Because we are all culture junkies

I attended the opening of the Singapore Art Show at the Singapore Art Museum last Friday. Actually I deliberately went down late so I’d miss the actual opening speech and not have to wait to tour the galleries. I had not seen the list of artists exhibiting at Art Buffet, the “choose from 12 themes” theme this year, prior to going down – so I was pleasantly surprised to bump into Eunice Ng. We had worked together in our former respective lives as advertising designer and publicist. After having her child Eunice took time off from working and is presently doing the BA programme in Fine Arts at LASALLE and her work was picked for the Art Show. Her installation “Inside Out” is a site-specific work that questions polarity in society.

Art and discussions about the limits of culture and society interest me and so I probed. Her installation, a dainty-looking but large cobweb woven from PVC and shaped by applying special emulsifying materials, hangs over a short walkway that connects an otherwise-isolated gallery from the rest of the museum. This means that the visitors who choose to enter that specific gallery must walk under the cobweb, and be made a part of the installation’s purposes.

Visitors who have walked under the web will see the other side of the web, obviously due to being at the “other” entrance to the walkway. From Art Buffet Eunice chose “Body” as the entry theme but she had intended for her work to explore the opposite – the “Spirit.” As the name of her installation goes, Eunice sees the action of “flipping things inside out” as a mechanism that proves things are the same inside out, even though the perspective is different.

For Eunice, if both sides of the thing refer to the same object, then what is the purpose of the different sides. She extends this question to ask what are the purposes of polarity – in her words, “is there really such a thing as polarity itself?” I see her question as a starting point to ask what is the need to call for polarizing or polarization of issues in society.

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I was also introduced to Jason Wee, whose installation of bottle-caps reminds of Shepherd Fairley’s iconic photoshopped high-contrast Obama “Hope” image even as ST Life! informs that it is suppose to remind of Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew “from certain angles.” In Jason’s rendition all the bottle-caps are white (ah…. all white, how did I miss that…) – leaving only a monochromatic imagery that is aided by the play of lighting and visual perspectives. Entitled “No More Tears” (Johnson & Johnson’s tagline?) the installation is immediately recognizable as a human face but yet also one whose features are always forgettable. Apropos the Chinese idiom “washing one face’s in tears” it seems that the one face we all try to forget and flush away with tears will always remain in sight. Blurred, after that much tears, but persistent nonetheless.

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Dawn Ng’s three-panel mixed media work “Massive Attack” may connect with her massively cool installation “I fly like paper I get high like planes” shown at the Blackout exhibition last month but within the competing grounds of the Art Show, the work has more to do with Battle Royale than the moniker band.

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George Wong’s work – “Blink” – is my favorite piece from the exhibition. A photograph of a football stadium framed from within the work only by the two stadium lighting towers, the linkage to the arbitrary themes isn’t as obvious at first sight as some other works. But “Blink” is compelling, and intrigues one into staring into its space. I’m enjoying this one. I could look at it for hours.

Art shows are fun.

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This Friday the Lu Hao exhibition (contemporary Chinese artist) is opening at Singapore Art Museum, while :phunkstudio’s New World (which explores the line between art and advertising) is opening at Art Seasons Gallery.

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