I’ve long suspected that, deep down inside, young Singaporean artists secretly harbour fantasies of being carpenters and architects.
Think about it. Donna Ong, the Chun twins (Kaifeng and Kai Qun), Vertical Submarine, Michael Lee – many of their works are installations and sculptural pieces of rooms and buildings and similar intricate works dealing with structures.
And even if they’re not making houses and buildings and such, there’s also an indirect link — defunct Evil Empire’s exhibitions in warehouses and HDB flats, a recent show by a group of young artists being held at a shophouse, etc.
I got to thinking about this after seeing a couple of shows recently: the recently ended Villa Alicia exhibit at 43 Binjai Park, which transformed an entire 1950s bungalow into an exhibit in and of itself (just before it’s slated to be demolished); and Tang Da Wu’s latest work Long Po Feng Yi / First Arts Council at Valentine Willie Fine Art.
The latter is dominated by this skeletal structure of a house, its frames painted yellow, with Perspex walls, a glass(green)house as it were. Inside is a yam plant, two figures of children, one of which seemingly peers down at a mirror that reflects a plank of wood painted blue dotted with stars hanging overhead.
Around it are other elements: drumsticks bound together looking from afar like a sheaf of wheat. Huge paintings and drawings by Tang himself and contributors Pan Jia Ding, Jeremy Hiah and Zai Kuning (who also collaborates with his daughter for a piece within the house structure). A chair hanging upside down from the ceiling enclosed in Perspex case.
The interplay of elements in this enigmatic show is so deeply layered but one does come out perceiving its central case.
From Tang’s very dedication of the piece to art teachers and, specifically the Singapore Teachers Academy Of The Arts, to its references to Van Gogh (the chair, the drumsticks, a painting by Pan of a Christ-like figure surrounded by crows, a letter by his sister-in-law Johanna) to the less obvious Chinese folk tale of a woman who sews clothes for children, and finally the inclusion of artists who have been nurtured (directly or otherwise) by Tang himself, it’s a whirlwind of images at the centre of which is the very idea of nurturing the arts and the artists.
But there is, also, something slightly unsettling and enticingly disorienting about it. The paintings are hung askew, there are odd corners disrupting your viewing, the house itself – and the sculptures of the two children – seem incomplete and haphazardly constructed or a work-in-progress. An open-ended experience.
It’s in contrast to Villa Alicia. Here, the very idea of nurturing artistic ideals is at its very end. We are seeing a valiant effort to revive a house in its dying days.
But it’s not just the structure per se but all it holds within – its history, the stories it keeps – sometimes in plain view as in the scribblings on the walls by its owner Dr Nalla Tan in her attempts to keep Alzheimer’s at bay. It’s all the more poignant considering Tan herself was a painter (some nice ones too) and a self-published writer (the exhibit’s title was taken from one of her books).
In what’s seemingly a reverse of Tang’s work, photographer Alecia Neo and sound artist Clarence Chung make a last ditch (and ultimately futile) stand by turning the very venue (not incomplete but decaying) into a living work of art. It’s not hard to imagine Chung’s soundscapes and installations of dinnertime conversations, clinking wine bottles and the sharp tearing of paper as, collectively speaking, the last gasping breaths of the place; and Neo’s reconstructions of the Tans’ family photographs in constant playful dialogue with the original versions as the hallucinatory double-takes of someone whose failing eyesight, like memory, is playing tricks on him/her.
Villa Alicia has already ended. But traces of it – some of Neo’s photographs and some “artefacts” from the house — can be found at the Imagine Malaysia exhibit adjacent to Tang’s. (The residents of 43 Binjai Park apparently have roots in Ipoh.)
Here, again, buildings and structures – from Lee’s After Humans series to Heman Chong’s advertisement posters publicizing a Guggenheim in JB in six year’s time (these go into my list of dream t-shirt designs along with the Cooling Off Day logo) .
But that wasn’t what struck me about the show but the artists’ responses to its thematic shout out.
“What do you think of your neighbours?” the show asks. “Erm, nothing much. Let me consult my archives.”
While some of them tap into personal histories (whether it’s their own – as in Loo Zihan’s performance Taman Negara (above), where he reenacts a childhood incident of getting lost in Malaysia’s national park by walking back and forth two columns non-stop for a couple of hours – or others’ – as in Sherman Ong’s lovely dance film about the love story of a political prisoner), it would seem that many Singaporean artists have a more detached way of confronting the idea of “Malaysia”.
From Lee’s photo of a demolished miniature model of the KL landmark and Genevieve Chua’s intricate stamps of Pedra Branca, to Alan Oei’s paintings of a young LKY and Mahathir to and Zhao Renhui’s photographs of lions and tigers (geddit?) to Jeremy Hiah’s oh-so-fun interactive train sculpture (geddit?), the engagement has been on the symbolic level. In fact, in one of Jason Wee’s works – various design permutations of 15 stars (Malaysia has 14, guess which what the other star stands for?) – it’s literally codified.
This curious observation was underscored, for me at least, by two works – Green Zeng’s time capsule sculpture that’s presumably sealed until reunification and Wee’s photograph of a bunch of keys that, ironically, cannot open any doors. They hint at impenetrability, at an opaque state of things.
Is this the extent of one’s imagining of Malaysia? And if so, it’d be interesting to know why. It is because these elements are so ingrained in the psyche that Singaporeans just, you know, “get it”?