrics familiar in the contemporary art scene: participation art, happenings, relational aesthetics. This last was a term coined by French curator Nicholas Bourriaud in the 1990s (which admittedly we are a decade away from as of now). Bourriaud’s aim was to describe the means by which forms of conviviality and sociability have become the desired ends in art-making: “In our post-industrial societies, the most pressing thing is no longer the emancipation of individuals, but the freeing-up of inter-human communications, the dimensional emancipation of existence.”* Unlike the scripted nature of a John Cage or Allan Kaprow Happening perhaps, in which the audience is invited to engage with the work of art in a specific, regulatory manner, the generation of a “community effect” is the point which Bourriaud wishes to stress: “The aura of art no longer lies in the hinter-world represented by the work, nor in form itself, but in front of it, within the temporary collective form that it produces by being put on show.”* In other words, it is the staging of a forum wherein relations between viewers – rather than simply a relation between the audience and the artwork – which is held out as the chief site of interest, or the instituting of an arena or an open system under the auspices of art to foster the sorts of communal conviviality that Bourriaud has identified.

I can’t imagine a more apropos instantiation of his ideas. Yes, the participatory element of the show was very much a restricted one: we couldn’t take pictures of the homes themselves, just the art; and of course we weren’t permitted to disrupt the owners’ possessions; their bathrooms were likewise off-limits; the time spent at individual apartments was limited to no more than ten minutes. However, the ambulatory character of the event – combined with the circumscribed relationship between viewer and work, where both time and space are controlled factors – was certainly conducive to communication and interaction between viewers instead. And here, in trying to account for the effects of the art experience rather than just the work itself, a shift from cataloging formal qualities to narrativizing the less tangible elements of art-viewership is desirable – and where perhaps moving into the personal and anecdotal may not be inappropriate. As mentioned, I was there with several friends. MY, whom I was meeting for the first time, was just done with her M.A. thesis, in which she maps urban theory onto military aesthetics (from what little I understood anyways). The point is, as a student and thinker she turned out to be just as keen on critical theory and cultural studies as I was. In between peering at the art, and trekking from one HDB block to another to peer at more art, we found quite a bit to talk about: my work, her work, the vagaries of academia, NUS, Foucault, Debord, the list goes on … It was a pleasant couple of hours, and while to describe it in Bourriaud-ian terms as a “freeing-up of inter-human communications, the dimensional emancipation of existence” may perhaps be something of an overstatement, the event accords, I think, with the general paradigm shift that Bourriaud lays out, in transferring the burden of significance from formal meaning to human terms like conviviality and sociability.

* See Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (France: Les Presse Du Reel, 1998), p. 60 & 61.