Ian Woo. We Have Crossed the Lake, 2009; acrylic on linen; 194 x 244 cm. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

Other Edens presents the garden as a site of desire in the colonial imagination. Singaporean painter Ian Woo’s lyrical, abstract representation of foliage and water represents the solace found in the natural world. A reference to mid-20th-century abstraction is evident, but Woo has invented a powerful and idiosyncratic visual language. Underlying the gestural, calligraphic mark making of We Have Crossed the Lake (2009) is a spare restraint emerging from his deep knowledge of Chinese ink-painting traditions.

Some works reflect the bitter aftermath of totalitarian ideologies. Asian nation-states today—even the behemoth of a post-Mao China—are hostage to the forces of the global market, and old certainties have vanished. Shen Shaomin’s hyper-real embalmed bodies of Communist leaders lie in crystal sepulchres, as if awaiting a call to arms that might reanimate them. Mao lies next to Ho Chi Minh and Fidel, Kim Il-sung and Lenin. Summit (2009) is a G8 meeting of cadavers. The meta-narratives of the 20th century, like these old men, lie in the morgue of history.

Shen Shaomin. Summit (detail – Ho Chi Minh), 2009; silica gel simulation, acrylic, and fabric; dimensions variable. Singapore Art Museum collection. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

Vietnamese/American collective the Propeller Group collaborated with an advertising agency to rebrand Communism, a tongue-in-cheek attempt to make it newly palatable. The mise-en-scène of Television Commercial for Communism (2011–2012) is all white—no red flags, no references to the glorious struggle of the proletarian masses, no cult-like imagery: a satirical “whitewashed” revolutionary ideology as empty and uninflected as a mouthwash commercial.

Anurendra Jegadeva. MA-NA-VA-REH – Love, Loss, and Pre-Nuptials in The Time of the Big Debate, 2012-2014; multimedia installation; dimensions variable. Singapore Art Museum collection. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

Anurendra Jegadeva’s MA-NA-VA-REH – Love, Loss, and Pre-Nuptials in the Time of the Big Debate (2012–2014) presents the personal as unambiguously political. A seductively gaudy Hindu wedding altar is adorned with images of the artist’s parents, the religious iconography of four major religions, and a panoply of South Asian cultural references. Jegadeva comments on two definitions of marriage: the wedding of the artist’s parents, in 1957, the year of Malaysia’s independence; and the marriage of convenience that created Malaysia as a modern state. Caucasian Krishnas are juxtaposed with the Virgin Mary, and portraits of political leaders jostle in a joyously vibrant eclecticism. In a time of increasing political and religious tension, this exuberant mash-up of culture and tradition seems utopian indeed.

Kawayan De Guia. Bomba, 2011; installation comprising 18 mirror bombs, sputnik sound sculpture; dimensions variable. Collection of Singapore Art Museum. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum

Eighteen sparkling “bombs” hang in the darkened space of the chapel (the museum was once a Catholic school). Terrifying disco balls promising destruction, they cast shards of light onto the Stations of the Cross that still adorn the walls. At once beautiful and menacing, Kawayan De Guia’s Bomba (2011) references the bombing of Manila in World War II, but evokes the horrors of more recent conflicts, and others of the past, contrasting the glittery lure of hedonism with a dance of death.

Chris Chong Chan Fui. Block B, 2012-2014; single-channel video with sound; 20:00 looped. Collection of the Artist. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

Other works explore urban alienation. Chris Chong Chan Fui’s 2012–2014 video Block B was shot in a gritty neighborhood of Kuala Lumpur where life unfolds chaotically within a grid of brutalist high-rise apartments. Shannon Lee Castleman set up sixteen video cameras in facing apartments on Singapore’s  Jurong West Street 81. Residents simultaneously filmed and were filmed by their neighbors. The work reflects the new realities of surveillance, but also reveals the joys of the everyday within these closely packed buildings. In unscripted exchanges between neighbors who might otherwise never have spoken, we see the possibilities for human connection in unpromising environments. Through this examination of utopias lost and found, the exhibition reminds us that the universal desire for the perfect world remains a tantalisingly elusive aspiration.

After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art is on view at the Singapore Art Museum through October 18, 2015.

[1] After Utopia catalog, Singapore Art Museum, 2015.

Subodh Gupta, Everything Is Inside, 2004, Taxi and bronze, 276 x 162 x 104 cm, Arario Collection. Image courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery, Cheonan, Seoul.

Not too long ago, I spoke with Howard Rutkowski, formerly of Sotheby’s and now director of Fortune Cookie Projects, intending to satiate my curiosity about art auctions and art dealing. While he probably scoffed at my naivety, he candidly said to me, “Plunging into the murky business of the art world is akin to swimming with the sharks. There’s a delicate dance that takes place between buyers and sellers.” There seems to be very little disagreement in those sentiments in Rutkowski’s diplomatically crafted comments; they are in fact, echoed with gusto ad naseum in many recently published books about art dealing and collecting, where vitriol, fake kisses and nefarious sleights of hand are as commonplace as a trip to the supermarket in a world resolutely disconnected from reality.

“The nature of the art business is that it’s filled with pettiness and jealousy. There’s little mutual respect…everyone is insecure about their accomplishments, which often leads to a great deal of bad behavior to disguise the truth,” writes Richards Polsky with remarkable honesty in I sold Andy Warhol (too soon). “It used to be all about the art world: visiting artists in their studios, socializing with collectors, and hanging out at art fairs with your fellow dealers. Now it was all about the art market.”

It is a commonplace but also a shrewd observation. A more accurate description of the “art world” these days must extend beyond appreciation and connoisseurship to the capitalist maze system of production and consumption in whose perilous waters artists, dealers, collectors, museums and galleries navigate. With the dissolution of cultural and commercial barriers, art criticism and appreciation face possible relegation to serve as mere adjuncts to the main business.

Ai Weiwei, Table With Three Legs, 2007, Table, Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), 117 x 115.5 x 115.5 cm, Collection of Mr Qiao Zhibing.

Running parallel with Art Stage Singapore – an international art fair that ended 16 January 2011 –, Collectors’ Stage: Asian contemporary art from private collections suggests that public exhibition spaces can get caught in these lively but fraught relationships. As a show created by a public institution, Collectors’ Stage engages in the meeker, mellower side of art-for-education purposes, positioning itself alongside Art Stage insofar as it could remain a neutral, fringe program while pinching some of the excess stardust from the highbrow glitz and glamor of its dominant partner. The show is intriguing in its bypass of a typical educational program that is de rigueur in many public art institutions’ exhibitions, lacking a certain insistence of pedagogical material and the usual contingent mix of critical thinking and art historical discourse. Drawing from the rich and varied coffers from private collections in order to parade the sheer diversity of Asian art lying in private hands, the exhibition triumphs the astute discernment and emerging intelligence of the collectors, while implicitly acknowledging the opaque (and potentially difficult) web of money, prestige and aesthetic (and monetary) value that exists between artists-as-producers and consumers.

Rashid Rana, Desperately Seeking Paradise, 2007 – 08, C-Print + DIASEC, stainless steel, 300 x 300 x 300cm, Collection of Amna and Ali Naqvi. Image courtesy of the artist.

The result in this instance, is a close-knit, reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationship that emerges when private collections surface in public spaces. Collections that rest in a museum for any period of time cannot help but gain public exposure (or notoriety); both collectors and artists benefit from the increased media scrutiny – despite the sort of press it might receive. An institutional display thrusts upon an artist much valued affirmation and recognition while potentially providing them a step-up in the elaborate system of critical reception and endorsement, and collectors themselves are validated by their purchasing inclinations and intellectual taste. Depending on the choice of works, the museum in turn, receives accolades for its program and its audacious bid to entertain.

The repercussion of this agenda however, is the compromise of the works’ engagement with the space in which they are presented and it is seldom that their content or meanings are found in dialogue with its surroundings or its viewing public. Despite the standing argument that the gallery’s white spaces are contested territories that actively influence the reception and meaning of art, space in Collectors’ Stage is utilized as vacant zones housing the sheer size of some installations, and the works are assembled and administered rather than didactically curated.

It is still entirely possible (and perhaps even necessary) to enjoy the works as individual entities. Many of the artworks are jaw-dropping and materially accessible, open to non-specialist viewers unfamiliar with art theoretical concepts. Thematically grounded in issues innate to contemporary Asian art and familiar to Asian viewers themselves – the dichotomy of embracing progress and observing tradition, political farce, the burden of modern life, urban sprawl –, this brave new world of the Asian aesthetic is constantly lamented and paradoxically praised.

Shen Shaomin, Summit 2009 - 2010, Installation, Dimensions variable, Osage Art Foundation Collection.

Chinese artist Shen Shaomin’s Summit (2010) challenges the annual G8 Summit where world leaders meet to discuss global political and economic events, offering instead, a hypothetical meeting of the most influential communist leaders in history (Fidel Castro, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh) in the light of the recent global financial meltdown and the apparent failure of capitalism. Shen’s Summit brings together – if never in history, then only in museum (or mausoleum) space – resin-silica-gel constructed cadavers laid out in a pentagon formation in crystal coffins reflecting their nationalities, with the exception of Fidel Castro who lies on the brink of death. With hushed and repellent awe, we are asked to venture into ideological black holes; has capitalism juggernaut’s also finally come to a halt as spectacularly as socialist ideology waxed and waned in the twentieth century?

Subodh Gupta’s Everything is Inside (2004) is India’s iconic yellow Ambassador taxi sinking under the weight of its load, reinforcing the eternal themes of travel narratives: dislocation and relocation within the rural and urban spheres as consequences of aspirations and the relentless quest for prosperity. Prizing the abstract and the multi-dimensional is Rashid Rana’s Desperately Seeking Paradise (2007-8), a sculptural work that questions the act of representation and perception through the distortion of visual sequences of Lahore. Hu Jieming’s 100 years in 1 minute (2010) deconstructs the “grand narrative” of history by piecing together fragments of the past century’s momentous events in various combinations within 1 minute, consequently presenting infinite possibilities of historical trajectories that could have been.

Hu Jieming, 100 Years In 1 Minute, 2004

Such works provide a dynamic summary of contemporary Asia: anxieties of geopolitical and socio-cultural changes that quite nicely form the thematic bedrock of Asian artists. They are deemed worthy of visual consumption and are called “great” because of the existence of a complex thread of validation from multiple sources. Collectively, it is not an automatic cause for celebration. With virtually unchallenged reviews and effusive praise, where then, is the place for dissenting voices and criticism amid these potentially intellectually stifling accolades? Where is the counterbalance of censure and soul-searching that has made these works what they are? Like Shilpa Gupta, I itch to start the blame game.

Shilpa Gupta, Blame, 1999, Installation with plastic bottles, Dimensions variable, The Lekha and Anupam Poddar Collection

Collectors’ Stage: Asian contemporary art from private collections is organised in cooperation with the first edition of Art Stage Singapore 2011, the newest international art fair in the Asia Pacific. The exhibition is presented at the Singapore Art Museum, and two off-site venues, ARTSPACE @ Helutrans and Tanjong Pagar Distripark. It will be on view until 17 February 2011.