Posted by May October 31, 2016

Singapore Biennale 2016

AN ATLAS OF MIRRORS

AT ONCE, MANY WORLDS.

The last I visited a Biennale was in 2006! Oh that's 10 years ago and it was spectacular involving temples, mosques, churches, public spaces and museums all around Singapore. It was like a treasure hunt for Art Installations back then. It has since down-sized and this year's Singapore Biennale can be found at Singapore Art Museum, SAM at 8Q, National Museum of Singapore & Stamford Green, Asian Civilisation Museum, The Arts House, Peranakan Museum and Singapore Management University. Sounds like a big area to cover for Arts but really, the span of art installation was a lot more impressive 10 years ago. It was also a lot harder to manage then I guess.

Singapore Biennale 2016 recently opened its doors over the weekend with the theme An Atlas of Mirrors. It would have been an honour to meet all the artists at the opening but children and crowd do not go well. Not my kids at least. I wouldn't have found a chance to speak to any artists about their artworks anyways if they were there. So. A visit on a Monday would be better in my opinion. Of course, without the crowd, I would bring them. We had a wonderful time. At least I think we did because I educated them about deforestation, mythical creatures, mirror reflections, the science of sound and vibration, museum etiquette and more. But we didn't stay for too long because they wanted pure play and thus, hopped over to Art Science Museum for Future World 90 minutes later. I could spend half a day at SAM and SAM@8Q if they hadn't come with I swear!

Exhibition Dates
27 October 2016 to 26 February 2017

Opening Hours at National Museum of Singapore
1000 to 1900 hours daily

Ticketing at National Museum of Singapore
Free

Opening Hours at Singapore Art Museum
Saturdays to Thursdays 1000 to 1800 hours
Friday 1000 to 2100 hours

Ticketing at Singapore Art Museum

ADULT S$15 (Singaporeans/PR) | S$20 (Tourists)

CHILDREN (6 years and below) FREE

STUDENTS S$7.50 (Singaporeans/PR) | S$10 (Tourists)

SENIORS S$7.50 (Singaporeans/PR) | S$10 (Tourists)

FAMILY PACKAGE S$36 (Singaporeans/PR) | S$52 (Tourists)

* The family package includes 2 adults and 2 children or 1 Adult and 3 children

I'd like to share the nine exhibits between SAM and NMS which I really enjoyed and hopefully entice you to make a museum trip with the family to because it isn't just boring abstract art which you cannot find meaning to. I sat the children down at each of these exhibit and talked a little about life, science and appreciation.

[a description of each exhibit extracted from www.singaporebiennale.org for your reading pleasure]

ONE

COOKING THE WORLD

NATIONAL MUSEUM SINGAPORE

Subodh Gupta

B. 1964, Khagaul, India

Lives and Works in New Delhi, India

I was hoping to get the kids to squat under this massive visual art piece for a picture but the security guard politely requested to stood around it instead. He doesn't want to get into trouble should one of these woks drop onto my children's head! Neither would I want that.

Gupta’s work draws on the visual culture around him, one that is saturated in an overabundance of images, forms, food and people – mirrored in his avalanche of plates, cups, pails and pots. But unlike his other sculptures made of shiny stainless-steel vessels, Cooking the World is made of used aluminium vessels that are inscribed with personal histories. They refer to the parallel realities in a globalised, consumerist society: surplus and affluence on one hand, dearth and deprivation on the other. The artist’s use of worn-out vessels monumentalises the lives of people who have been marginalised by life and history, while the delicate threads from which each pot hangs lend a sense of fragile temporality to this work. If a breeze were to pass through this gargantuan haloed sphere, one could imagine the smaller pots gently swaying, as though they were particles of stardust threatening to escape from this only-temporary assemblage of a world.

TWO

THE GREAT EASTERN INDIAMAN

NATIONAL MUSEUM SINGAPORE

David Chan
B. 1979, Singapore
Lives and Works in Singapore

Commingling fact and fiction, The Great East Indiaman revisits Sir Stamford Raffles’ landing in 1819, which led to the founding of modern Singapore. In place of the triumphant European male protagonist, the artist recasts the narrative as a fantastical tale of a mythical, now-extinct species of whale that brought Raffles to these shores. In this invented folklore, the whale species called the ‘East Indiaman’ was domesticated as man’s marine beast of burden. However, Chan’s origin tale is also grounded in rigorous historical research: from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the East Indiaman was the generic name for any sailing ship belonging to the English East India Company, and it was on one such merchant vessel that Raffles sailed to reach Singapore. The work, sited on the front lawn of the National Museum of Singapore, also recalls the skeleton of an Indian fin whale that was once the highlight of the museum.

THREE

THERE ARE THOSE WHO STAY/

THERE ARE THOSE WHO GO

STAMFORD GREEN

Perception3

Established 2007, Singapore
Live and Work in Singapore

This work explores the idea of ‘staying’ and ‘going’ as what the artist-duo calls “two perspectives of a single decisive moment”. Two mirror-finished walls face each other. One bears the phrase, “There are those who stay”; the other, “There are those who go”. As if in a stand-off, the walls suggest layered readings into the nature of choice, attachment, separation and loss. The artwork is sited where the old National Library building once stood (it was demolished amid public outcry in 2005), and offers an open reflection on Singapore’s architectural heritage, while the mirror-like walls provide the viewer with a tangible, yet reflected and hence distanced encounter of the site.

FOUR

INSCRIPTION OF THE ISLAND

SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM

Lim Soo Ngee

B. 1962, Singapore

Lives and Works in Singapore

This piece consists of a sculpture of a large left hand emerging from the ground, with the palm facing skyward and a pointing index finger. In Lim’s imagination, this was once part of a colossal statue that guided the ships of an ancient, mythical civilisation. But the statue collapsed and, being too large to be moved, was left to nature. Subsequently, the islanders drew a circle around the hand and used it as a sundial. The artist asks: might Singapore have had a Bronze Age to call its own? In proposing myth upon myth, Lim extends our sense of history beyond historical records. Meanwhile, our imagination is left to run wild: we ponder what lies in the earth beneath, as indicated by this lone left hand.

FIVE

LOCUS AMOENUS

SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM

Ryan Villamael
B. 1987, Laguna, Phillipines

Lives and Works in Quezon City, The Philippines

Latin for a “pleasant place”, the phrase Locus Amoenus also evokes the notion of an escape into an ideal landscape. In this instance, the pastoral paradise has been sited within a house of glass – the greenhouse – an engineered Eden for flora uprooted from its native soil. Indeed, Villamael’s ‘greenhouse’ houses unusual foliage: intricate cut-outs created from archaic and contemporary Philippine maps. Coalescing notions of nature and nurture, culture and the cultivated, the work probes the imaging of the Philippines’ fraught history as the country that endured the longest colonial rule in Southeast Asia. Collapsing multiple realities, the installation is cut from maps that have two sides – a semiotic layering that conjoins the historical with the present-day. Creeping down from the ceiling, the Monstera deliciosa looks to colonise its climate-controlled space in the museum. It is situated in the Singapore Art Museum in the only space where a section of the original colonial building façade from 1852 is still visible.

SIX

NOAH'S GARDEN II

SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM

Deng GuoYuan

B. 1957, Tianjin, China

Lives and Works in Xi'An, China

This site-specific work is at once a garden of artificial flora and a labyrinth of mirrors. Entering the installation, viewers find themselves inside a kaleidoscope, where the surrounding infinite mirror images create a feeling of the loss of subjectivity. Artificial plants, referencing classical Song Dynasty representations of particular flora, but coated in vibrant colours, assault the senses and blur the lines between the real and the artificial. In applying the colour schemes from maps he has examined to these artificial plants and classically-referenced ‘scholar rocks’ he has created, the artist defies the conventional systems of colour-coding in map-making, recasting the world with a renewed hope for the integration of richness and diversity and the resolution of conflicts. By evoking scepticism and uncertainty, his work raises doubt about the validity and accuracy of map-making; it creates a utopia while simultaneously disassembling it.

SEVEN

PARACOSMOS

SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM

Harumi Yukutake

B. 1966, Tokyo, Japan

Lives and Works in Tokyo, Japan

Paracosmos propels the viewer into a parallel world – a space of otherness that is recognisable but unfamiliar. Shaped by Shinto ideas of interconnectivity, the site-responsive work is situated in the circular stairwell of the Singapore Art Museum, a central transition space that connects two floors. Here, the ‘membrane’ of hand-cut mirrors dissolves the definition between foreground and background by dissipating the single image into an explosion of reflections. A space of simultaneity, and eternally liminal, the mirror was core to philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia as a kind of zone that could encompass other sites. Yet munificence can also be deceptive, and like a mirror that throws a warped or skewed reflection, heterotopias can disturb and distort the spaces held in their embrace. The mirror reveals itself as a paradoxical device: able to hold every other image by having no inherent image, it canenfold an ‘everywhere’ by being a ‘nowhere’ in itself.

EIGHT

BLACK FOREST

SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM

Han Sai Por

B. 1943, Singapore

Lives and Works in Singapore

Han has been recognised for her investigations into the impact of human activities on the natural world. Since 2011 she has been working on the ‘Black Forest’ series, which takes the form of installations comprising black or blackened wood logs lying on beds of charcoal. This presentation is different: we see a destroyed ‘forest’ of charcoal logs standing upright. Representing the charred wood from ongoing deforestation activities, these evocative ‘columns of nature’ prick our conscience, yet attest to Nature’s resilience against every imaginable catastrophe.

NINE

I WANDER, I WONDER

SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM

Dex Fernandex
B. 1984, Caloocan, The Philippines

Lives and Works in Caloocan, The Philippines

In this artwork, Dex Fernandez probes the psyche that lies behind the compulsion to hold on to ‘useless’ objects. It is not uncommon to find Philippine homes abounding with decorative mementos and souvenirs. These are often gifts from family members working overseas, but when disaster strikes, these possessions can imperil their owners’ lives by becoming fire hazards or obstructing exit routes. This prompted the artist to examine how seemingly unnecessary objects become ‘unintended mirrors’ of the self: they subconsciously reflect and reveal what we desire and believe is vital. Such objects are cherished for their emotional worth – their ‘sentimental value’ – which far outweighs their utilitarian function. This site-specific mural comprises of two counterpoint sets. One suite is based on the surviving possessions of people in Tacloban who lived through the deadly typhoon in 2013; the other suite centres on Filipinos in Singapore and depicts the objects they brought with them here.