"Inside the Chamber of Spectacles ... or Outside It", Article: The Singapore Biennale Review (Robert Zhao)

ARTICLEThe Singapore Biennale Review DECEMBER 2013

FREEISBN 978-981-07-3538-8

The Singapore Biennale 2013, “If the World Changed,” invited artists to “respond to and reconsider the world” in which we live. Among the many artworks, there are five in particular that are singularly memorable. These works examined issues as far ranging as memory and history to corruption and censorship and explored the relationship between the past and the present, bringing to mind the words of T.S. Eliot, that “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past”.

Peace Can Be Realised Even Without Order by Japanese art collective teamLab (est.2001) is arguably one of the strongest works in the Singapore Biennale. The work combines art and technology to create a moving, transcendental experience. In this animated diorama, cut out figures interact with each other and also to the viewers’ movements, as they navigate the gallery space.

As one enters the darkened gallery, ghostly figures of traditional musicians, jugglers, dancers — some in elaborate costumes, others in fearsome masks — move all around the viewer. An incongruous figure in a frog mask plays a drum, while another dressed as a rabbit dances trance-like in a hypnotic rhythm.

In Japanese traditional art, there is no central perspective and something of that sensibility is located in this work. Here, the past and present collide, and the moving figures, the layering of sound and light, and the use of mirrors create a sense of spatial instability, of being transported into the ancient world that this work evokes.

Toy (Churning of the Sea of Milk), by Cambodian artist Svay Sareth (b.1972) is another significant installation work that references both the past and the present. Sareth grew up in refugee camps and is a survivor of one of the world’s bloodiest conflicts. Toy (Churning of the Sea of Milk) spans 15 meters. In it, the artist meticulously reproduces the famous bas-relief at Angkor Wat depicting the Churning of the Sea of Milk, an ancient Hindu creation myth from the Mahabharata.

The installation is larger than life and is covered with camouflage material, resembling a large soft toy. It reminds us that monuments were historically tools to shape political consciousness and construct a nation’s collective memory.

The work intertwines issues of conflict, war and political machinations with larger narratives of history and myth-making and is a commentary on the power struggles and cynical alliances created in modern warfare. This giant sculptural soft toy references both Cambodia’s tumultuous past as well as its problematic present and suggests that the cycle of violence and conflict is not yet a thing of the past.

Another evocative work in the Biennale, with an unusual sense of gravity and intimacy, is Unsubtitled by Vietnamese artist Nguyen Trinh Thi (b.1973). In this video installation, luminous figures — her fellow artists and fellow members of an experimental art space in Hanoi — are projected onto life-size wooden cutouts.

As one walks into the darkened gallery to see these figures in the corner of the room, one feels as if one has stumbled upon a group of people having a very quiet and private moment. This sensation is heightened by the sound of the artists eating — the crackle of a paper bag being torn open, the crunch of a carrot — amidst the ambient sounds of traffic and a dog barking.

Nguyen is inspired by her past experiences of police intimidation and state censorship. Here, she references the short film Andy Warhol Eats A Hamburger and directs her fellow artists in the video to eat a favourite item of food and then state their name and the item of food that they are consuming. Unsubtitled equates the very necessary act of eating with the suggestion that if one eats to nourish one’s body, one makes art to nourish one’s soul. The work also explores the power of collective action: the power of a group of people engaging in a singular activity, as well as the artist’s inalienable right to freedom of expression.

The intensity of the work, the defiance with which each artist looks into the camera to state his or her name and the dignity with which they stand and proclaim their choice is very moving and, in the context of a Biennale with a Southeast Asian focus, reminds one of some of the challenges facing many artists in the region, albeit to varying degrees. (Continued on page 3)

Between Past and Present

Rahel Joseph

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1 + 2 The Sick Classroom by Nge Lay

PUBLISHED BY AICA SG(The International Association of Art Critics, Singapore)

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RAHEL JOSEPH Between Past and Present

MAYEE WONGWould the World Change? Worlding Southeast Asia in the Singapore Biennale 2013

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Modern warfare takes many different forms and, in The Sick Classroom, Myanmar artist Nge Lay (b.1979) examines how the education system in her country has been used as a tool to control and subjugate her people.

Here, she has recreated a classroom from the Thuye’dan village, some 340 kilometres from the capital city of Yangon. The artist, whose mother-in-law works as a teacher at the village, has direct contact with the children at the school and, working with local craftsmen, has created life-size wooden sculptures of the school’s Grade 1 children.

Details in the reconstructed classroom can be seen everywhere — from the desks littered with primers, pencil boxes, schoolbags (including a well-worn Justin Beiber knapsack) to the chalk-covered class blackboard. There is not a single identical wooden sculpture. She has captured the characteristics and idiosyncrasies always to be found in a classroom: two chatterboxes in the back row; an industrious student, bent over his books, pencil in his hand; a daydreamer looking out of the window.

The power of this work is in the detail and, stepping into the installation, one is immediately drawn into the tiny world of a small classroom in a remote village in Myanmar. In this intimate space housed in the Singapore Art Museum (once a school for boys), one is struck by the larger narrative of how education can mould and shape young minds in both positive and negative ways and its implications for the future.

The Biennale is dominated by new media, so Filipino artist Leslie de Chavez’s (b. 1978) Detritus comes as a welcome relief. His painting, which is set at a toxic Manila landfill, addresses the socio-political issues that have faced his country, from corruption and greed to economic deprivation and spiritual decay.

The artist’s use of a black primer creates a strong sense of foreboding. Throughout the painting, a rich iconography of destruction and decay, which is symbolic of a society in turmoil, fills every corner of the canvas. The painting is teeming with multiple narratives. Its theatrical imagery — a mob of hooded men, a monkey with an explosive tied to its body, a crucifix held by a masked man, a hangman’s noose, a tattooed man brandishing a gun, an exploding rocket, a snarling dog, a hail of bullets — has the frenetic logic of dreams. A sign lit by pink neon proclaims in Tagalog, “It is said: God is enough.” It reflects the conflicting emotions of resignation and optimism, hopelessness and faith felt by ordinary people through the ages and the sentiment that, despite the merry-go-round of politicians and leaders, the past keeps repeating itself and that nothing really changes.

The work draws one in again and again and it is with relief that we find, amidst the despair, the image of the sun breaking through the clouds in the foreground of the painting. It is a symbol of hope in an uncertain and always evolving future.

These five works have one thing in common: they combine compelling subtexts with a poetic and lyrical form. Although the issues explored in the artworks are not new — corruption, censorship, warfare — like all great art, these works leave the viewer feeling as if they are encountering these issues for the first time.

Rahel Joseph is a writer and independent curator based in Kuala Lumpur. She was formally Director of Cultural Relations at the Australian High Commission Kuala Lumpur and Head of Exhibitions and Public Programmes at GALERI PETRONAS, Kuala Lumpur.

SHARAAD KUTTANAn Interview with Yee I-Lann

PAUL KHOOPlaying Safe

ALEKSANDAR BRKIĆIn a Bigger Family

VIVIANA MEJÍAPlaces of Art: Cambodian Artists in the Biennale

CHRISTINA CHUALee Wen: The Artist is Making Noise

MICHAEL LEETravel and Hope

LOUIS HOInside the Chamber of Spectacles ... Or Outside It

FAISAL HASNIThe Airport Runaway: Escaping My Fear of Contemporary Art

HO RUI ANThe Region Unviewed

ONG PUAY KHIMIf only the Singapore Biennale Didn’t Change: Tracing the Four Editions of SB

ZARINA MUHAMMADRemembering the Rituals of Renewal: Sharon Chin’s Mandi Bunga Performance

ANMARI VAN NIEUWENHOVEIs it worth it?

LOREDANA PAZZINI - PARACCIANIBelieving in (Positive) Change: Su Tan Ni, a Thai Collective at the Singapore Biennale

MELANIE POCOCKChina looks at Southeast Asia: An Interview with LEAP

PRASHANT ASHOKAPortrait of the Viewer

LAREMY LEESpotlight off the Art: Thoughts and Impressions of Visitors to the Singapore Biennale 2013

SHARAAD KUTTANThe First Draft of History

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Contents

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VIVIANA MEJÍAIf the Biennale changed: An Interview with Erin Gleeson

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3 Peace can be Realised Even Without Order by teamLab

4 Detritus by Leslie de Charez

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The Singapore Biennale this year has an official theme that extends beyond a single, or two-worded concept. Instead of “Belief”, “Wonder” or “Open House” of the previous years, the Singapore Biennale 2013 (SB2013) proposes to ask “If the World Changed”, an evocation that gestures towards possibilities and alternatives, departing from the past and the present. Certainly, the Biennale has changed from its previous edition, most obviously in its curatorial model. Instead of two or three international and local curators, the Biennale now boasts twenty-seven curators from Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries. In addition, instead of showcasing international artists alongside regional and local artists, the Biennale has taken a decidedly regional focus, with most of its featured artists based in or hailing from Southeast Asia.

Given the Biennale’s regional emphasis, you might wonder if the notion of the world has been left behind in all these changes. After all, internationalism has always been part of the draw of the Biennale format. The Biennale brings the international art world to Singapore, and also puts Singapore on the map of the international art world. You might still remember Scandinavian duo Elmgreen and Dragset’s German Barn (2011) in the Old Kallang Airport site from SB2011, a traditional German structure transplanted into the hangar, complete with bales of hay and young ‘German’ boys. Or the work of Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov, whose fear of flying becomes the basis of a whimsical collaboration with Singaporean filmmaker-artist Liao Jiekai, resulting in Liao executing Solakov’s instructions in the Kallang airport control tower.

It seems as if this year’s Biennale is an involution from the “Open House” of SB2011, in having the artists of Southeast Asia reflect and project upon the world, while demarcating its boundaries within a geographically contained space. What kind of worlds might this new approach yield if we situate the focus of perspectives in and from Southeast Asia?

SB2013 offers to aesthetically create and map the world according to Southeast Asia, and in the process bring the imaginary worlds of Southeast Asia into being. Here, I would like to introduce the notion of “worlding” in relation to the theme of SB2013, its aesthetic productions and its cultural effects. I think about worlding in terms of two broad definitions. One has to do with the metaphysical sense of our experiences of and with the world, through the interplay of our external senses and our imagination. The other has to do with worlding in the cartographic sense, which gives rise to images of global or geographical coherence.

At an existential level, art is always about worlding: the creation and manipulation of material and meaning where there might previously be none. Art invites the projection, suspension and the emergence of new spatialities and temporalities, defying or disrupting the way we encounter the world. Situated this year in Bras Basah, Bugis, and Taman Jurong — sites which force us to literally move across the country — how do the works of the Singapore Biennale invite us to immerse ourselves into uncanny, alternate or multiple worlds? As always, how do the particularities of the material and scale of the art intersect with the experiential dimensions of their sites?

Would the World Change?Worlding Southeast Asia in the Singapore Biennale 2013

Mayee Wong

These questions take on a greater significance in the context of the Biennale’s theme, which opens up the issue of rapid modernisation and its effects. This is a familiar issue that we continually return to with respect to this region, and it is usually pitched in terms of encounters between binaries of local traditions with processes of globalisation and capitalist production. The material world changes into something more ephemeral, fragmented and immaterial with the use of new media technologies, while our patterns of import consumption have reflected a greater trend towards a lifestyle of disposability and obsolescense. How do the curators and artists revisit, reexamine, revise or transform these notions with the platform of SB2013?

Or, does the Biennale exhibit symptoms of import culture, demonstrating pop-up spectacle and tokenistic novelty in the form of a world (or rather, regional) exhibition?

The deliberate emphasis on Southeast Asia in this year’s edition brings me to the cartographic notion of worlding, which raises questions on the Singapore Biennale’s geopolitical agenda and ambitions: is SB2013 an attempt at regional introspection, or a strategic consolidation of Singapore’s metropolitan influence as Southeast Asia’s contemporary art capital? It is quite clear that the Singapore Biennale has always been staged to complement Singapore’s promotion of itself as a global city-state. The shifting of the Biennale’s focus and the SB2013 curatorial model could be seen as a cultural parallel to diplomatic efforts pushing for ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) economic integration in 2015.

More immediately, with an increasingly cluttered Asian biennale scene, SB2013 can be regarded as an attempt on the Singapore Art Museum’s (SAM) part to project the boundaries of the Southeast Asian art world to establish its distinction in a rapidly changing international art scene. SB2013 is organised by SAM this year, which anchors the institutional role the museum projects for itself in the contemporary art world of the region. While SB2011 was also organised by SAM, curators from SAM have taken on a much larger role this year, participating as part of the team of twenty-seven. Out of this, eight curators were from SAM, four were from other Singapore-based institutions, with the rest of curators from the other Southeast Asian countries. This expansion of curators from three to twenty-seven has been pitched as an opportunity for regional collaboration. It is a framework that certainly bears much potential for multiplicity and exchange, but also poses its own organisational challenges.

The question is how — and if — SAM can channel its institutional weight into bringing focus to the current state of Southeast Asian art while being sensitive to the diversity of the art and cultural landscapes and practices of the region. Is SB2013 an extensive collection of contemporary Southeast Asian art, or an organic ensemble where, in the course of its run and beyond, worlds will unfold, reverberate, and enmesh into each other?

How does SB2013 map the contemporary Southeast Asian art world, and what directions or orientations does this Biennale offer us for thinking about Southeast Asian art? It seems remarkable that it was only in the early 20th century that Southeast Asian art began to be officially documented. Even then, Southeast Asia was mapped in art history as “Farther India” or “Greater India”. While the traditional art of the region has since gained its own profile in the Western art world, contemporary Southeast Asian art, in comparison, still lacks visibility in global terms. Whether SB2013 can help change this remains to be seen.

Mayee Wong is currently pursuing a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of California, Davis, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. She is also a member of the Singapore chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

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1 Official Logo of The Singapore Biennale 2013

Designed by fFurious

Image Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum

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Well known for her sometimes trenchant, sometimes lyrical artistic critiques of the notion of Malaysia as a modern political construct, Yee I-Lann’s inclusion as co-curator in the SB2013 was an opportunity to ferret out alternative visions caught in the interstices of Southeast Asia’s modern nation-states.

SK (Sharaad Kuttan): Let’s begin with the question of process.

YI-L (Yee I-Lann): Khairuddin Hori, a curator at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) called me to be a curator. I said, “No, I am not a curator, I’m an artist.” I am not confused about that; there is no ambiguity in my mind. But he said, “This Biennale is a learning process. It is opening things up. In a way, SAM is approaching the Biennale in order to find out what we don’t know.” They were very curious to know what is happening in the Malaysian Borneo side — in Sabah and Sarawak. I am eternally the representative for art from Sabah. I fill the quota [laughing]. My mandate was to look at contemporary art from Sabah and Sarawak. Then, I understood what this Biennale is attempting. It is as much an extravagant research exercise as it is a biennale. I think SAM has put itself in quite a vulnerable, but brave, position, in attempting to explore the beast of contemporary art in Southeast Asia. And its premise is local research.

SK: Biennales often have a single curator whose vision holds the whole together. What happens when you move from that model to one that is as dispersed as this?

YI-L: What happens is that you don’t have a singular vision, perspective, idea or directive. That’s kind of scary. From the beginning, the curators compromised to various degrees, which diffused their original personal intent. But, it’s an interesting exercise. So many issues came up: whether the Biennale be about periphery arts; whether a biennale is the equivalent of a “United Nations of human rights and social issues”; whether a biennale has a place in Southeast Asia.

There were some people who really wanted the Biennale to be focused on contemporary art. They wanted it to be seen within the trajectory of contemporary art led by the Western world, and not about place, region or specific issues from “here”. In other conversations, curators expressed their concern about community projects, with art in that kind of setting, and communication with disparate groups of people. At least half of us were not curators but artists, so we were learning what curating was in the process.

SK: Tell us about curating the Malaysian component of the Biennale.

YI-L: The Malaysian co-curator team consisted of Khairuddin Hori, Faisal Sidek a young curator with the National Art Gallery Malaysia (Balai) and I. Khai’s role was to oversee the Malaysia side, in a way, from the SAM point of view. But we were given a lot of freedom. I was given a directive to focus on Sabah and Sarawak; Faisal, to explore Semenajung (Peninsular Malaysia). Once we met the other curators, there were conversations about how we might look for art and artists.

SK: Were you mindful of the theme when thinking about who to showcase?

YI-L: Yes, very much so. The theme was decided before all of us came on board. It drove a lot of the decision making.

SK: What about the conversations you had with Faisal Sidek? He is from the Peninsular half of Malaysia, while you are from the Borneo half. Malaysia’s two halves, while politically united, are, in terms of culture and aspirations, quite different.

YI-L: He was asked, I think, because SAM wants to develop its relationship with Balai, institution to institution. Faisal was a representative of Balai in a way. But I think Faisal took a back seat to Kai and I, perhaps because we have such strong personalities. I was hoping that Faisal would present ideas about young artists at UiTM Mara, (a leading art school), present us with artists that I don’t know of. And that certainly happens in the art world where you have your own clique of people you’re familiar with. So I was hoping that Faisal would present new works. But he didn’t.

SK: How many works are there from Malaysia and who selected each work?

YI-L: There are nine artists — five from Peninsular Malaysia and four from Malaysian Borneo. We all brought our ideas to the table and presented it; it was a very long process. And that’s when the geographical mandate that we began with started to fall away. It became about the art; about the storytelling; and the molding of what this beast could be.

SK: What do you think this “beast” is and could be?

YI-L: This experience has challenged me. I don’t think I’ve ever really given serious consideration to what defines or constitutes contemporary arts in Southeast Asia with such focus before. There seems to be many contemporaries in practice. So what

An Interview with Yee I-Lann

Sharaad Kuttan

ultimately determines what is defined as contemporary art in SEA is everything else — the frameworks provided, the continued dialogue both from the wider art world and what the practitioners and audiences say it is. Sometimes we forget the many types of audiences and engagements that artists may be seeking.

The Singapore Biennale, to me, is Singapore located in Riau, meaning something that is highly connected, cosmopolitan and global operating within something that is deeply local and located. These are the two high notes I think the Singapore Biennale should strive to achieve — to be like a mandala with centrifugal and centripetal dynamics.

Sharaad Kuttan is a producer with BFM Radio in Malaysia. He is co-editor of Looking At Culture (1996) a collection of essays on cultural politics in Singapore.

1 Rukunegara 1: Belief in God by Zulkifli Yussoff

2 Longing by Chi Too

3 Waiting Room by Shieko Reto

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Community art gets strong representation in the Singapore Biennale 2013. Perhaps that is no surprise, given that current Singapore arts policy, articulated in the Arts and Culture Strategic Review of 2012, is focused on bringing art to the grassroots. But making successful street art, community art’s more problematic cousin, is trickier as it exposes the contradictions inherent within a state-driven agenda versus a grassroots form.

Two Indonesian artists, Irwan Ahmett (b.1975) and Tita Salina (b.1973), are known for doing street interventions in public spaces. Branded broadly under Urban Play, their historical works are featured prominently on the prime ground floor space of 8Q, alongside new site-specific commissions for the Biennale.

Coming from Jakarta, a sprawling metropolis of 15 million and notorious for lack of rule following, the duo’s combination of urban critique and a playful, oftentimes humorous stance, works. In Monorail Slalom (2010), the public becomes a human train traversing the skeleton of the uncompleted Jakarta monorail system, a commentary on the failed urban public transportation policy. In Trashball (2012), city children play soccer with a ball of urban rubbish that balloons to a monstrous size, poignantly pointing to failed environmental policies.

However, the artists’ modus operandi falls flat in the Singapore environment. Despite their ambitious intentions, they end up with two dull pieces. The first is a take on their Jakarta work, Dancing Umbrellas (2010). The plot involves getting the vendors of some quasi-legal space to coordinate a dance of umbrellas. But the subtext involves navigating the subterranean power structures governing these markets. In Jakarta, the duo had to deal with the network of gangsters touting shady state connections known as the preman. Ironically, while they successfully negotiated with the Jakarta underworld, replete with threats of real violence, their efforts to replicate the concept in Singapore’s Thieves Market on Sungei Road failed. Apparently, in the supposedly corruption and crime-free Singapore, informal power structures also exist, thwarting the duo. Eventually, the intervention becomes a tame exercise of genteel people promenading around Singapore in a coordinated display of umbrellas, resembling an MGM musical with limited choreography.

The Sungei Road experiment illustrates how easy categories of globalisation, be it street art or youth culture, may actually face very different local contexts or material realities. This is seen in the duo’s piece City Crossword, located at the Singapore Management University (SMU). The work is a human-sized crossword puzzle featuring Singapore references, none of which are particularly politically controversial. Unlike their Jakarta pieces, the play here is contrived, no surprise given that the duo solicited questions from participants in workshops, so subject material is based on the workshop’s outcome. There is also limited engagement with the public, apart from the theoretical audience who may play the game and the seminar participants. In contrast, much of the strength of the Jakarta pieces stems from their ability to engage real, concrete publics, be it the vendors dealing with the market criminals or the street kids. The idea of public here becomes another theoretical, public policy exercise that lacks any organic existence.

Like the failed Sungei Road intervention, the story behind the SMU piece tells a more interesting narrative. Apparently, even this fairly innocuous exercise entailed huge amounts of negotiation with the Singapore Management University. None of this should surprise anyone, particularly Singapore street artists and independent spaces that face multiple bureaucracies and a myriad of rules to make art. Unlike Jakarta, power and material reality in Singapore exists in formal and bureaucratic forms, albeit fragmented ones. As such, the concept of play that thrives in the chaos of empty spaces found in between formal structures falls flat. Perhaps Irwan and Tita should have done a crossword puzzle of bureaucratic acronyms as an appropriate urban critique of the Singapore reality. Certainly there are enough to go around.

Paul Khoo is an art historian who teaches cultural policy at NTU’s School of Art, Design, and Media. He also sits on the board of The Substation.

Playing Safe

Paul Khoo

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The opportunity for Singapore to organise its first contemporary art biennale came in 2006 when the city hosted the Annual Meetings of the Boards of Governors of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group. Touted as the anchor event of “Singapore 2006: Global City, World of Opportunities”, the mission was clear. As the media releases stated: the Biennale was to set Singapore up as a “vibrant cosmopolitan city” and an “international visual arts hub” through showcasing the “vibrant, global character of our city”. To this end, the inaugural edition matched ambition with scale.

Helmed by artistic director Fumio Nanjo, together with co-curators Sharmini Pereira, Roger McDonald, and Eugene Tan, the Biennale, titled “Belief”, presented works by ninety-five international artists spread across sixteen venues around the city. Not only did it market the city-state by including sites of interest such as City Hall, Tanglin Camp, Singapore River, and Orchard Road, the Biennale also engaged the sites with its theme in meaningful ways by convincing religious spaces to play host to contemporary works, which in turn responded to those sites.

The event profiled Singapore substantially and attracted attention from the international art circuit. More importantly, it marked a key moment in the development and reception of contemporary art in Singapore. Prior to the Biennale, contemporary art had not been established in the mainstream and had not quite developed the desired mass audience. This is not to say that audienceship for and acceptance of contemporary art increased exponentially after the first SB. Rather, the significance of the event was in its introduction of contemporary art practices to the Singapore masses, made more effective by virtue of its scale and extended coverage by the mainstream media. That this was not picked up and developed in a sustained manner after the first SB and in the lead up to the second was arguably a missed opportunity.

The second edition of the Singapore Biennale in 2008, “Wonder”, was smaller in scale (due to a smaller budget) and again had Nanjo as artistic director, this time working with co-curators Joselina Cruz and Matthew Ngui. With the pressure of city marketing surrounding the first SB behind it, SB2008 was able to focus on presenting the diversity of international contemporary art while continuing to showcase urban developments in the city, using sites such as South Beach, a conserved site slated for redevelopment, and new tourist attractions such as the Singapore Flyer and the Marina Bay area. More effort was put into engaging the general public and drawing them to the Biennale through installing public artworks at popular locations such as the Raffles City Shopping Centre, the Esplanade Bridge, and so forth. SB2008 also had a more targeted education and outreach programme that was focused on engaging the local schools.

Up till then, SB had remained committed to presenting international contemporary art practices and its third edition was no different. However, it took on added responsibilities, one of which was to “develop our artistic and curatorial capabilities” (again, from the official media releases). This was thought to be achieved through appointing a Singaporean, Matthew Ngui — who was a co-curator of SB2008 — to helm the Biennale in 2011. Under the artistic direction of Ngui and his co-curators Russell Storer and Trevor Smith, SB largely maintained an international outlook albeit one that placed emphasis on having the “strongest Asian and local representation to date”. It also maintained SB’s characteristic use of buildings and spaces in transition. It was with this third edition that the National Arts Council (NAC) relinquished its role as organiser of the Biennale and appointed the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) to undertake the project. The decision was part of the Council’s plan to move away from direct programming. SAM was seen as an ideal choice at that time for its “expertise […] in the areas of curatorial, exhibition management, art education”. The potential skills transfer was thought to help further the function of SB as a platform for capability development. It was in that same year, in 2009, that the museum renewed its direction to focus on contemporary art in the region. Having SAM organise SB was therefore equally about lending credibility to the museum and anchoring its position as the authority on contemporary art.

To facilitate the transition, SB was moved back by six months to March 2011. As it turned out, SB2011, “Open House”, was plagued by problems. Media coverage was unbalanced, centring mainly on Tatzu Nishi’s project The Merlion Hotel. Then came an uproar over SAM’s handling of Simon Fujiwara’s installation — an act of self-censorship which resulted in the closure of the exhibit. Finally, complaints about one of the main venues, the Old Kallang Airport poured in, mainly on logistical matters, from the lack of effective signage to poor ventilation. While many factors surely contributed to these problems (the previous SBs were not without their fair share of problems), one might speculate that perhaps the Museum’s “expertise” was a capability that seemed to apply mainly within its own premises and on its own terms.

Despite its varying degrees of success and a subtle shift of emphasis towards local and regional artists, SB has over its first three editions managed to create some sort of identity with its characteristic use of significant sites across the city, and its component of commissioning a comparatively large proportion of new works that attempt to engage with their sites of production. It seemed to also settle into a curatorial model consisting of an artistic director aided by a small team of co-curators.

All this changed with the fourth and current edition of SB. Re-appointed as its organiser, SAM established a new focus and a new curatorial structure. Abandoning

If Only the Singapore Biennale Didn’t Change:Tracing the Four Editions of SB

Ong Puay Khim

the practice of showcasing international artists, SB2013 is decidedly focused on Southeast Asia. With the exciting developments in and increased international attention and demand for contemporary art from Southeast Asia in recent years, any effort at investigating a region that is as complex as it is diverse is always welcomed. The new focus was also in line with Singapore’s recent ambition to be the “gateway” to contemporary art in the region and was met with approval.

Its was its curatorial model that aroused mixed reactions and scepticism. SB2013 adopted a collaborative curatorial structure consisting of a team of 27 curators from Singapore and the region (one-third of them were SAM curatorial staff). The aim was to tap into the local knowledge of the co-curators thus making SB2013 a “leading entry point for regional contemporary art practices”. If bringing together this group of curators was to offer an opportunity for critical exchanges, conversations with several SB curators revealed to this writer that this dialogue did not always happen. For instance, the theme “If the World Changed” was not a result of discussion but was one decided upon by the organiser in advance. From what I could gather, there was no curatorial direction and thus each co-curator brought with them their selection of artists based on their individual interpretation of the theme. There were many discussions, but these were centred on individual works, and without much of an attempt to bring together the varied curatorial viewpoints. One cannot help but question the seriousness of such an endeavour if discussions crucial to a meaningful engagement were not facilitated. As a gesture, it was grand but perhaps empty.

The decision to lose the other trait of SB — the use of sites in transition — seems unfortunate. Confined to the Bras Basah-Bugis precinct, SB2013 has little engagement with locality despite boasting a large proportion of new commissions. A case in point is Guo Yixiu’s (b.1989) Paranoia at Waterloo Street. As a site-specific piece, the work was meant to intervene upon existing structures but instead, it employed a structure built specially for it, keeping it within a designated zone, thereby defeating the very idea of the work. We are then left to wonder if the problems from the last SB may have resulted in this change of policy, placing convenience over artistic considerations. If a biennale does not attempt to engage with the city it is in, what sets it apart from, say, another museum exhibition?

SB2013 attempts to illuminate contemporary art practices from the region but turns out to be a piecemeal showcase of contemporary art from various Southeast Asian cities. This in no way means that the works in SB2013 are of no merit. However, while it presents contemporary practices from each country, as a whole, there seems to be insufficient dialogue between these works. In many ways, SB2013 felt like an extended SAM exhibition. In fact, the very premise of SB2013 sounded exactly like what SAM had set out to do when it renewed its programming direction back in 2009.

What do we make of these changes? Any government funded event or initiative in Singapore is subject to certain objectives, and its development is often determined by the ambitions in vogue. SB is no exception. Contemporary art in Singapore has for decades actively engaged with the international art world, echoing the country’s internationalising efforts: participating in the Venice Biennale, sending artists on international residencies and exchanges, and so on. In recent years, with the changes in the local socio-political climate, there seem to be an anxiety to instil a shared identity amongst the citizenry, to create a certain “Singapore spirit”. One of the tools assumed to achieve this social cohesion is arts and culture. Thus, large amounts of funding have been directed towards heritage projects and the “traditional” art forms. Increasingly, government funding schemes also prioritise projects with local content and community engagement. It is no surprise, then, that SB, being a big budget event funded by the state, may have had to align to such purposes, particularly since it is organised by an institution under the umbrella of the National Heritage Board.

The shift to focus more on local needs (or was it perhaps to justify the organisation of such an event in the first place?) can be glimpsed in the official write-up about SB. The last two editions (2011 and 2013) spelled out the role of SB as providing “new opportunities for local visual artists, arts organisations and businesses, and cultivates deeper public engagement with the arts”. From the original ambitious aim of positioning “Singapore prominently as an international centre and regional thought leader in the field of visual art” (2006 and 2008), SB now presents a platform that seems to emphasise local participation in international dialogues and collaborations. While SB2011 maintained the international aspect, SB2013 seems to have abandoned it in favour of the regional. Arguably, rather than benefitting from being more focused, it was limiting and self-containing.

Looking ahead, the key question to ask then is what role should SB play? Given the increasingly vibrant and diverse local contemporary art offerings, promising developments in the art market, and the establishment of new organisations, would SB be at the forefront of these developments? The main issue with SB thus far is its lack of a clear direction; neither the commissioner nor the organiser was clear about what it is to be in the long term. Equally important is that SB responds to the developments in the art scene itself, not to government policies.

Ultimately, it is a matter of trust. For SB to establish itself and in turn benefit the local art scene, it needs to maintain a certain distance from the ruling powers, shed the burden of being a social service, and focus on what it is meant to be always about — art.

If only we can get that trust, and the money.

Ong Puay Khim is an independent curator based in Singapore. Her recent curatorial projects include Landscape Memories at Louis Vuitton Espace in Singapore and Engaging Perspectives: New Art From Singapore, organised by the Centre for Contemporary Art at Gillman Barracks.

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1 Paranoia by Guo Yixiu

2 Deutshe Scheune / German Barn by Elmgreen & Dragset

Singapore Biennale 2011

Image Coutesy of the Singapore Art Museum

3 Fog Sculpture #48687 by Fujiko Nakaya

Singapore Biennale 2008

Image Courtesy of the writer

4 Contain art Pavillion by Shigeru Ban

Singapore Biennale 2008

Image Courtesy of Singapore Biennale 2008

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VM (Viviana Mejía): What was your role as the co-curator from Cambodia for this biennale?

EG (Erin Gleeson): People have been curious about the “co” aspect of the co-curatorial — about the potentials of the particular co-curatorial process of this Biennale. The Biennale organiser, the Singapore Art Museum, stressed the importance of collective curatorship in its own communications. Understandably, for a biennale, a strategy of working with individuals who primarily curate where they live and on smaller scales (relative to a biennale) is indeed rare. I’ll answer this question as it applies to the logistics of selecting artists, because things turned logistical quite quickly. For the first and second phase of the process, I worked closely with SAM’s designated Cambodia curators Naomi Wang and Khairuddin Hori. The first phase was the making of a shortlist. Naomi, Khai and I had some overlapping artists, initially, although we had some differences as well. The final shortlist was decided upon after the SAM curators made a research visit to Cambodia. The second phase involved a review of the proposals from the open call, considered on their own but also against the shortlist. The third phase involved something like a “region within the region” collaborative strategy that was applied to Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, as these three nations had only one curator each, and were given the lowest quota of artists. The fourth phase involved all the 27 co-curators voting on all country-specific short-listed proposals. Time and knowledge were limited here and we each had to rely on the expertise of the respective country teams.

VM: Tell us more about the artists that you chose.

EG: There are so few people choosing to be an artist in Cambodia today, and it is interesting to ask where they are coming from, how they come to art. Their backgrounds and educations differ greatly. Svay Sareth discovered art in the refugee camps as a teenager and went on to co-found the Phare Ponlue Selpak art school in Battambang in 1994 before continuing to get his BFA and MFA in France. Khvay Samnang has a BA from Cambodia’s only national art school, the Royal University of Fine Arts in the capital, Phnom Penh, where he studied painting and came to contemporary practices through residencies within and outside of Cambodia, including at Tokyo Wonder Site. Albert Samreth comes from Cal Arts in the US. Aside from a number of artists who are self-taught in Cambodia, these educational backgrounds are quite typical: Phare, the Royal University of Fine Art, or well-established US-based or French-based art schools.

Generationally, Svay born in 1972, is the oldest, having lived through three violent regimes. Khvay was born in 1982 into post-Khmer Rouge Vietnamese rule. And Samreth was born in 1987, in Long Beach to Cambodian parents and he grew up both within and outside the large Cambodian diaspora community there (the second largest in the world and largest in the US). So of course their perspectives and approaches differ largely due to how they interpret the times they are from. Though, interestingly, none of them are fixated or capitalise on their own biography or identity in their practice.

VM: Do you feel that the theme and title of the Biennale allowed for an open-endedness, or was it, paradoxically, a restriction to you and the artists?

EG: I’m seeking some kind of resolve between the global vision of the title and the regional focus of artists and works. The title was decided upon by SAM prior to involving the non-museum co-curators, and some of us fought for title change but the marketing was fixed. I chose not to think about the title literally; I’m not interested in illustrative responses from artists. At the same time, the title does allow for nearly any work, so there is lot of mobility.

VM: As a curator was there anything you would have liked in terms of the co-curating model? Or is there something you expected that didn’t happen or would change if you could do it again?

EG: It was quite an experiment so I didn’t have many expectations; I just was there to learn as much as I could and mainly to support the artists I worked with. What I wished would have happened is rather than a conference being only at the end of the Biennale as planned, we could have started our first meeting with a small conference that focused on knowledge beyond what we co-curators knew. We did each present a brief survey or an aspect of our countries’ art scenes, but I think it would have been important to listen, as a whole group, to historians, economists, geographers, writers, etc., and to get their impressions of the place and time that art gives shape to. I am not an advocate of translating art as regionalism or vice versa. However, if it is a claim of this Biennale, then we should have more critically considered the region itself. It could have provided for some grounding in terms of selection. I currently feel the artworks are floating in their own space; this reflects our country specific co-curatorial work, and beyond this, perhaps that artists in “Southeast Asia” are reflecting their own lives and histories. The thematic indicators that SAM placed throughout the Biennale mimic road indicators that would make a traveler lost. Maybe this is good. We have to look at each work for itself. But going

If the Biennale Changed:An Interview with Erin Gleeson

Viviana Mejía

back to the question, “If the Biennale changed”, I would still want more discourse. This knowledge that I am still looking for, it takes time, and the Biennale itself is a step in building it.

Viviana Mejía is an art writer, curator and gallery manager at Future Perfect. Some publications of her work include Article 2012, Singapore Architect, Broadsheet, National Portrait Gallery of Australia, and La Salle Journal.

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1 + 2 Toy (Churning of the Sea of Milk) by Svay Sareth

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Three generations of Cambodian art converge in the Singapore Biennale. The complex and layered backgrounds of all three artists are both overtly and inadvertently translated in their work. Albert Samreth’s soundscape is located in the foyer of the Singapore Art Museum, Sareth Svay’s sculptural installation is to be found in the corridor of the National Museum basement, while Khvay Samnang’s video installation is at 8Q. As the Cambodian-based co-curator Erin Gleeson explains, when it came to the selection of artists and artworks, “ultimately we considered the strength of individual works. It wasn’t until we had to present them for voting by the entire curatorial team that I really noticed the selections could be read as representational of many different aspects of art in Cambodia today. There are differences in the artists’ education, in the media and the practices that they choose. They are from different generations and have considerably different life experiences”.

Behind a black curtain, there are five screens, symmetrically placed, each one presenting a different video by photographer and performance artist, Khvay Samnang. In the first, his slim body emerges from the contaminated waters of Boeung Kak Lake in Phomn Penh, where blue and black trash bags, decomposed food, weathered plastic bottles and random debris surround him in a disturbing embrace. He looks directly into the camera as he pours sand from a black plastic bucket over his head. In the second video, at another place in the same lake, he repeats these gestures, interrupting the murky and tepid surface of the waters; nearby, disconcerted construction workers try to decipher his gestures, as they build a floating wooden house. The artist then reappears in the eutrophic waters of Boeung Bayab Lake with a sly, defiant stare and proceeds to empty the contents of his bucket over his body. Close to the shores of Boeung Snour Lake, Kvay continues to articulate the same process, while in the background, cranes and construction equipment are testament to the country’s accelerated development. In the fifth video, he revisits Boueng Kak Lake and one last time pours sand over his head, while rising from the water. Houses built within and around the lake are visible in this shot.

Untitled reflects on the actions and implications of water systems in Cambodia, which, especially in recent years, have been constantly adulterated, appropriated and utilised for economic gain. In 2007, the Cambodian government announced signing a 99-year lease with the Taiwanese company Shukaku, which allows them to develop Boeung Kak Lake and its surrounding area. More than 4200 families were affected by this decision, which lead to one of the largest urban evictions since the Khmer Rouge. The lake has been pumped constantly with sand, changing this once fertile ecosystem into a large puddle of flooded homes. Not only did the population lose their homes and the right to the land, many also became victims of the floods that occur when the high rains have nowhere to be drained. In early 2010, before this

Places of Art: Cambodian Artists in the Biennale

Viviana Mejía

situation became world news, Kvay accessed these lakes and documented his acts of pouring sand over his body.

Kvay born in 1982 comes from the generation that survived the Khmer Rouge and witnessed the rapid development of the country as it tried and still tries to synchronise itself with the larger Southeast Asian and global contemporaneity. The artist’s critical gaze aims to portray an organic encounter with these problems and issues, offering a different perspective in contrast to the sensationalism of media headlines. Kvay says, “If I want to know, I need to go. To understand stories I hear or read, I just go there and observe for myself, and talk with people. I went there to learn more, and my work is drawn from my experiences in this process. It is my nature to be drawn to difficult places … I somehow feel responsible to share certain stories”. The simplicity of his gesture — the act of pouring — is the most telling aspect of the work. He reiterates this specific action in five instances, with five perspectives, each time registering a space that has been transformed and obliterated.

Svay Sareth (b.1972) redefines Khmer iconography with Toy (Churning of the Sea of Milk), an impressive 15-metre-long installation placed at the basement of the National Museum. He draws inspiration from the historical stone bas-relief of Angkor Wat, which alludes to an ancient Hindu myth. Vishnu, master of the universe, persuades demons (asuras) and gods (devas) to produce an elixir of immortality that they both covet. Both forces churn the waters of the cosmic ocean using a five-headed serpent as a rope and a sacred mountain as a pivot. Lying on opposite sides, a tug-of-war ensues between the devas and asuras causing the mountain to swivel back and forth, agitating the waters. When the mountain unexpectedly begins to sink, Vishnu keeps it afloat until their churning yields the elixir. He then seizes the extract, which has the power to destroy the world, and prevents its misuse.

For this installation, the artist reproduces the bas-relief as a fully formed sculpture, constructing the work with an iron and wooden structure, then covering it with camouflage fabric, creating what looks like an enormous toy. “I have taken these icons like a mirror from the past, and used them as a reflection of the present and future”, explains Svay. He feels that as soldiers the figures need to wear camouflage to protect themselves and be invisible — they need to “disappear” in order to be able to attack and kill. Yet Svay deliberately makes visible the invisible by making the camouflage evident, where one can see clearly the actions of the figures fighting as they seek the power they assume will grant them immortality. But beyond the mythology, Svay is transposing this struggle onto a larger context. “You can also imagine the reality of economic war, the power struggles of the US and China, you can imagine who are those that become the victims of this war”, the artist suggests. With Toy, Svay deliberately engages with the most common tropes of the

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Cambodian narrative, Angkor Wat and war, but the artist skilfully uses these motifs to invite audiences to engage in conversations about contemporary Cambodia that go beyond the overused dichotomy of tourism and trauma.

“Remembering is not the opposite of forgetting, they are partners. Like the body intercepting sunlight and casting a shadow. How can you recognise something that you’ve never known before. Like you never know heartbreak until it happens”. Emerging from multiple speakers from the SAM foyer, these words are uttered by a voice that at once seems familiar but has an unidentifiable presence. Cambodian-American artist, Albert Samreth, was born in 1987 and raised in the USA, a child of the diaspora. He currently divides his time between Cambodia, Los Angeles and Berlin, and is one of the youngest artists in the Singapore Biennale. He is interested in “scripted spaces”, a concept developed by Norman Klein; after spending some time with the renowned academic, Samreth wanted to translate this idea into his artwork, and analyse and question the narrative-based reality in which we live. To illustrate the idea, Samreth offers this example: when one enters a shopping mall, the architecture and overall design is created in such a way as to make everyone feel as if they are the main character in their own storyline — a situation he finds especially heightened for those living in Singapore.

For his artwork, The Voice, Samreth invited public announcer Carolyn Hopkins, a woman whose voice is heard in airports and train stations across Europe, Asia and the Americas, to read and record a selection of poems and verses written by him. His lines are simple, almost formulaic, which he considers “maybe even frustratingly naïve”. “The poems were all concerned with confronting aporia. Their non-determinate organisation was a strategy to avoid emphasis being placed upon an implicit beginning-middle-end narrative”. There is also the idea of the loop, which implies a return to a concept, a revisitation, “a complete understanding”.

The Voice is a work about pushing invisible delimitations; the artist seeks to be transgressive without being antagonistic, and aims to challenge the ways we navigate spaces. Samreth wants “the curtain to be lifted”, and the audience to question the logic of infrastructure — an issue that is implicitly connected to Cambodia’s rapid evolution and Singapore’s incessant progress. As his home country goes down the “rabbit hole” of economic dynamism and competitiveness, it encounters a path that may seem recognisable and clear, but may instead be more reminiscent of the circular trappings of a savage capitalism.

It is as if you are navigating a new space, where you think you know what is happening, and it is seems like you are moving forward, but in reality you are lost. Samreth’s work explores how the familiarity of certain phrases, which are usually assumed to provide solace and comfort, can actually become disquieting forces — creating a place that seems uncannily recognisable, yet is anything but homely.

1 + 3 Untitled by Khvay Samnang

2 The Voice by Albert Samreth

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My phone buzzes and I quickly snatch it off the desk. But the conversation is interrupted by a strange, low-pitched, pregnant blare – similar to (but not quite like) a tuba moaning.

“Where are you, Christina?” “I’m at work!” “What is that?” “The artist. The artist is making noise!” Later in the week, that same friend who had called attends the opening at the

gallery where I work. The occasion is part of a series of Singapore Biennale parallel events taking place at Gillman Barracks. The artist — Umeda Tetsuya — makes the same noise; this time my friend sees firsthand how it is performed and somehow, it makes sense.

Also that evening, just across the road, at the new Centre for Contemporary Art, Lee Wen hitches a harmonica to his lips and takes up his guitar. His song fills the large dim room and the assembly listens. This time the sound is more familiar to me, and through this performance I am already tugged backwards into the quiet courtyard of Palazzo Bembo. It was December and most certainly not biennale season in Venice. So quiet that one could hear the lap of canal water against the lower curves of Rialto Bridge — no din, no tourists. Some art school students were directing me to a performance festival, a must-see before our dinner. Here, through the hushed crowd of winter coats, at the very centre, Lee Wen was plucking his guitar. We didn’t speak then, and I left soon afterwards without a goodbye. But I had found him there. I was surprised and then happy, and I can now say: “I was there. I heard him.”

Back to Singapore, and the Biennale opening. The assembly soon broke off into networking circles, dense with buzzwords, ricocheting off the walls, in the corridors of the former boys school that is SAM, and in the white cubes at the Barracks.

When the clamour finally subsides, after the Biennale opening week, I search Lee Wen out for dinner. “We have to talk,” I say, “I have to interview you”.

“You want the bak kut teh or the noodles?” I tell him about the performance in Venice, we remember and he recounts stories of London, the artists on welfare, the house parties, and the few friends he still writes to. Shanghai, Berlin, the many other cities, the living in between.

“Being already in your third decade of practice now, Wen, where do you feel you’re going?” He lowers his spectacles as he looks over my questions on a sheet of paper.

“Well, you know, at the end of this year, I’m thinking about what happened 20 years ago, it being the 20th anniversary of the AGA” (the Artists General Assembly was a week-long arts festival organised by 5th Passage Gallery and The Artists Village at the end of 1993. See Ray Langenbach’s Archive, by Loo Zihan at Sculpture Square, part of “Ghost: The Body at the Turn of the Century”, a remembrance and resurrection of the events surrounding the AGA).

“Ray had proposed to hold a conference talking about where we are now, and where we’re going, amongst the artists who took part in the AGA. I think the question he is asking is very important to Singapore. It’s not about looking at the past, but looking at the present. It affects our cultural growth.” Lee Wen laments that the conference, for various reasons, is not happening this year, but reiterates the question with significant stress, “What is fair to the artist?”

He continues, “But I can’t think about this question alone! That’s why I thought it’s important to create networks, in the region as well as internationally, for performance artists, and to get them to talk to each other. A lot of artists actually cannot stand each other, because they have such strong egos; they cannot speak to each other. It’s so ridiculous because these artists are talking about freedom, talking about peace, and yet they cannot talk — one artist to another. It’s important to hold dialogues, first of all, between artists, before we can talk about global peace and all that. This is the kind of thing that I’m doing with the Archive: exchanging ideas, creating platforms for artists to speak and get together” (the Independent Archive & Resource Centre was set up by Lee Wen to archive visual practices in Singapore and enable collaborations within the region and abroad).

“And what about the future?” I probe.“The future? The future is dead and gone!” Wen says with a confident but

nonetheless poetic smile. He speaks about the death of the artist (and a group he participated in called ‘ART ST’, literally ‘art street’, having dropped the ‘I’ and the artist’s ego).

“I’ve always been saying the same things, you know.” I nod in agreement, though not yet fully following his swing from the relatively prosaic to the aphoristic. “I sing about death because I want to be born again, not to really die. There’s always death going on, but at the end of the day, we talk about death to wait for something new”.

“That’s very romantic”, I proffer. The evening matures, and we walk back to 67 Aliwal Street, where the four-piece folk band Hanging Up the Moon is playing to an intimate crowd, on a Sunday evening.

After their set, we share a cigarette. “Holding onto that romanticism, I guess I should bring you back to the Biennale. What do you feel about the wishful, utopian premise behind the Biennale’s theme, Lee Wen? What if the world changed?”

“I must admit it’s the kind of thing I’m described as, that kind of idealistic, utopian thing. I’m the last of the bohemians when it comes to that”. He moves on, in all sincerity, “A lot of young artists these days don’t drink, you know! I feel it’s a loss of romantic ideals. These people are so sober, and at the same time, they don’t care

about ideals anymore. They go into it for the market, for the mingling of curators, directors, whatever. They think life is futile in terms for fighting for a cause. I think it’s a shame. No matter how, I still want to be using art as a battle for better things to come.”

Amidst the commotion of the past week, my conversations with Lee Wen provide me with some clarity. The art world had come to town, and the various commentaries and opinions — whether carefully constructed or made too readily available, some much louder and angrier than others — seemed like a lot of clutter. But as Lee Wen reiterated, he had already been saying the same things. The artist spoke with conviction that evening, and I was happy to have been there to hear him.

Christina Chua works at Ota Fine Arts, a contemporary art gallery at Gillman Barracks, and has contributed to previous editions of Article, Singapore Architect magazine and Ceriph.

Lee Wen:The Artist is Making Noise Christina Chua

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 Lee Wen

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15

The travelogues of Kidlat Tahimik (b. 1942) and Sai Hua Kuan (b. 1976) represent hope of two different but related kinds: speaking on one’s terms, and discovery beyond one’s turf.

Go away, wake up and express yourself — these themes may well describe both Tahimik’s work and life. His experience as an economist in Paris (1968-1972) awakened him to the ongoing cultural dominance of the West, particularly the United States, in his native Philippines beyond the colonial period of 1898 to 1946. Among the colonial legacies he resists is the Hollywood formula he summarises as “S (Sex) + V (Violence) = P (Profit)”.

In Memories of Overdevelopment (1980-2013), Tahimik weaves two semi-autobiographical travelogues: the life of Enrique of Malacca, a slave of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, during the 1519-1522 circumnavigation of the globe; and a present-day painter Enrique’s journey to find Ferdinand, a sculptor.

By restaging and fictionalising history, Tahimik plays out the misadventures and determination of Enrique the slave amidst the harsh realities of colonisation. He defeats his master in a game of chess, and ironically becomes the world’s first circumnavigator upon his master’s death on the battleground. The unfinished historical epic is also an ever-extending family portrait featuring family members, friends, strangers, and Tahimik himself.

Long-drawn at points, the almost two-hour twin odyssey sometimes forces inter-narrative connections down your throat. However, Tahimik must be applauded for his resourcefulness, incisiveness and humour. The self-professed “romantic native” wants to inspire us to uncover and speak about injustices past and present, as well as to share our stories in our own way.

Similarly motivated by discovery, Singaporean artist Sai Hua Kuan starts with private musings and extends these to engage broader and timeless truths about the cosmos. The Rise and Fall of 1°17’N103°50’E, 1°5’0”S75’0”W — A Circular Journey by Sai is a video installation that shows the sunrise and sunset from Singapore and Yasuni National Park in Ecuador.

The choice of sites reflects Sai’s scientific yet serendipitous approach. By wondering mathematically, if naïvely, about the endpoint of a straight tunnel dug from Singapore through the earth’s core, Sai appropriated a set of readymade invariables (former colonies with similar climates and tropical rainforests) for his thought experiment. As a ranger on an unbeaten but imaginary path through the

earth, Sai discovers worlds of differences at both ends. No two other tropical regions could have thrown up starker contrasts than Singapore — a modern city boasting order, newness and efficiency, often at the expense of plant and animal survival — and Yasuni National Park, the most biologically diverse area on earth whose existence is nonetheless threatened by unsustainable deforestation and hunting, as though it is about to repeat the “Singapore experience”.

Projected through both sides of a mist screen, Sai’s sun-chasing impressionism is multi-sensorial, though on a scale too modest for a stronger impact. One passes the mist interface like a swift about to lay eggs behind a waterfall. Ambient sounds of forest and city offer moments of resonance, like when the train-door alarm recalls a chimpanzee’s laughter heard moments earlier.

Oddly, the nearly three-hour loop of real-time sunscapes is not tedious. The lucky or patient few savour rare cubist minutes of simultaneous sunrise and sunset, or snippets of a bustling city and forest. That only one of the two sceneries is usually visible suggests that no matter how badly we want the best of both worlds, one or both will escape us.

The sites in this piece are not explicitly named, which may cause some ambiguity. But this decision is an apt one. After all, the artist, informed by Chinese philosopher Laozi’s concept of nature’s cyclicality, wants us to consider the fates of Singapore and Yasuni as changeable, even exchangeable. This ambiguity also inspires wide-ranging interpretations. One interpretation is ecological, as it envisions Singapore, having adopted Yasuni’s conservation measures, as reversing or slowing down its resource depletion. I call this a wishful reading. Another, a realistic perspective informed by speculative fiction, imagines a world where humans become extinct. Seemingly bleak, such a post-human world is likely a happier one for nature. But there is hope for humans too: since nothing lasts, we might as well embrace this fact and act proactively on matters close to heart, whether it is to speak up, save the earth, spend time with loved ones, or to live life adventurously.

Tahimik and Sai offer two types of travelogue: the personal film directed at upsetting the myth of the powerful, and the thought experiment that begins small but expands to broader issues and far-flung places hardly juxtaposed together. If Tahimik is a homecoming wanderer eager to share his culture with newfound pride, then Sai is an explorer unrepentantly ignorant of physical and conceptual limits. An introspective approach, complemented or alternated with a global outlook, helps cut through the ongoing conundrum of terms like “regionalism” and “Southeast Asian”, which often border on defensiveness, provincialism and forced solidarity.

Note: Memories of Overdevelopment — Redux (1980–2013) by Kidlat Tahimik, screened over the opening weekend of the Singapore Biennale, will have a final screening on Saturday, 15 February 2014, at 5pm at the Moving Image Gallery. An installation of film props by Tahimik is located along the corridor outside the gallery, on Level 2 of Singapore Art Museum at 8Q, the same level as Sai Hua Kuan’s The Rise and Fall of 1°17’N103°50’E, 1°5’0”S75’0”W — A Circular Journey.

Michael Lee is an artist, curator and publisher based in Berlin and Singapore. He researches urban memory and fiction, especially the contexts and implications of loss, transforming his observations into objects, diagrams, situations, curations or texts.

Travel and Hope

Michael Lee

1 + 2 + 4 The Rise and Fall of 1°17’N103°50’E, 1°5’0”S75’0”W -- A Circular

Journey (installation views and composite video

still), 2013. 2-channel video installation, 2h 58min

loop by Sai Hua Kuan

3 Memories of Overdevelopment (film still), 1980-2013. Single-

screen film, 1h 58min by Kidlat Tahimik

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Robert Zhao’s latest project is a freak show. There is an image of a luminous piscine presence, for one, glowing like a

sliver of lime-green neon against a pitch-dark backdrop. The text notes that it is a “zebrafish encoded with a green fluorescent protein originally extracted from a jellyfish [which] was developed by a team of scientists in Singapore ... ” A bunch of man-made grapes sits on a pedestal, synthetic produce developed from “gelatin, grape flavouring and artificial colours”, and “passed off as real grapes in roadside markets in China.” And then there is a supposedly unbreakable egg: “A company in Japan has developed a technique to create eggs that are so strong that they cannot be broken ... created by adding plant protein of a banyan tree to a chicken, thus creating an egg with a bark-like texture.”

These are a small sampling of the objects featured in Zhao’s (b. 1983) contemporary take on the “wunderkammer”, or cabinet of curiosities, titled A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World. Located on an upper level of the Peranakan Museum, the installation assumes the form of a self-contained white cube. (It is accompanied by three standalone images on an adjacent wall, which are not considered in the present essay.) Unlike the chambers of yore, though, Zhao’s “kammer” keeps the viewer at bay: our only means of access to the objects within is through the defensive auspices of a plate-glass window — we can see, but we are certainly unable to touch. And just what do we espy?

One side of the space is given over to photographic plates: arranged in a grid are images of various forms of zoological and botanical life, ranging from the phosphorescent zebrafish, to the world’s smallest man-made frog, to fake beef, to a square apple and a head of venomous cabbage. Next to the plates are several three-dimensional objects, including a remote-controlled mechanical cockroach, a banana bonsai plant, and a small pile of moon dust (the powdered remains of insects incinerated by street lamps); displayed along the other wall are the artificial grapes, a number of genetically modified eggs, as well as a peanut that purportedly does not rot.

What the viewer is confronted with, here, is a spectacle of nurtured nature: a taxonomy of fauna and flora altered by human engineering, a visual encyclopedia of the victims of human civilization and its interventions. Where the “wunderkammer” proffered a cornucopia of the unidentified, the unclassified and the downright bizarre, Zhao presents instead the evidence of our interference in the natural world, documenting the disruptions inflicted upon evolutionary and biological processes by the needs of homo sapiens. Or does he?

The installation certainly seems informed by an aesthetic of clinical objectivity. The interior is, in the manner of a hospital or a laboratory, painted a stark, pristine shade of white and evenly lit by fluorescent lights, banishing almost all shadows from the setting and rendering the space and its contents cleanly, uniformly open to the viewer’s gaze. The contents are likewise documented and depicted in ways that demonstrate an empirical approach: images are shot head-on, in a coolly impersonal manner, with the composition shorn of all extraneous elements and the only discernible aesthetic adornment provided by a pastel-hued background; objects are simply set atop plinths. For instance, a pair of the world’s smallest man-made frogs — “about 0.5cm long”, according to the text, and able to “leap up to a height of 10cm” — are posed against a mint-green background, and depicted life-size, at a scale so diminished that the subjects elude all but close-up scrutiny. The square apple, created by “stunting ... [its] growth in glass cubes”, likewise rests blandly in the middle of its coral-pink setting, as do the eggs and the grapes, the solitary peanut and the little pile of moon dust. If, as a pair of scholars writing about the hothouses and winter gardens of the nineteenth century tell us, these highly regulated environments of exotic flora from distant lands were a demonstration that “Nature could be controlled, and not just for immediately useful purposes”, then Zhao’s own little chamber of mutant spectacles represents the dystopian underside of that experiment — the subject finally, irrevocably altering to meet the desired result. It all seems perfectly dispassionate, detached, disinterested.

Yet, as is so often the case with Zhao’s work, appearances are deceptive ...... For appearances are all the viewer has to go on with. The distance enacted

between the images and objects within the white cube, and the audience confined to the exterior beyond the glass window, functions as the key component of the installation. Here, physical distance translates into an epistemological obstruction: the act of keeping the viewer at arm’s length, the restriction of intimate, tactile access to the contents of the chamber, correlates to the limitation of our knowledge of these objects. Like the little match girl of Hans Anderson’s story, we are left out in the cold, both spatially and perceptually.

The indestructible peanut, for one, a lonely little presence on a pedestal set by the far wall, turns out to be something less than an organic entity. Zhao’s text informs us that this particular plant was “injected with the DNA of a lobster to create a peanut that will never rot”, since “lobsters, known for their relatively long lives of up to 70 years, have the telomerase enzyme in their bodies.” The actual object entombed within the structure, however, is really a clever wooden replica of a peanut, a small gewgaw, which the artist casually mentions he picked up in a souvenir shop in Hong Kong.

The unbreakable egg with “a bark-like texture” is yet another wooden imitation, while the bunch of ersatz grapes, supposedly created from gelatin in an effort to fool consumers in China, is synthetic in a whole other way here. What Zhao has put on

Inside the Chamber of Spectacles ... Or Outside It

Louis Ho

1 + 2 A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World by Robert Zhao

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display is really plastic fruit, the sort of ornament one finds on a trellis along with fake creepers and faux vines, passing off one form of forgery for another.

Incredibly enough, one of the few examples of an authentic specimen in the installation manages to fool the viewer into thinking it is something else altogether. What looks to be an image of three tiny, almost indiscernible organisms is in fact a trio of actual tiger mosquitoes, mounted on a board similar to the photographic plates in the series.*

In the manner of a filmic narrative, the artist’s manipulation of the gaze, allowing us only remote optical access to his images and objects — and even then set at one remove — obliges the viewer to suspend all sense of disbelief. Zhao’s practice has always been premised on a slippage between the factual and fictive, utilising both the camera’s instrumental neutrality and the photograph’s expressive potential. The physical configurations of A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World however, with its canny insertion of a material and cognitive barrier between art and audience, hints at its own conceptual framework situated in the gap between authenticity and artifice. Where Zhao’s photographic work has tended to slyly, obliquely suggest the constructed nature of its supposed objectivity, often relying on meta-textual clues to alert the viewer, the blatant strong-arming of the gaze in A Guide seems nearly to amount to a declaration of intent: one will perceive only as much as the artist permits, the inhibitory glass wall suggests. The spatial distancing of viewer from viewed, and the problems of knowledge therein engendered, foreground not just the thorny issues of taxonomic ontology (are peanuts sporting crustacean enzymes still considered legumes?), but the elusive nature of photographic veracity and visual representation – one form of doubt dovetailing with the other.

Is Robert Zhao, after all, finally avowing his own sleights of hand?

*In the interest of full disclosure, this author was given the opportunity to interact with the objects in the artist’s studio, prior to the setting up of the installation.

Louis Ho is an independent art historian, critic and curator, and is the co-editor of an upcoming journal of Southeast Asian art history, Remote. He also teaches at a number of local institutions.

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Halloween arrived with the Singapore Biennale. While everyone ran from ghouls at Sentosa, I faced my demon: contemporary art.

I had visited the last Biennale, SB2011, “Open House”, with my classmates and lecturer. Arriving at the Old Kallang Airport, I knew I was going to be a flight risk.

In less than an hour, I was done.“That’s impossible!” my lecturer was peeved, “I’m not even halfway done! You need to give the

artworks time.”Prolonging my ordeal wasn’t an option. I had never been confronted with so much contemporary art.

It scared me; it made me anxious and angry. I turned to a friend and the nearest exit and said, “I’m getting out of here!” I felt relieved making my early departure.

A month before this year’s Biennale, I had begun rationalising my irrational fear and learning to overcome it. I love art but there is something about contemporary art that makes me antsy.

“Seeing contemporary art is like meeting a very smart person,” Phoebe, an animator and illustrator, explained. “The very smart person expects you to have opinions about things. But you’re unsure if you’re smart enough. So you get nervous.”

Contemporary art is, nowadays, perceived as the “Dalai Lama of art”. Many, naturally, expect chin-stroking revelations when viewing it. But if you don’t have an “Aha Moment“, you feel like a joke. You either pretend to see the emperor’s clothes or call the naked bluff. I have read countless online tirades attacking contemporary art. No one likes feeling stupid; mocking seems easier.

“It’s herd mentality. Everyone says contemporary art is hard to define so everyone thinks it’s hard to define,” Shirin, another illustrator, mused. “When visiting museums, I’m reluctant to see contemporary artworks. I look at them and think: ‘What does it mean? Maybe I have to read the artist statement.’ And I spend more time reading than looking.”

This was a problem on a recent visit to the Singapore Art Museum. I was with May, a graphic designer and artist. Instead of speed-dating the artworks I took my lecturer’s advice, and spent a few minutes with

each work. Most of which, I found, was spent reading artists’ statements.

“I don’t think it matters if most people don’t get my works,” May confessed. “It’d be sad though. But then again, if your work’s in a gallery, someone must get it enough to put it up.”

An experiment was in order. “Is there a rule against wearing sandals here?” Samantha,

a hotel HR exec. asked when I dragged her, and Sarah, a junior college teacher and artist, to SAM’s Not Against Interpretation: Untitled exhibition. I told them not to read the artists’ statements. Since the works in this exhibition were untitled and mostly unexplained, the conditions were perfect for my experiment.

“How do we know if our interpretations are correct?” Sarah asked.

Rules? Correct?Artworks aren’t school examinations that require

right answers. Yet, I realised, I too had been treating artists’ statements like answer sheets at the back of assessment books. Had our exam culture infiltrated our museum-going habits? Could this account for some of the anxieties surrounding contemporary art?

So, on the Singapore Biennale 2013’s opening night, I avoided all texts about the artworks except for the artists’ names. Without the pressure to get “right answers”, I found myself verbally analysing artworks as one would do with poetry.

Without textual aids, I deciphered Tran Tuan’s (b. 1981) Forefinger. “It echoes Midas and Ozymandias,” I prattled. “And animal trading and worship and animism.” Did my interpretation reflect the artist’s intention? Who cares? The experience one gains from analysing an artwork is as valuable as the artist’s idea for creating it. Neither should have to answer to the other.

I saw several women snapping selfies with Vu Hong Ninh’s (b. 1982) Little Soap Boy that evening. A professor of mine, who had worked at a Chicago museum, had told me that visitors placed offerings near a Ganesha statue on display there. In both instances, the viewer had created a unique experience.

Estblished art-seeing customs (walk/look/read) can be comfortable to many. However, if you find yourself uncomfortable, as I was, approach artworks in your own way, even if they are unorthodox. Artists challenge rules all the time. Shouldn’t viewers do the same? It may mean avoiding artist statements, taking selfies or even worshipping artworks. Today, we personalise everything. Shouldn’t we start personalising the way we experience art?

Faisal Husni is an artist, illustrator and writer who recently graduated from the NTU School of Art, Design and Media. He writes Singapore Urban Speculative Fiction. His recent work, The Totem Thief, combines literature with found objects to create an immersive storytelling experience. His strong love for art history and criticism has recently led him into the welcoming family of the Singapore Art Museum as a Curatorial Assistant.

The Airport Runaway:Escaping My Fear of Contemporary Art

Faisal Husni

1 Forefinger by Tran Tuan

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I started thinking about archipelagos back in 2011, when I was writing my first novel, Several Islands. The project was commissioned by The Substation, Singapore’s first independent contemporary arts space, and the brief, succinctly put, was to respond to the memories and histories surrounding the space. The research for the project was long and intense, involving interviews with numerous individuals, and the eventual work that came out of this at times unruly process, was aptly quite a strange concatenation — less a novel than a string of loosely related conversations.

But the toughest part of the project was coming up with a title for it that could, if not encompass, at least hint at its expansive and shifting contours. And it was as I was grappling with the multiple notions of locality, community and most importantly, incommensurability, around which the novel was written, that the image of the archipelago came to me. The immediate point of reference was the Malay archipelago within which Singapore was geographically, historically and culturally entrenched — and in certain respects, estranged — but I was also contemplating more generally the sense of a body that was at once one and many, its elements held together by their separateness and singularity.

At that time I had not yet read the works of the great Martinican writer, Édouard Glissant, whose writings on postcolonial identity, as drawn from his experiences of the French Caribbean, formed the basis for an “archipelic thought” that, to use a catchphrase of the international curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist, has become a crucial “toolbox” for curating in the networked environments of the twenty-first century. But my belated acquaintance with Glissant’s ideas has its benefits, for encountering them only in the wake of their distribution allows one to map their transformations along the way, in turn serving to simultaneously clarify and expand the original context of their articulation. The archipelic imaginary within which I was thinking could in fact very well have arose from this dissemination, and thus the sense, in my reading of Glissant today, of a return to a source — a source which, however, in its willful deflection of itself, defies the possibility of return.

The appeal of Glissant’s ideas to the art world — especially that particular art world of biennales, festivals and mega-shows — seems to derive from how they are able to affirm the desirability of cultural contact in the current age of globalisation. For the poet-thinker, identity is “Relation” insofar as Relation enables and also negates identity, allowing it to move beyond itself. The abstracted nature of Relation as defined here is difficult to grasp, and necessarily so, for it works precisely to dispel the totalising impulses of any kind of discourse that seeks to apprehend

identity as a discrete being. Identity, for Glissant, is more of a movement towards a totality, an outside, that in turn demands specificity. Put simply, Glissant undercuts the stability of both the universal and the particular by insisting that each is always calling towards the other.

But the translation of Glissant’s ideas in the world of art has not been unproblematic. Particularly, the seizure of the archipelago as a handy metaphor to image a harmonious coexistence of disparate localities floating within some semblance of a utopian, amniotic space often inadvertently lends itself to the homogenising drives of globalisation which it is supposed to dismantle. Among the most cheesy manifestations of this are the still-incessant invocations of the “glocal”, a term often used to describe an artist who despite or because of his or her engagement with local realities is able to speak to a global audience, and who, more often than not, must at least possess a tint of non-Western complexion. The question of cultural contact in Glissant’s philosophy is here reduced to that of mere legibility, in which locality is figured as a mere sign of authenticity to be read and consumed within global economies. Locality, instead of being expanded, becomes ossified into a thing — an image.

Indeed, the problem of how Glissant is interpreted in the art world seems to arise from the trouble with visuality. The art world, being what it is, demands images, when Relation is precisely that which resists assimilation into something as vulgar as a picture. Relation is an aperture, an opening — opening the eye and testing the limits of the seeable. Perhaps then, it is only timely to abandon the archipelago as a metaphor — and in fact all metaphorisation that feeds our ocular thrall — and rethink Relation through another imaginary. But can one really imagine Relation without recourse to the image?

The current edition of the Singapore Biennale has taken the curious route of focusing exclusively on artists from Southeast Asia, a region within which lies the world’s largest archipelago. Seductive though the temptation to conceive of the region though the notion/image of the archipelago, I would like to propose an alternative: that we rethink the archipelago through the region. But this is only possible if we first seriously consider what the word, “region”, really means.

The “region”, unlike the “archipelago”, does not offer us an image of itself. It designates an indeterminately drawn space; it is indeterminacy itself. It is an amorphous space that seems to be perpetually in retreat, thus demanding to be salvaged by our inhabitation of it, as we gather and ambulate upon it to continually

The Region Unviewed Ho Rui An

secure its parameters. Thus the almost surprising felicitousness of the concept of a “regional biennale”, for is not the chief occupation of biennale-going that of gathering around objects, walking between them and negotiating the intervening distances? To begin thinking at the level of the regional allows us to abolish the necessity of relying on monolithic notions of the local and the global as intellectual and imagistic crutches. To think regionally is, in other words, to think from the unmoored space of the middle. The modus operandi of a biennale with any aspirations towards the regional is thus not that of exhibition, in the sense of raising something to be seen, but of excursion, of creating a space in which seeing opens the visible outwards. Whether or not the Biennale will be able to realise this very lofty ambition, however, remains to be seen.

Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, theory and fiction writing. Based in London and Singapore, he is the Singapore desk editor for ArtAsiaPacific and has recently contributed to the new Yang Fudong monograph edited by Philippe Pirotte and Beatrix Ruf.

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1 Telok Blangah by Ahmad Abu Bakar

2 Telok Blangah (detail) by Ahmad Abu Bakar

3 Payatas (detail) by Oscar Villamie

4 Payatas by Oscar Villamie

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The difficulty facing art, in the broadest sense of the word, has always been to distance itself from a society that it has to embody. Nonetheless, if it wants to be understood, art has to express society (meaning nowadays the world), but it has to do it deliberately. It cannot be simply a passive expression, a mere aspect of the situation. It has to be expressive and reflective if it wants to show us anything we do not see daily on TV or in the supermarket. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, 1995.

I moved to Singapore four months before the beginning of the 2013 Singapore Biennale. Therefore, my serious challenge was how to develop a proper theoretical, social and political framework that would help me navigate as huge an initiative as this collective effort of 27 curators from Southeast Asia.

However, my recent research on cultural policy frameworks that influence the (re)construction of national and supranational identities provided me with an interesting reflection point. The issues, such as the positioning and meaning of international visual arts biennales; the question of social engagement of the arts (artivism); as well as political aspects of arts initiatives connected with the issues of national, regional or other form of supranational identity, seem relevant in the context of Southeast Asia.

Ways of seeing?

What do you think of Western civilization?I think it would be a good idea. Mahatma Gandhi

What do you think of Southeast Asia?It would be a good idea. #Japundz

When you move away from your place of origin (what is happening with the notion of “home” today?), you become acutely aware of the different levels of identity you carry within you. The difficulty lies largely in the Eurocentric education system that I and most Europeans have gone through. It positions Europe in the centre of history, and then, as Dipesh Chakrabarty says, “other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called ‘the history of Europe’”. Even if you are aware of the history of intra-European relations, where you could defend the position of Southeast Europe (where I come from) as a region that never contributed to the colonising impulses of Europe, your self-identification with “European values” does not let you be an “innocent spectator”. Your own network of existing knowledge, experience and “values” starts to become an obstacle of seeing. You need different reference points, and a different grid. Or is the grid in place, but you are lost because you expected a different one?

The problem of Biennale as a form and Nation as a construct

Despite the constant dialogue within the artistic and academic community in Europe about the potentially outdated form of biennales (and even quadrennials, like the one in Prague) that represent a collection of national pavilions, they still manage to stay unchanged. It is the Venice Biennale, formed in 1895, which serves as an archetype of these types of events. Although it may seem that in an era of networks and virtual communities of interest, this form has lost its place in the world, it actually reflects the paradox position of the nation as a construct in a contemporary society.

Instead of getting closer to the vision of a nationless global society, we live in a world where nations are entering a certain revival process. But how do you reflect this in the art world? Are there any new national art movements today? Or national art styles? Recent editions of the Venice Biennale constantly challenge these forms (such as the work of Susanne Gaensheimer for the German Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2013), but they remain the same. We can connect this with the notion of methodological nationalism — where we think about the nation as a natural concept, often not even aware of it, applying it to every aspect of life. Rarely do we allow for an alternative angle to this construct — can a nation be seen as an event, a project? Elusive and ephemeral, as any project, with its beginning and its end (the end is the beginning is the end).

Regionalism: new approach or a good application of the existing method?

I would have told them to be careful with their mechanisms of political correctness. For years before it collapsed, Yugoslavia believed it had all the necessary tools for lasting peace, reconciliation and prosperity and brotherhood and unity. Everyone pretended they loved everyone else. And then one day a strongman came and banged his fist on the table and said: “Gentleman, the game is over. Fuck off!” And that was all it took for the whole house of cards to slip into civil wars.Goran Stefanovski, Heart of the Matter, 2006.

It is not new to think about a biennale as an interesting framework to present the new or launch the revival of old social and political ideas. So, if the world really changed can we think through regions and not nations? Or are we just replacing the nation with a region, placing ourselves in the position of a mediator of “inter-Asian dialogues”? Is this inter-Asian approach falling into the same trap like the one from which I came from, not being able to resist the Eurocentricity of the texts engraved in me through education and experience? And is Rustom Bharucha right when he claims that Singapore needs Asia “to balance the loss of local cultures, language, traditions and communities in the interests of global capital and real estate” with the Biennale as a manifestation of a cultural capital of “Asian empires”?

What if … the world changed, and we really feel happy and free? Well, hope brings us here. Let’s just hope that the little soap boy will not give us the middle finger before we live up to our dreams.

Aleksandar Brkić is a Lecturer at the School of Arts Management, LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. Aleksandar won the 2011 Cultural Policy Research Award (CPRA) administered by ENCATC and ECF. His book, Cultural Policy Frameworks (Re)constructing National and Supranational Identities: the European Union and the Balkans, published by the European Cultural Foundation, can be accessed through www.culturalfoundation.eu

In a Bigger Family Aleksandar Brkić

1 + 2 Hope Brings Us Here by Nipan Oranniwesna

3 Happy and Free by Boo Jun Feng

Can flower, fruit, leaves and herbs effect change? In what sense or context? For whom? On what scale? What even counts as change? Sharon Chin’s (b. 1980) Mandi Bunga performance, held at the front lawn of The National Museum, offered a public meditation not just on the potency of flora and the foliaceous, but on the broader questions of change, renewal and transformation that have long plagued human experience and consciousness.

Mandi bunga directly translated from Malay to mean “flower bath”, is a ritual associated predominantly with the act of cleansing, purging, purification and healing. Many a ritual, particularly those of a magico-religious nature, have marked culture, tradition and history in the Southeast Asian region. Both a repudiation or a return to such rituals in our contemporary world is deeply problematic and raises many questions. Like language, rituals cannot be reduced to simplistic formulas or strict categories. Employing an often obtuse vocabulary of gestures, symbols, behaviour and actions, rituals in all their myriad guises and incarnations offer insights into understanding how notions of culture and community are constructed. Throughout history and across cultures, it is evident that ritualistic ceremonies and gestures have undergone a fair degree of adaptation, appropriation and re-contextualisation. The various forms these beliefs and activities take essentially reflect, albeit rather generally, notions of cultural belonging, communication, continuity and change within any given society. The belief in the efficacy of symbolic action is at the heart of all rituals.

“What does it mean to do something alone? What does it mean to do something together? How can we be ourselves with others?”

These three key questions underpin Sharon Chin’s Mandi Bunga project. Chin’s take on and interpretation of the age-old rite of mandi bunga, whilst taking into consideration the communal characteristics of much ritualistic action, also lays equal emphasis on the agency and self-reflexivity of the individual. In addressing these concerns, various dichotomous categories are situated alongside, in conflict and in subsets of each other. What are the tensions that lie between collective and individual experience? What are the modes of being and behaving in public and private spaces?

Although the work takes a three-pronged approach to addressing these concerns via a workshop, a performance and an exhibition, the central and fundamental highlight of this project has to be the public, and arguably ritualistic, performance of a hundred people partaking in a mass mandi bunga. Clad in bright yellow sarongs, each one designed and customised by its individual wearer, the hundred or so participants were led by the artist to uniformly arranged rows of yellow tubs replete with an assortment of flowers, pomelo leaves and kaffir lime. Mandi bunga is practiced across different ethnic-religious communities in Malaysia and Singapore. The ritual is typically performed using either three, five or seven types of flowers or items. The bath usually begins with the pouring of water to the feet and then the knees, thighs, abdomen, chest and, lastly, the head. Kaffir lime is a key ingredient; it is believed to be the main purifying agent that cleanses away any bad luck or negative energies attached to the person. Apart from spiritual protection, it is also believed that this ritual can aid in baiting a desirable spouse or to ward off illness. In these contexts, it is believed that the ceremony is best performed under the direction of a shaman/bomoh.

As an observer, some initial questions struck me as the performance began: how did the participants position themselves socially, culturally, even politically in relation to this mostly self-directed ritual or series of actions? Or not? How did the spectators make sense of this sight and spectacle of collective bathers who seemed to individually take rather different approaches and methods to this opportunity for ablution and the process of cleansing?

At no point does Chin take the position of a shaman of sorts. But what she does do in this work is to offer a space for her participant-collaborators, as well as the spectators present, to engage/indulge in a voyeuristic moment of reflective awareness of self and others. It was quite evident that prescriptiveness and a bounded parameter of what counted as the “right” interpretation for the ritual was not part of the instruction sheet. The ritualistic symbols, meanings, aesthetics, edicts and etiquette were given a free-range treatment where variations on the dimensions and experience of the ritual were sanctioned and even celebrated. How does one label a

work like this and attempt to concretely classify its intentions and outcomes then? Does it really matter?

Perhaps the bigger questions are: what matters as change and renewal in this day, age and moment and what are the ways it may fuel our individual and collective checklists for what needs and must be transformed? This piece is part of an ongoing work that draws on the artist’s experiences taking part in Bersih 2.0 and 3.0, street rallies that took place in Kuala Lumpur in 2011 and 2012 respectively, seeking to reform the electoral system in Malaysia. Even though the artist acknowledges the dangers and contextual inexactness of transposing her personal politics onto this performance and the broader Mandi Bunga project as shown within the backdrop of the Singapore Biennale, she insists it must also be acknowledged as a referential thread that incited and underpinned the inception of the work. While it may be safe to say that the performance appeared, on the surface, to steer clear from the weight of political readings, it was the open-endedness of the rite, ritual, act, coming together of people (however it wishes to be named) and the multiple layers of readings that could be weaved, side-stepped, meandered through and negotiated in this work that mattered. Can flower, fruit, leaves and herbs effect change? Perhaps in ways that defy tangibility, suspend our habitual beliefs and return us to a moment that can only be acutely, thoroughly and persistently personal.

Zarina Muhammad is the co-founder and co-curator of Etiquette, a biennial multidisciplinary showcase of art, writing and film. Currently she is working on a research project on myth, magic and folk religion.

Remembering Rituals of Renewal:Sharon Chin’s Mandi Bunga Perfomance

Zarina Muhammad

1 Mandi Bunga (detail) by Sharon Chin

2 Mandi Bunga Performance by Sharon Chin

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National consciousness is nothing but a crude, empty fragile shell. The cracks in it explain how easy it is for young independent countries to switch back from nation to ethnic group and from state to tribe.Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth. Cast a cursory eye at the Biennale this year and chances are that you would raise an eyebrow. I did — at choices and concepts that seemed epistemologically suspect, and even dubious at times. Perhaps in its radicalness, with a structure that Susie Lingham, Director of Singapore Art Museum, calls “unwieldy”, the Biennale has asked, and left open, some important questions on what we consider to be contemporary art, and what it means to be Singaporean — for me, at least.

Responses I’ve personally heard about the Biennale have been shocking. From a Singaporean perspective, the most commonly asked question has been, “What’s worth seeing?” The next natural response or reaction is then to see only what is “worth it”, which then means artworks from mostly familiar Singaporean artists, or international “blockbusters” like teamLab from Japan or Ken + Julia Yonetani, based in Australia. The other Southeast Asian artists are rarely mentioned, or deemed “worth it”. Is such unaccustomed exposure to reality or collective totality and insistent regionalism intolerable? Does that put us in Quentin’s position at the end of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, with the revealing “I don’t hate the Third World! I don’t! I don’t! I don’t!”? As Quentin puts it, one in our position may well feel confronted with the daily reality of the other two-thirds of the globe, that “there was nothing at all attractive about it in fact”.

Lingham has said that this Biennale has “steered away with the more rigid country ‘pavilions’”, and yet the pavilions unwittingly return to haunt us. I’ve heard galleries described as “The Indonesian Room” when there is no such distinction or demarcation. Artists are discussed in national categories such as when we talk about “the Filipinos” or “the Vietnamese”. Yet in a Biennale with 82 artists, of whom almost 60 are not Singaporean, you would think the bulk of representation, interest and attention lies not with the Singaporeans. At a press conference with a panel of mostly non-Singaporean co-curators (the rest sat in the audience), you could see what the spotlight is on. Yet our interest, as Singaporeans, still lies in the familiar. I think that if anything, this Biennale forces us to rethink and reclaim our presence within a wider framework, that being the political, social and cultural locus of Southeast Asia.

Fredric Jameson, American literary critic and author of Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism, famously wrote that “all third world texts are necessarily … allegorical … what I will call national allegories”. Is this how we see the other Southeast Asian works? Jameson’s thesis has also just as famously been critiqued as a troubling appropriation of Otherness, with the aim of exploring the West rather than the Other. Yet, what value can be made of confronting these trajectories, or these binaries, especially in today’s context? Jameson has proposed that between “developed” and “underdeveloped” or “developing” countries, rather than cling to a “particular mirage of the ‘centered subject’” and the unified personal identity, we would do better to honestly confront the fact that we are fundamentally and unavoidably “fragmented on a global scale”.

This fragmentation is keenly felt when I look at the Filipino artists and works, and think of what I’ve lost as a Singaporean. Not only do I bridge gaps and rekindle cultural proximity with our regional neighbours, but I’m reminded constantly of my embodied experience, positionality and cultural outlook as a Singaporean. I consider the Philippine works amongst some of the most complex and esoteric in this Biennale. They articulate desires and meanings that are far-reaching and impenetrable, despite what some might call “simple” or “naïve” modes of representation.

I feel the AX(iS) Art Project, while calling to question the most troubling problems with this Biennale, cumulatively represents the Philippine spirit. AX(iS) runs on the premise that art is not exclusive and therefore is posited outside institutional norms. Hence it is no wonder that it has trouble “belonging” in a contemporary art museum. A tapestry, a tree, wooden binulols, a canine restro, the Mighty Bhutens’ snake mosaic, the Uncyclopedia, I could not claim to understand Tiw-tiwong: The Odds to Unends, only witness and partake. As I walked through the other galleries, a sitter asked me, “Need me to explain this one? Or you good?” I wonder how he would have “explained” AX(iS).

Art writer Adeline Chia calls their work “an indulgent roomful of questionable art objects … reminiscent of a show-and-tell school project, which came across as patronising and wrongheaded”. Today’s Mayo Martin, on his blog, called it a work that “precariously straddles that fine line between being a lesson in regional cultures (and geography) and an art experience … [A] show-within-a-show … combine to give viewers a comprehensive snapshot of the art scene in the northern Philippines … [E]ven with scores of traditional wooden idols occupying one wall, the sound of tribal gongs, and a huge sculpture of a totem-like tree in the middle; it nimbly sidesteps exotica and feels alive”.

Working with AX(is) at SAM in the lead up to the SB2013, I realised my interaction with them was the best possible entry point to the work.

It has not only shaped my reading tremendously, but given me more than I could have known. The mode by which they work has a very different objective from that which we may be used to. When Kidlat Tahimik, whose films are commonly associated with the Third Cinema movement through their critiques of neocolonialism, was asked what format his film was in, whether it was HD, or

available on Blu-ray, he simply laughed. When I asked Leonard Aguinaldo, as we laminated a menu for their restro museum, if it looked “too good”, he laughed and said, “I think you’ve got it — what we’re about”.

Funnily enough, I thought Tahimik’s film Memories of Overdevelopment was a reference to the 1968 Cuban film of similar title by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. But Tahimik has never watched Memories of Underdevelopment. Disposing of and at once referencing a film well known as a “national allegory” is to reject and deny that same fate. Their principal guiding motive that “life is art” has roots deeper than one may think. This work and its motivations did not start with the Biennale. It began years ago, and it will not end with the Biennale. It is no one person, it is every person. It is fathers, mothers, children, sons, daughters, girlfriends, wives, dogs, snakes and trees. It is death, it is life. It is a betelnut-crushing green, white and brown, yielding a deep, blood red.

Anmari Van Nieuwenhove graduated with a degree in Literature from the National University of Singapore. She is currently a curatorial and editorial assistant at the Singapore Art Museum.

Is it worth it? Anmari Van Nieuwenhove

1 + 2 Tiw-tiwong: The Odds to Unends by AX(is) Art Project

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“Everything changes, nothing remains without change”. These are the distilled words of wisdom from Lord Buddha.

It is all about change in the 4th Singapore Biennale, “If the World Changed”. Focused primarily on the Southeast Asia region, a team of 27 curators selected works that responded to the wide and daunting theme of “change”, inviting the artists to reconsider the world we live in and the world we want to live in.

The works presented and partly commissioned for this major platform cover a variety of mediums and feature more than 80 artists and art professionals. Aside from individual works, a number of community-driven art projects are featured prominently in the Biennale, highlighting the relevance of community participation in the art-making process and the cross-disciplinary nature of contemporary art today.

Responding to the theme “If the World Changed”, these community projects share an apparent optimism for a better world where we are agents of change. This is seen in various ways, be it re-examinations of folkloric traditions or the involvement of ordinary people from schoolchildren, diverse art professionals to prison inmates.

It is from this perspective that the Thai collaborative project, Sa Tan Ni (Thai for “Station”), finds its purpose and meaning.

The collaboration combines creatives from various backgrounds all working together for the first time. The creatives include artist Kamin Lertchaiprasert, architect Pattama Roonrakwit, designer Anon Pairot, researcher Samart Suwannarat and bicycle activist Zcongklod Bangyikhan. Under the helm of curator Angkrit Ajchariyasophon, Sa Tan Ni aims to bring awareness of cultural activism and the role of art as an agent of positive change.

Community engagement is a shared concern among all members of Sa Tan Ni. The synergy achieved by melding the individual visions of the five members, as well as involving everyday people in a series of workshops, is central to the collaboration.

Located in the glass porch on the second floor of the Singapore Art Museum, the central area for participants of the Sa Tan Ni workshops is defined by the bright yellow tape furniture created by Thai designer Anon Pairot (b. 1979), together with volunteers, as part of his ongoing sustainable furniture project.

to social and environmental challenges. His A Day Bike Fest has made an impact on people of all generations, and has, in particular, pushed youngsters to reconsider their choices in favour of a better world. In his workshop on November 23, Bangyikhan took his audience on a bike tour around Singapore, giving them a first-hand view of the original landmarks, and not their reproductions featured in museums and galleries.

The fourth of the five-member Sa Tan Ni is architect and community activist Pattama Roonrakwit (b. 1968). Founder and director of CASE (Community Architects for Shelter and Environment), Roonrakwit has consistently devoted her work to the less privileged in the urban areas, helping them make substantial changes in their daily lives. Often working on zero-budget projects, Roonrakwit has helped develop neighbourhoods in the poorer areas of Bangkok, encouraging mutual support and collaboration during all phases of the projects.

Her contribution to Sa Tan Ni was originally conceived as the creation of a new pavilion on the lawn outside the Singapore Management University (SMU). Made of scattered stilts, or points on a map, they are then connected to indicate the unifying effort of communal participation and also to offer a place for cross-cultural exchange with other Biennale artists and curators.

Believing in (Positive) Change:Sa Tan Ni, a Thai collective at theSingapore Biennale

Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani

Made of recycled objects, each piece of furniture is taped together, transforming and changing the pieces from discarded material to functional accessories. “Furniture is about culture”, Pairot said during an interview in October. He also emphasized the connection between art, design and social change — the core of his Tape Collection. Much like Pairot’s social efforts, researcher Samart Suwannarat (b. 1977) works towards improving the life of slum dwellers living on the periphery of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand by engaging in a project of creative urban planning. Suwannarat, a researcher at the Social Research Institute at Chiang Mai University, is also a founding member of the not-for-profit organisation Kon Jai Baan, which prompts community participation mostly directed to the less privileged by encouraging marginal urban planning and educational awareness. Kon Jai Baan’s mission helps highlight the value of communal and collective effort towards positive and effective change in daily life.

In his Biennale workshop, Where We Begin: People and Community Rejuvenation, Suwannarat worked closely with Thai Studies students from NUS to discuss innovative and sustainable solutions for environmental problems.

Environmental concerns are also brought forward by a day magazine’s editor-in-chief and bicycle activist, Zcongklod Bangyikhan (b. 1978). Bangyikhan has championed the “one-man-can-make-a-change” motto by initiating major bicycle events throughout Thailand. Although he does not come from an art background, his path does reveal a creative trajectory by embracing simple and effective solutions

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Roonrakwit’s work was never constructed. As Singapore Art Museum co-curator Michelle Ho pointed out, various logistic issues (which implies the involvement of a third party, namely SMU) impeded the actualisation of the project.

In the glass porch, however, visitors are given an idea of what the project entails by examining the drawings Roonrakwit made for the pavilion, thus acquiring a sense of what the structure would have represented in the open space. Roonrakwit’s missing outdoor structure was also meant to host the monumental skull, part of the project Non-Being By Itself by Kamin Lertchaiprasert, the fifth member of the Sa Tan Ni collective.

Internationally-recognised Kamin Lertchaiprasert (b. 1964) is the only fine art practitioner in Sa Tan Ni. Informed by Buddhist philosophy, Lertchaiprasert has a unified, inseparable view of life and art being one and the same thing. “The body is the museum of our life experiences. The spirit is the art expressed through social and individual practice”, the artist shared during a recent interview.

The 31st Century Museum of Contemporary Spirit is a project Lertchaiprasert started in Kanazawa, Japan, in 2008. The work involves the laying out of several containers to form the shape of the number 31, indicating a cultural space of the future where experience and inner spirit (that is, art) can be shared.

Non-Being By Itself is a component of 31st Century Museum of Contemporary Spirit developed by the artist for his solo exhibition at Chulalongkorn University gallery in March 2013. The idea for the Chulalongkorn exhibition, and to some extent for the Singapore Biennale, was to present videos made by random people on one specific subject matter: a personal role model who has inspired a positive change in each person’s life. Prominent in the installation at Chulalongkorn University was the monumental skull, conceived as a space for self-meditation and reflection, and the videos surrounding it.

1 Thai Group Collective Sa Tan Ni curated by Angkrit

2 Sa Tan Ni Architectural Project (preparatory sketch, not realised) by Pattama Roonrakwit

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3 + 4 Non-Being By Itself by Kamin Lertchaiprasert

5 Tape Collection by Anon Pairot

China looks at Southeast Asia:An Interview with LEAP

Melanie Pocock

Melanie Pocock talks with LEAP magazine’s Senior Editor, Wu Jianru, on the relationship between the Chinese and Southeast Asian contemporary art scenes, as well as the state — and stakes — of art criticism in China.

MP (Melanie Pocock): You mentioned that LEAP magazine intends to engage more with art in Southeast Asia. Could you tell me more about that? Are there reasons for this?

WJ (Wu Jianru): Over the last three years, LEAP has been solely focused on the development of Chinese contemporary art. As communication and exchange between Chinese artists and the world outside intensifies, Chinese contemporary art will only become more “global”. But is such commentary objective enough? We believe observations on the state of contemporary art in Asia can provide our local and international readers with a holistic view and understanding on what’s happening both locally and abroad. After all, most Asian countries share similar cultural backgrounds.

To start, I don’t think the Buddhist influence in China is nearly as strong as it is in Southeast Asia. Otherwise, it would be difficult to answer your question. One simple response would be that in today’s globalised environment, both China and Southeast Asia must confront an overwhelmingly Western discourse, especially when it comes to art. How can we identify our own trajectory? And our subjectivity? These are issues both China and Southeast Asia must tackle.

MP: Looking at this year’s Singapore Biennale, do you think there is a disconnect between China and Southeast Asia in their contemporary art scenes?

WJ: I am not really familiar about the general strategy behind the Biennale. I do know there are 27 curators from different areas of Southeast Asia, a number not commonly seen in any Biennale. The diversity of Asia appears to be the focus of the exhibition. The Singapore Biennale is not bound by duty to cover the whole of Asia, just as the Guangzhou Triennial or the Shanghai Biennale do not have to show only Chinese artists. How and which artists should be selected is entirely up to the host.

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Crucial to Lertchaiprasert’s project is the fact that all the videos, collected since the inception of Non-Being By Itself in Bangkok, were meant to be shown as an integral part of Sa Tan Ni (originally in Roonrakwit’s pavilion housing the skull and then, when that fell through, in the glass porch) together with the new videos recorded in Singapore during Lertchaiprasert’s workshops on November 23.

Indeed this was a large-scale and ambitious project that regrettably did not reach its full potential at the Singapore Biennale, perhaps due to its complex logistics. In the glass porch, Non-Being By Itself is represented partially by the screening of some of the videos and not in its entirety, thus lacking most of the contextual background crucial for the visitors to understand the full extent of Lertchaiprasert’s ongoing social practice.

Being an experience-based project, which relies heavily on the active engagement of its members with the audience, Sa Tan Ni has gone through a series of logistic difficulties that are to be expected in non-traditional art-making. However, while partially unfulfilled, Sa Tan Ni does counterbalance the institutionalised artwork with its scope and mission. For Sa Tan Ni, the process is as important as the final destination, where the intrinsic value of art lies in the active participation of the public or community as well as the strong engagement of the art practitioners.

Questionably, it seems that institutions, museums and major art events such as biennales may find it challenging to fully embrace these participatory, experiential projects that are “not about art objects, but about people”, as Ajchariyasophon says. The conundrum seems to be for these platforms to endorse, within the art institution setting, the legacy of an experience, which rejects the convention of institutional art-making and leans towards engaging in a more critical social dialogue.

As “everything changes, nothing remains unchanged” goes, we should ask ourselves if we are truly receptive to the possibility of a better world and if major cultural platforms are ready to facilitate this “change” in favour of social sharing and mutual engagement.

Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani has a master’s degree in Asian Art Histories. She writes for several academic journals, art magazines and symposium publications, and works extensively as an independent curator for commercial and institutional places in Singapore and Bangkok. Her academic and curatorial focus, as well as continuous research, revolves mostly around contemporary art in Thailand.

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In this context, do you think it is possible for art and art criticism to remain independent from commercial agendas? Do you see the role of LEAP as important in creating an outlet for independent art criticism in China?

WJ: In China right now we are seeing a considerable number of privately-owned museums undergoing construction. This may mean more opportunities for artists, but it doesn’t mean much for critics. Take LEAP, for example. Many of our contributors are not freelancers. Most of them have full-time jobs, which allows them the freedom to write. LEAP has always had a serious interest in maintaining a platform for independent art criticism.

MP: Is it in LEAP’s interest to support art criticism that’s written in Chinese?

WJ: China isn’t lacking in good art critics. By the 1980s and 90s, there were already a number of articles published that are crucial to understanding Chinese contemporary art. But only a few of these have been translated into English.

The reason LEAP supports art criticism in Chinese is that many fantastic critics here don’t have the opportunity to be heard abroad. It is our stance against globalisation. Being bilingual increases opportunities for communication and exchange — but the veracity and efficiency of this exchange is, of course, worth discussing. The intricacies of translation form a considerable portion of our work.

MP: In art magazines, it can be difficult to balance rigorous criticism with more accessible forms of writing. How does LEAP manage this balance? Is it something the magazine seeks to consciously address?

WJ: On the one hand, we take into consideration the readability of our content, but on the other, we seek to increase the literacy of our readers. Art criticism does not have to be obfuscatory, but it does have to provide a point of view that ensures a better understanding of art and its related knowledge.

For instance, the three sections of the magazine are written in different styles. The articles in the first section are shorter and more dynamic, with a wide variety of columns that attempt to delve into the many facets of contemporary art. “On Canvas”, for example, focuses on painting; “Institutional Critique” looks at alternative spaces; “First Person” offers artists the chance to speak for themselves; and “Exhibition Making” analyses the thought and strategy behind, well, creating exhibitions. This structure is meant to grant greater possibilities in our writing. In contrast, the last section of the magazine consists solely of serious exhibition reviews.

MP: According to art critic Pauline Yao, the problem in China is not the lack of art criticism but its absence of “critical depth”. Do you think the state of art criticism in China is changing? Has the global economic crisis and its exposure of China’s inflated art market help generate more reflective forms of art criticism?

WJ: The situation to which you refer, I think, hasn’t changed much recently. But this problem isn’t limited to China; it’s a global issue. In China’s case, it can be traced to deficiencies in education. Add a society driven by the free market and we’re looking at a lack of criticism everywhere — not just in art.

Furthermore, the art media in China do not enjoy governmental support and assistance as they would in the West, nor are institutions buffered by favourable policies. Here, we must rely on support from the commercial sector. In China we’re seeing a newly flourishing art market, and the emergence of digital art media, both of which present new opportunities and spaces for art commentary and contribute to an increase in serious writers and critics. But will critical depth be just as swiftly fostered? I think it needs some time. Of course, the state of the economy then becomes slightly irrelevant. As long as artists keep creating, critics will keep mounting new platforms to critique it.

Melanie Pocock is a curator and writer based in Singapore, where she currently lectures at LASALLE College of the Arts. She previously held curatorial positions at Art Scene China and Modern Art Oxford, and her writing has appeared in Eyeline, Kaleidoscope, The Financial Times and Third Text, among others.

Portrait of the Viewer Prashant Ashoka

The audience of the Biennale and capturing the viewer’s interaction with the art was an aspect of this year’s show which intrigued me, as I spent time in the exhibition spaces, photographing the breadth of artworks for Article. Being particularly interested in portraiture, I ultimately decided to take a series of photographs of visitors from all the different venues.

I approached people at various exhibits and spoke with them about how they felt about the work. While doing so, I requested to take a portrait photograph of them. The conversations that unfolded reflected opinions on various topics, ranging from the viability of art as an impetus for a global change (the theme of this year’s Biennale) to the similarities and differences in the identities of SouthEast Asian nations. Some found the exhibits to be very thought-provoking. For instance, Ken and Julia Yonetani’s Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nuclear Nations, with its eerie glowing chandeliers each representing the countries that hold nuclear weapons. Others contemplated the alternative realities the artworks presented, such as another version of Singapore’s history in Boo Junfeng’s evocative installation, Happy and Free.

Prashant Ashoka specialises in portraiture and documentary photography.

MP: Historically, Chinese artists have had an important influence on the development of modern art in Southeast Asia. This is evident in Chen Wen Hsi and Cheong Soo Pieng, Singaporean artists who founded the “Nanyang style” that fuses Western and Chinese art.

Do you think such cultural ties are still relevant to artists living and working in China and Southeast Asia today?

WJ: Chen Wen Hsi and Cheong Soo Pieng, two pioneering Singaporean painters, are not mentioned in the art history books here, so it would be hard for us to discuss their influence on Mainland Chinese artists. Yet remarkably, Chen and Cheong studied painting in China during the 1920s and 30s. This was a very important period of art history in China, as Chinese artists were learning from the West and proclaiming a revolution in Chinese painting.

However, with subsequent events, such as the founding of the People’s Republic, its opening and reform, and other massive agents of change, such discussion has turned towards the impact of history on art. We must discuss more fundamental subjects, such as the unfinished modernity of Chinese art, for example.

MP: Many observers refer to Southeast Asia — particularly Indonesia — as the latest “trend” in the art market. Do you see any similarities between this and the Chinese contemporary art scene in the 1990s-2000s?

WJ: The art market is not complicated. Capital goes wherever there are unexploited resources. China, India and Indonesia have been the new spots in the market during the past ten years. Of course, they could be replaced by Brazil or some African country any second. It is the collectors and the social structure which we should be paying attention to. For example, contemporary art collectors in Indonesia have been enjoying social stability, while their Chinese counterparts are subject to the ebb and tide of the market, despite the ingrained tradition of collecting antiques in China.

MP: One key issue in both China and Southeast Asia is the dominance of the art market within the arts infrastructure. This dominance further affects the integrity of artists and art criticism, which then becomes subservient to market interests.

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The Singapore Biennale 2013 (SB2013) has been lauded for achieving the ambitious feat of bringing together 27 curators to present a diverse body of work representative of the contemporary art produced in the Southeast Asian region. Moreover, its gamble to intentionally exhibit artists from lesser-known regions underscores the Biennale’s faith in and commitment towards Southeast Asian art.

Nevertheless, the question of the SB2013’s significance to members of the public visiting the Biennale still stands: what has the fourth edition of the Biennale brought to this segment of the audience in terms of its value and its reach?

Article interviewed visitors to the SB2013 to find out their thoughts and impressions of the artworks in the Biennale. Those I spoke to were unanimous in their praise for the quality of the work they had seen.

Foong Pui Yee, a retired mathematics lecturer from the National Institute of Education and first-time visitor to the Biennale found the works on display “striking”. She was especially taken with Payatas by Filipino artist Oscar Villamiel (b. 1953), an installation consisting of hundreds of dolls and doll heads that had been excavated from a Manila landfill of the same name. Calling it “an experience that the artist can turn this into art”, Foong was amazed to see the “artist try to take life from his surroundings and put it into a form” like this.

Similarly, Kriffith Fernando, a fourth-year political science student from the Singapore Management University and also a first-time visitor to the Biennale, was awed by Jeremy Sharma’s (b. 1977) Terra Sensa-Lovell. “Although I’m a bit confused by it, it got me thinking. I thought it was really interesting that he [depicted] how we were so preoccupied with everything else that we miss out on what’s actually there,” Fernando said.

Frasers Centrepoint CEO Cheang Kok Kheng, attending his second Biennale (having previously been to the 2011 Biennale), was no less effusive. “The ideas [in this Biennale] are quite refreshing, some of them even quite shocking, which I think [is] what art is supposed to do; it’s supposed to shock you from [your] level of comfort. So it’s quite nice.” Cheang picked Happy and Free by Boo Junfeng (b. 1983) — an installation that imagines a Singapore that is still a part of Malaysia — as his favourite piece, and explained, “It was so well done I thought it was a news clip at first!” He went on to quip: “I didn’t know what it was supposed to say, but it was an interesting idea. [But] don’t let Mr Lee Kuan Yew see it!”

For the visitors with no training in art or the arts, the curatorial efforts of the organisers were invaluable.

Foong explained that for a first-timer, “background and context is important. Otherwise, it’s just visual.” She found the information provided in the synopses of the artworks, such as the write-up by curators Mia Maria and Tay Swee Lin for The Face of the Black River by Mahardika Yudha (b. 1981), particularly useful in “appreciat[ing] the experience”.

“I watched the video without knowing what was going on,” Foong said, “but when I stepped outside and read the synopsis, I thought I had better go in again to watch the video one more time.”

Notably, the pieces at the SB2013 inspired the visitors to make further connections to life in Singapore.

For Fernando, it was about the perceived “inaccessib[ility]” of art. “For Singaporeans, our mentality towards art is that it’s for high-flyers or top-notch people, something that the rest of us can’t be a part of,” she said. “In our generation, not everyone is exposed to the arts. The focus is always on going to a good school, getting a good job — and that’s it. So we need a push out of that mentality.”

For Foong, it was about the future generation of artists, as she mulled over how “sterile” life is for Singaporean youth. “They always have to worry about exams. And look at the surroundings in Singapore: it’s all buildings! Where will they get inspiration from?

“They need something that can touch their lives so they can [in turn] touch the lives of others.”

Laremy Lee’s writing has been printed in Ceriph, Her World (Singapore) and Esquire (Singapore) and published online at the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, POSKOD.SG and cyberpioneer. He was Singapore’s Writer-in-Residence at the Toji Cultural Centre in Korea from April to May 2013.

Spotlight off the Art:Thoughts and Impressions of Visitors tothe Singapore Biennale 2013

Laremy Lee

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 The Garden by Sean Lee

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When I stand before the Singapore Art Museum, I am, without fail, transported back to my past. The museum is housed in what was once a school, “my school”: St Joseph’s Institution.

Above the coach port is a verandah and there stands a statue to St. John Baptist de La Salle, an educational reformer and the founding father of the Catholic religious order that ran the Christian school in the mid-19th Century. By his side are two young boys; one who looks to La Salle for guidance; he responds with a gesture that seems to suggest he is pointing to the distance.

In my time the middle distance was a road where, we were told, transsexual sex workers plied their trade in the evenings.

“If you don’t study hard, you’ll end up there,” was our adolescent punch line.The Singapore state’s trajectory, much like our own individual lives, was always

framed in terms of the future; an impulse that is not surprising for many former colonies. Though many new nation-states faltered and either retreated into the pre-colonial past or became fixated with the moment of their troubled birth, Singapore, much more than many, is the very quintessence of future-orientation.

This year’s Singapore Biennale, with its theme of “If the World Changed” appears firmly eyes forward, but not without the conditional.

Indeed I inadvertently entered the Biennale through a parallel event at the National Museum of Singapore, “A Changed World: Singapore Art 1950s – 1970s”. This exhibition expresses another, if implied, sense of the theme: that the world, which is constantly changing, can be framed as History, with both dominant as well as alternative narratives

This sense of Singapore’s history and its location in the larger world and immediate region, continue to provide counterpoints to the rush forward towards the unencumbered visions of the future.

Traversing the landscape of a city that was the backdrop of my formative years, personal history is both past and, at the same time, deeply present, making the experience of the Biennale wonderfully personal but strangely limiting.

Albert Samreth’s (b.1979) The Voice and Angie Seah’s (b.1979) Conducting Memories played with the powerful trigger of memory: creating sound-scapes in the corridors I once muddled about as a teenager. The art works made material the ways in which our memories not only occupy space but also are constantly at play.

The parallel events, In Search of Raffles’ Light by Charles Lim which seeks to “remember histories” attached to the Raffles Lighthouse — which I visited as a child with my late father — and Liao Jiekai’s Bukit Orang Salah, a 20 minute film about St. John’s Island — where my maternal uncle was interned as a political prisoner — each resonate with the possibility of personal identification. These histories, excavated or fabricated, are the stuff of my memories.

Yet, is the theme a call to re-imagine or to create a new narrative of that history or is it a call to speculate on alternative historical routes? Can art take on history without the pitfalls of nostalgia or is it doomed to encase it, lifeless, in a vitrine to be gawked at?

Artists’ General Assembly – The Langenbach Archive by Loo Zihan (b.1983), part of “Ghost: The Body at the Turn of the Century” exhibition at Sculpture Square attempts to re-animate an archive.

(I confess, again, in this work art and personal biography bump into each other.)Performance artist Loo uses the debris of an event in Singapore art history that

demarcated the then existing play of state, society and individual on the cultural landscape.

But the work, named after Ray Langenbach, the performance artist and scholar resident in Singapore for many years, is neither a re-telling nor is it precious in its handling of the debris of that art controversy.

Langenbach’s hundreds of notes and photo-copied newspaper articles are literally poked, prodded and weaved through with a web of intersecting colour-coded threads and forced to speak to the present. (Not that anyone is forced to listen.)

Through the work Loo lays bare a “troubling” moment that emerged just at that point when the Singapore state embarked on an ambitious project to be a major cultural centre for the region.

The archives, mounted on two walls create a corridor through which the viewer can move back and forth, crisscrossing, as the threads do, the minutiae of controversy.

However the archive isn’t digested for the viewer and re-presented as a clear and coherent history. While connections are made between people, institutions and other moments in this controversy, no narrative — of increasing state control, for instance — is offered. The viewer is left surrounded by an almost bewildering mass of evidence.

But evidence of what, one might ask. For those of us directly implicated in that history, we can perhaps pose the

same questions asked 20 years ago but this time with a reasonable expectation of a different answer. And for those unaware of this history, they might well see in the archives something of the pre-conditions of their present.

Sharaad Kuttan is a producer with BFM Radio in Malaysia. He is co-editor of Looking At Culture (1996) a collection of essays on cultural politics in Singapore.

The First Draft of History Sharaad Kuttan

1 + 2 + 3 Artists’ General Assembly — The Langenbach Archive by Loo Zihan

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NOTE FROM THE EDITORSThis is the fourth edition of Article, which is published by the Singapore Section of the International Association of Art Critics, AICA Sg. The first publication focused on the 2007 Singapore Art Show, the second, the 2008 Singapore Biennale, and the third, the launch of the Gillman Barracks art galleries precinct. As with previous versions, Article is intended as a project to develop and nurture local art writers but also to develop the readership for art. The writing team includes a mix of experienced and newer art writers.

ABOUT AICA In the aftermath of WWII, a contingent of art critics, historians, educators, and curators from museums of modern art gathered at two congresses at UNESCO Headquarters (1948 and 1949), following which, the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) was founded in 1950. AICA comprises a wide range of experts intent on supporting the fields of artistic creation and dissemination, cultural development and international co-operation and brings together over 4,000 art professionals from over 70 countries all over the world, organised into over 60 National Sections and an Open Section. AICA Singapore was established in 2006.

EDITORSLee Weng ChoyKathy Rowland

WRITERSAleksandar Brkić

Anmari Van NieuwenhoveChristina Chua

Faisal HusniHo Rui An

Laremy LeeLouis Ho

Loredana Pazzini-ParaccianiMayee Wong

Michael LeeMelanie PocockOng Puay Khim

Paul KhooRahel Joseph

Sharaad KuttanViviana Mejía

Zarina MuhammadCOPY-EDITORS

Lisa CheongPooja Makhijani

Melody Uy

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARDAdele Tan

Charles MerewetherJeannine Tang

Lucy DavisMayee Wong

Mustafa Shabbir HussainRay Langenbach

PHOTOGRAPHYPrashant Ashoka

ADVERTISINGPrashant Ashoka

DESIGNSarah and Schooling

PUBLISHED BYSingapore Section of theInternational Association of Art Critics

WITH SUPPORT FROMNational Arts Council

TOMOKO KASHIKI17 JANUARY - 02 MARCH 2014

7 Lock Road, #02-13 Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108935t. +65 6694 3071 e. sg@ota�nearts.com www.ota�nearts.com

Tomoko Kashiki “A Beast Hiding Treasure” 2013 acrylic, ink, paper, linen, wooden panel 227 x 163 cm

We invite you to the inaugural exhibition of our moveto a new space at 7 Lock Road, Gillman Barracks