Of course, Quincey’s opiate-fueled reflections of Asia as an imagined site of mystic sublimity have all the familiar trappings of a particular system of thought that has dominated Western representations of Asia in the past few centuries: the power of the gaze to fabricate and invent an eroticized and exoticized Other. For a large part, the rhetoric of Paradise Lost, the inaugural exhibition of the newly established Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Singapore, plays to this outdated but still oft-studied dialectic with three major video works by Fiona Tan, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Zarina Bhimji, all of which seek to question the politics of migration, cultural identity, and transnational boundaries.

Fiona Tan. Disorient, 2009 (film still); double-screen video installation; color HD installation, 5:1 surround, 2 HD-cam safety masters, 2 HD projectors, 2 computers, 2 surround amplifiers, surround speakers. Courtesy of Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem.

Fiona Tan. Disorient, 2009 (film still); double-screen video installation; color HD installation, 5:1 surround, 2 HD-cam safety masters, 2 HD projectors, 2 computers, 2 surround amplifiers, surround speakers. Courtesy of Frith Street Gallery, London. Photo: Per Kristiansen.

Fiona Tan’s Disorient (2009) is a two-channel production commissioned for the Dutch Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale that contrasts discordant perceptions of Asia. The first video delineates a fictional but richly textured space curated to showcase objects found and gleaned from an exotic Other. Accompanied by a voice-over narration of Marco Polo’s travel accounts that were written at the end of the thirteenth century, Tan’s theatrical set—designed to emulate the exotic appeal of a cabinet of curiosities—imagines Polo’s lived experience of the material world, with shelves filled to the brim with figurines, taxidermied beasts, and other unnamed ornaments. But if the cabinet of curiosities is often meant to provide a visual narrative for the classification and analysis of the material world, Tan’s enormous Kunstkammer seems solely designed to disorient and to celebrate the act of collection for its own sake, highlighting perhaps the West’s centuries-old unilateral perception of the East. Yet the pursuit of capturing atavistic myth, so intricately drawn out in the first video, is dashed away by the jarring contemporary footage of the second video. The unsentimental, poverty-stricken urban landscape of East Asia, derelict and in disrepair, concurrently provides an ironic counterpoint to Polo’s romanticized configuration of these same regions, and bluntly questions the ideology presented in the first screen.

Zarina Bhimji. Yellow Patch, 2011 (film still); single-screen installation; HD Blu-ray and Dolby 5.1; 35mm film transferred to HD; 29:43. Courtesy of the Artist.

Zarina Bhimji. Yellow Patch, 2011 (film still); single-screen installation; HD Blu-ray and Dolby 5.1; 35mm film transferred to HD; 29:43. Courtesy of the Artist.

Zarina Bhimji’s Yellow Patch (2011) is a slow, delicious cinematic exploration of architecture, hinterlands, and destinations that utilizes the camera’s ability to create a disjuncture between image and referent. By carefully correlating the moving image to affective sounds, Yellow Patch eschews cerebral contextualization and factual presentation in favor of visual sensations created by mise-en-scène where interiors are merely obliquely equated with individual and collective memory. Like reticent sentinels of a time long past, monuments and buildings serve as Bhimji’s markers, which foreground the migration and movement of peoples and cultures in the British colonial subcontinent of the late 19th to the early 20th century. The passing of time is marked by abandoned buildings, peeling paint, and decaying walls, as the desolate urban landscapes—elegiacally softened by slow-moving shots and framing—carries the tumultuous weight of a nation’s history.

Trinh T. Minh-ha. Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 1989 (film still); 16mm; 108 min. Courtesy of Moongift Films.

Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) tackles issues of documenting, translation, and interviewing within the familiar territory of cultural voyeurism, identity politics, and the construction of memory. Through a series of montages, archival footage, voice-over narrations, obscure Vietnamese proverbs, and English subtitles, Surname Viet Given Name Nam uses the power of fragmentary storytelling to explore aspects of Vietnamese reality as seen through the lives of women in Vietnam and the United States. The camera shots are deliberately unsteady as though wielded by an amateur’s hand, yielding information that is only coherent enough to glean partial information of the injustices that women suffer. The staged quality of these “ethnographic” interviews becomes more pronounced as the film progresses, until we realize that Trinh’s deliberate intention is not for us to misconstrue their halting speech as shyness or them as people struggling to speak in a different language, but rather the uncertainty of amateur actors who are in fact Vietnamese women living in the United States. Surname Viet Given Name Nam redefines identity as an interview experience, a quasi-fictional way of encountering the ethnographic self through the act of speaking and recollecting. But Trinh’s feminist critical discourse also raises questions that strike at the core of identity politics: What is selfhood and how should (or can) it be represented?

Seen in this light, Paradise Lost does not merely showcase narratives of displacement but also validates the notion that encoded within people are an indeterminate amount of political and cultural selves. As a consequence, identity—whether personal or collective—is at best too slippery to be pinned down by a taxonomic and digestible checklist of authentication. Certainly, the exhibition makes a convincing case of the value of exploring diasporic perspectives and the global aesthetic influences that come into play, despite the recurrent eagerness of such exhibitions to assimilate the oft-explored hallmarks of post-colonial discourse. At every turn, we are constantly reminded that the show is an unrelenting exercise in probing issues of memory and identity (which seem to be recurrent obsessions of regions that have a colonial past), and of the artifice of such illusions. There are questions heaped upon questions, but no ready answers as we are left to ponder the politics of conflicting narratives and sensitivities in each installation. As acutely sensitive to such concepts as the exhibition has proven to be, perhaps the most unsettling realization it leaves is that representation—rewritten from the perspective of an object that has always been represented—obfuscates as much as it reveals.

Paradise Lost is on view at the Centre for Contemporary Art at the Gillman Barracks through March 30, 2014.

'Roni Horn, 'This is me, this is you' (1998/2000) detail from installation of 12 photographs. ©Roni Horn, courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zürich & London. Presented by the Art Fund under Art Fund International

Across a two-year period beginning from 1998, Roni Horn took photographs of her niece Georgia, that are on show in an installation at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow. A set of prints are placed on one side of a wall, seeming to trace a path of growth as Georgia adopts a different hairstyle, posture, and way of expressing herself to the camera. Another set of prints hanging on the facing wall seems to present duplicate images, with almost imperceptible differences that are revealed on closer look. At each occasion that Horn recorded Georgia’s actions, two consecutive photographs at intervals of a few moments would be taken, giving rise to a series of seemingly double prints. While This is me, this is you documents a specific point of a young girl’s development in a spontaneous and personal manner, the series of prints provoke thought on the way our identities shift not just within the passage of two years, but also within seconds, as expressions we try on and grow into.

These fluctuations and representations that revolve around individuals and spaces in history, seem to be one of the themes emerging from Tales of the City, an exhibition now on view at GoMA that seeks to bring together artworks interpreted as responses to man-made urban spaces, from documenting changes in the city to re-imagining them, and features artworks by artists including Martin Boyce, Boyle Family, Emily Jacir, Toby Paterson and Corin Sworn.

Fiona Tan, 'Disorient' (still) (2009). Copyright the artist. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

Fiona Tan’s Disorient occupies the ground floor gallery, the same space where another video work she made, Tomorrow (2005) was presented two years ago.  A two-screen installation, one screen pans slowly across a recreated depot, with the camera moving to reveal a curious assortment of objects from Asia, and a voiceover reading from the tales of Marco Polo. The facing screen pieces together commentary and footages extracted from modern-day documentaries of countries in Asia. Commissioned for the Dutch Pavilion at the 53^rd Venice Biennale in 2009, Disorient draws on the cultural history of Venice and questions the nature and reception of text and visual representations of Asia across centuries to the present.

Hans-Peter Feldmann, Handprint Poster. Copyright and courtesy Hans-Peter Feldmann / Galerie Mehdi Chouakri. Photo: Jan Windszus

Handprints of well-known artists and poets in the twentieth century comprise ten posters by Hans-Peter Feldmann. These handprints were found in the notebook of psychologist Charlotte Wolff who examined the diagnostic significance of the hand and captured the handprints of famous personalities, many of whom were involved in the Surrealist movement, including Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, André Breton and Aldous Huxley. By scanning and enlarging these handprints, Feldmann offers a way of considering the aesthetic qualities from the curves and textures of each print, and an avenue of reading and interpreting the minds of these personalities.