There is no shortage of mirrors and maps in the fifth iteration of the Singapore Biennale. Glass mirrors in Harumi Yukutake’s Paracosmos (2016) curve around the main circular stairwell of the Singapore Art Museum, dazzling the eye as light hits their multiple reflective surfaces. Dozens of mirrors appear in their reflections; dozens more yet, to the power of infinity, show up in the reflections of their reflections. In[…..]
After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) explores the dissonance between our innermost longings and the contemporary world we have created. Gunter Grass said, rather gloomily, that melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin. Imagining perfection, we confront the contradiction between the Arcadia of our imagination and the imperfect realities of our everyday. Featuring eighteen[…..]
As Jia Aili grew up in the 1980s, it seemed as though post-Mao Zedong China was well on its way into transforming itself into a superpower, leaving in its wake the trauma of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, struggling more with material trappings and economic growth rather than ideological fulfilment. These reforms and attitudes quickly penetrated across China’s vast landscapes, accompanied by[…..]
In the self-explanatory show entitled Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010, the history and evolution of the video art genre are recounted through 50 video works and installations, drawn from the collections of both the Singapore Art Museum and Centre Pompidou. Having developed in tandem with the apparatus of television and the analogue and then digital video cameras, video art’s reconfiguration of the[…..]
The Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House threw open its doors to the public on 13 March 2011 with 63 artists from 30 countries presenting 161 works across four exhibition venues. Predicated on the belief that contemporary artistic practices are largely driven by discursive acts of exchange and transactions, Open House records the ensuing visual dialogue and contested ways of seeing that emerge when communication channels are[…..]
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[…..]
Japan is utterly strange, if we are to follow in the footsteps of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) as visitors to a country for whose culture and language have (nor do they want to have) absolutely no affinity. Yet their acute sense of dislocation and turmoil in which we are caught up simply play out at the fringes[…..]
