Atrium of National Gallery Singapore. Courtesy of National Gallery Singapore.

Housed in Singapore’s beautifully restored City Hall and Supreme Court buildings, and connected through a network of bridges spanning an open atrium, the National Gallery’s two permanent exhibitions reveal its epistemic ambitions. Siapa Nama Kamu?: Art in Singapore Since the 19th Century establishes the city–state’s official art history, while Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia Since the 19th Century seeks not only to define a regional narrative, but also to insert that narrative into a global art history that is currently dominated by the West.

Exhibition View of Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia Since the 19th Century in Singapore’s restored Supreme Court Building. Courtesy of National Gallery Singapore.

Organized into four loosely chronological categories—19th century colonialism, early 20th century nationalism, 1950s–70s revolution, and post-1970s postmodernism—Between Declarations and Dreams collapses complex national histories into a compact regional narrative.

In the first section, rich wooden interiors provide a fitting background for 19th century colonial art. Photographs of European men in the jungle, two monumental paintings by the Dutch-trained Indonesian Romantic painter Raden Saleh, and a portrait of a Tonkin woman by French Impressionist Victor Tardieu hint at the complicated flows of images and ideas between Europe and its colonies.

Victor Tardieu. La Tonkinoise au Panier (Tonkin Woman with a Basket), 1923; oil on canvas; 108 x 80 cm. Courtesy of National Gallery Singapore.

Nguyen Phan Chanh. The Singers in the Countryside, 1932; watercolor and ink on silk; 65.4 x 49.4 cm. Courtesy of National Gallery Singapore.

Like Gauguin in Tahiti, Tardieu’s Tonkin Woman reminds viewers that Western “modernity,” in both art and history, was built on a legacy of colonialism. Yet its juxtaposition with The Singers in the Countryside, a radically experimental work by Tardieu’s student Nguyen Phan Chanh, reminds viewers that this transformation cuts both ways. As Tardieu’s oil paintings grew bolder and more expressive in Hanoi, Nguyen Phan Chanh used what he learned at the l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts Indochine to push ink and silk painting in new directions.

Chuah Thean Teng (蔡天定). Morning, c. 1960–1963; batik on cloth; 112 x 173 cm. Courtesy of National Gallery Singapore.

In the 1960s, Chuah Thean Teng made a similar breakthrough using batik, a traditional method for dyeing fabric, in his weavings of iconic scenes of Indonesian village life. And as Communist ideology swept through Southeast Asia in the mid-20th century, Nguyen Duc Nung combined the working-class heroes of Social Realism with lacquer techniques to portray a shining new future.

Nguyen Duc Nung (b. 1909, Vietnam; d. 1983, Vietnam). Binh minh tren song trang (Dawn on a Farm), 1958; Lacquer on board; 63 x 91.2 cm; Collection of Vietnam Fine Arts Museum. Courtesy of National Gallery Singapore.

In the 1970s, as optimism gave way to authoritarian strongmen from Indonesia to the Philippines, and the Vietnam War ravaged the Southeast Asian peninsula, violence dominated art. Pratuang Emjaroen’s painting Red Morning Glory and Rotten Gun casts Thailand’s tumultuous political climate as a surrealist nightmare. Indonesia’s FX Harsono appropriated the idea of found art and placed a plastic rifle in a wooden crate in Paling Top.

Pratuang Emjaroen. Red Morning Glory and Rotten Gun, 1976; oil on Canvas. Collection of National Gallery Singapore.

As the 20th century stretched on, artists across Southeast Asia became increasingly cognizant of how geopolitical power relations are reflected in the art world. Artists’ movements like Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Movement) in Indonesia and the Kaisahan (solidarity) collective in the Philippines learned to strategically position themselves and push back within a larger framework of globalization. Their works mock Abstract Expressionism as one of America’s most successful exports and challenge the conventions of the local art establishment. The galleries devoted to these movements are some of the best in the exhibition, focusing on specific exhibitions, such as Indonesia’s Fantasy World Supermarket (1987), instead of sweeping national histories.

The National Gallery Singapore has been criticized for not providing enough context for its works. Yet the National Gallery’s high-profile international collaborations—Reframing Modernism with the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and Artist and Empire with Tate Britain (London)—suggest that the museum’s curators are keenly aware of context. By continually positioning its collection within European settings, the National Gallery, like the artists that it features, aims to reshape a global narrative of art history. The hope is that in its rush to challenge Western art history, it will not have glossed over its own.

Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia Since the 19th Century will be on view through June 10, 2020.

Tomás Saraceno. Omega Centauri 1 Nephila Kenianensis 4 Cyrtophora Citricola, 2014; spidersilk, carbon fiber, light, tripod. Courtesy of the Artist and Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin.

The gallery hums with screechy sounds resembling acoustic feedback, punctuated by random bursts of bass and cartoonish sound effects. The soundscape is queasily amorphous and disorienting, built on dissonance and the chaotic rhythms resonating from a handful of arachnids that have woven fine, thick webs around delicate wire frames. Featuring a plethora of spiderweb sound installations, Tomás Saraceno’s latest show Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions is an experimental drive to amplify and record the vibrations created when spiders communicate, and using special sensory devices, like transducers and laser Dopplers, that map their movements. When made perceivable to human ears, these vibrations—spontaneously produced in a freewheeling environment—enable jam sessions to become integral part of the show, where musicians have been invited to respond to the arachnids’ vibrational signals in a bid for interspecies mingling.

In spite of what the name of the exhibition suggests, the curatorial framework of the show is given vague, but stylish parameters that situate Saraceno’s oeuvre on the crossroads of art, architecture, and science. To term Saraceno’s show as “sound art” or “sound installation,” would be an underestimation of the multivalent nature of an artistic practice that prizes interaction, interconnectedness, and a kind of new order that can only form out of an established network of chaos.

Tomás Saraceno. Spider Salon: Jam Session with Evan Ziporyn with Cyrtophora citricola duet on semi social musical instrument SXDF-NB1006-2: built by four Cyrtophora citricola, eight weeks, on September 28, 2015 (performance still). Courtesy of Studio Tomás Saraceno.

Built upon the notion of conceiving “alternative ways of knowledge, experience, and interaction”[1], Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions comfortably slips out of any attempt at definition or categorization, playing to its own brassy tune in interrogating the nuances within the established structures of knowledge. In the enveloping darkness of the gallery space, glowing glass cases suspend the webs in the expanse of space, lending metaphorical and literal weight to each installation: a small, chaotic network of nature whose interconnectedness parallels transnational urban systems and galactic spirals in both shape and behavior. Their imaginative, gemlike exquisiteness, however, is muted by the sheer amount of technical and scientific information provided in the catalog, like a well-timed reminder that its beauty is a construct out of the precise observation of nature.

Tomás Saraceno. Spiderweb sonification experiments in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Hannelore Hoch and Roland Mühlenthaler, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, 2014 (performance still). Courtesy of Studio Tomás Saraceno.

A spiderweb functions as a visual metaphor for what Saraceno prefers to term as the “cosmic web,” a persistent theme that is demonstrated over and over in varying forms and materials throughout the course of his artistic practice. The web begins with a single thread flung into the wind, where by chance, the filament of silk catches on an object that will anchor its structure. Only then does the web’s tridimensional complexity—assembled upon mathematical principles of radial lines and auxiliary spirals—start to take shape, as form and function come together geometrically to create a product of precision engineering. Social .. Quasi Social .. Solitary .. Spiders … On Hybrid Cosmic Webs (2013) features multi-tiered, collaboratively woven webs by different species of spiders showing grades of sociability: social (living together in a community on a single web), quasi-social, and solitary (living alone in a web). These hybrid webs interlink, morph, and shift, serving as instruments for communication and cooperation. Saraceno’s working process mirrors the spiders’ complex web-spinning processes, if not in precision, at least in form, invoking ideas that begin on the ground and end up somewhere in the cosmos: an envisioned future formed by collaborative forces, perfected by technology and sustained by trailblazing ideas.

Tomás Saraceno. Social .. Quasi Social .. Solitary .. Spiders … On Hybrid Cosmic Webs, 2013; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin. ©Andrea Rossetti.

“When cosmologists or astrophysicians were trying to explain how the universe had formed, the way how they describe [that] type of cosmic web and the geometrical analogy as they like to use is tridimensional spiderweb,” Saraceno says. Indeed, his constructs mimic what already exists in nature; from cosmic macrostructures to biological microsystems, his many projects of interests interrogate an endlessly expanding cluster of ideas grounded in socialist sustainability, until they morph and materialize into schools of thought that span multidisciplinary practices—again, not dissimilar to the process of web spinning.

The material results of these combining fields of knowledge are large-scale productions of networked utopias, cloud cities, and scalable installations that contain the indispensable notion of connectivity, found in the complex ecosystem of a spiderweb, the morphology of cloud formations, and within sociological and evolutionary pathways. In Galaxy Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web (2008), interwoven elastic ropes are stretched across floors, walls, and ceilings, over and around viewers. A single touch of the elastic connectors sends reverberations through this simulacrum of a universe, allusively drawing attention to concepts of social theory, patterns of networks and spheres that seem to articulate the basic structures of contemporary interaction.

Tomás Saraceno. Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, 2009; installation view, Venice Biennale, 2009. Courtesy of Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Alessandro Coco.

As far as exhibitions go, Saraceno’s ambitions are hard work, literally and figuratively. They straddle high conceptualism and scientific research, borrowing heavily from the technical language of visionary architects like Buckminster Fuller, and require years to complete. Underlying the web’s intertextuality is the subliminal emphasis on the selfless collective, and in a culture where individualism dominates, that is perhaps the hardest to understand.

Tomás Saraceno: Arachnid Orchestra Jam Sessions is on view at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore through December 20, 2015.

[1] Tomás Saraceno: Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions. Press release and exhibition catalog.

Del Kathryn Barton. The Cosmos Is Disco Lust, 2015; acrylic on French linen, diptych; 180 x 240 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and ARNDT Singapore.

Out of this universe, a particular aesthetic emerges: a deconstructed anime style of illustration that pulls together tribal and natural elements so tremulously sensual that it has viewers scrambling for adjectives to describe its manic, strange beauty. The Highway Is a Disco, Barton’s first solo debut out of her native Australia at ARNDT Gallery, is a testament to this eccentricity. Featuring large-scale paintings finished with acrylic and gouache, the works on show are few—and new—but ocularly challenging in their numerous fine ink lines, and virtually cenotophobic in their aversion to blank space. Her visual language is articulated in jeweled shades of pink, red, and yellow, and fleshes out some part of the female psyche that is polymorphous, sensual, desiring, and desirable.

Del Kathryn Barton. The Highway Is a Disco, 2015; acrylic on French linen; 240 × 180 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and ARNDT Singapore.

The Cosmos Is Disco Lust (2015) is a luminous garden of delights where beast and (wo)men entwine, elaborately laid out against patterns and textures that seem to reference the fine dot work and bright, contrasting colors of Australian deserts found within aboriginal painting. Breathtaking in the minutiae offered for visual consumption, no part of the canvas is left untouched in this strange world of hybrid images of Lolita-esque characters with multiple pairs of breasts, fey creatures, and botanical entities. It is a universe that conflates an unmistakable erotic undercurrent where only women (who may not be entirely human) and nature coexist, flourishing in the stark absence of masculinity.

Otherworldly and strange, Barton’s works call to mind the aesthetic visions of fin de siècle painters, meshed with the mythic drawings of indigenous art. The Australian bush is, after all, the place of Barton’s childhood, a foundational experience that is constantly reworked into variations on a theme in her oeuvre, a psychological impetus as well as a physical outpouring of her foundational years translated onto a two-dimensional surface. “Whenever I am in the bush at night,” Barton says, “it is properly dark. It is dark in a deep, deep way that takes you psychologically to a much deeper place, in terms of dreaming. That is a real gift and a real sensory reprieve so that other, deeper subterranean spaces open up.”[1] The night sky thus unsurprisingly became Barton’s canvas, on which is drawn a mesmeric, mystical universe that thrives on her personal system of signs and values.

Del Karthryn Barton. Inside Another Land 1-15, 2015; archival print on cotton rag with acrylic paint; edition of 3 (each with unique hand painted wash) + 2 AP; 58.5 x 83 cm each. Courtesy of the Artist and ARNDT Singapore.

Inside Another Land (2015) recalls the biting but anachronistic aesthetic of second-wave feminist art that fought to divorce feminine identity from biological function. Presented as a series of collages of the female form, flowers resembling vulvas and splayed legs come together against psychedelic backgrounds of halftones, polka dots, and shape-based repeated motifs. Body parts are prominently on display here, obscured and distanced strategically by the placement of petals and buds, paying homage to the surrealist and symbolist traditions while interrogating gendered and culturally embedded notions of femininity, desire, and the male gaze. An oddly literal elucidation of the enduring patriarchal fantasy of the objectified, faceless female body, it is a jarring departure from the doe-eyed, candied beauty of Barton’s other works that offer no clear narratives of subjugation or resistance.

Inside Another Land, however, isn’t the only installation that stands so starkly in contrast to the ethereally sensual and figurative paintings in the show. Flowers (2015) and To Feel (2015) are sculptures that tangentially contemplate issues of motherhood and domesticity. A generous reading of these works would locate them in the repetitive discourse of womanhood and empowerment. Barton’s reworking of Oscar Wilde’s subversive fairytale The Nightingale and the Rose—of a nightingale’s unacknowledged sacrifice for a student’s unrequited yearning for his professor’s daughter—focuses on the aesthetic qualities of the fairytale’s archetypal settings and characters, infusing visual qualities to the abstract, universal themes of beauty and loss.

Del Kathryn Barton. Nightingale and the Rose, 2014 (film still); edition of 6 + 2 AP; 15:00. Courtesy of the Artist and ARNDT Singapore.

But if this is also a showing of Barton’s forays into sculpture and digital media, it’s also here where the show’s curatorial framework falters, the apparent arbitrariness of these displayed works operating against what has been, up until now, a cohesive exposition of Barton’s rhetoric of beauty and femininity. They make for interesting viewing, even if their individual exuberance is dimmed by details that ultimately do not sufficiently persuade the viewer to look past them.

Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway Is a Disco is on view at ARNDT Singapore through December 6, 2015.

[1]Andrew Stephens, “Del Kathryn Barton brings the bush alive in NGV exhibition,” October 10, 2014, http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/del-kathryn-barton-brings-the-bush-alive-in-ngv-exhibition-20141003-10pmho.html#ixzz3qgXXuf5m

Tomás Saraceno. Omega Centauri 1 Nephila Kenianensis 4 Cyrtophora Citricola, 2014; spidersilk, carbon fiber, light, tripod. Courtesy of the Artist and Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin.

In spite of what the name of the exhibition suggests, the curatorial framework of the show is given vague, but stylish parameters that situate Saraceno’s oeuvre on the crossroads of art, architecture, and science. To term Saraceno’s show as “sound art” or “sound installation,” would be an underestimation of the multivalent nature of an artistic practice that prizes interaction, interconnectedness, and a kind of new order that can only form out of an established network of chaos.

Tomás Saraceno. Spider Salon: Jam Session with Evan Ziporyn with Cyrtophora citricola duet on semi social musical instrument SXDF-NB1006-2: built by four Cyrtophora citricola, eight weeks, on September 28, 2015 (performance still). Courtesy of Studio Tomás Saraceno.

Built upon the notion of conceiving “alternative ways of knowledge, experience, and interaction”[1], Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions comfortably slips out of any attempt at definition or categorization, playing to its own brassy tune in interrogating the nuances within the established structures of knowledge. In the enveloping darkness of the gallery space, glowing glass cases suspend the webs in the expanse of space, lending metaphorical and literal weight to each installation: a small, chaotic network of nature whose interconnectedness parallels transnational urban systems and galactic spirals in both shape and behavior. Their imaginative, gemlike exquisiteness, however, is muted by the sheer amount of technical and scientific information provided in the catalog, like a well-timed reminder that its beauty is a construct out of the precise observation of nature.

Tomás Saraceno. Spiderweb sonification experiments in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Hannelore Hoch and Roland Mühlenthaler, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, 2014 (performance still). Courtesy of Studio Tomás Saraceno.

A spiderweb functions as a visual metaphor for what Saraceno prefers to term as the “cosmic web,” a persistent theme that is demonstrated over and over in varying forms and materials throughout the course of his artistic practice. The web begins with a single thread flung into the wind, where by chance, the filament of silk catches on an object that will anchor its structure. Only then does the web’s tridimensional complexity—assembled upon mathematical principles of radial lines and auxiliary spirals—start to take shape, as form and function come together geometrically to create a product of precision engineering. Social .. Quasi Social .. Solitary .. Spiders … On Hybrid Cosmic Webs (2013) features multi-tiered, collaboratively woven webs by different species of spiders showing grades of sociability: social (living together in a community on a single web), quasi-social, and solitary (living alone in a web). These hybrid webs interlink, morph, and shift, serving as instruments for communication and cooperation. Saraceno’s working process mirrors the spiders’ complex web-spinning processes, if not in precision, at least in form, invoking ideas that begin on the ground and end up somewhere in the cosmos: an envisioned future formed by collaborative forces, perfected by technology and sustained by trailblazing ideas.

Tomás Saraceno. Social .. Quasi Social .. Solitary .. Spiders … On Hybrid Cosmic Webs, 2013; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin. ©Andrea Rossetti.

“When cosmologists or astrophysicians were trying to explain how the universe had formed, the way how they describe [that] type of cosmic web and the geometrical analogy as they like to use is tridimensional spiderweb,” Saraceno says. Indeed, his constructs mimic what already exists in nature; from cosmic macrostructures to biological microsystems, his many projects of interests interrogate an endlessly expanding cluster of ideas grounded in socialist sustainability, until they morph and materialize into schools of thought that span multidisciplinary practices—again, not dissimilar to the process of web spinning.

The material results of these combining fields of knowledge are large-scale productions of networked utopias, cloud cities, and scalable installations that contain the indispensable notion of connectivity, found in the complex ecosystem of a spiderweb, the morphology of cloud formations, and within sociological and evolutionary pathways. In Galaxy Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web (2008), interwoven elastic ropes are stretched across floors, walls, and ceilings, over and around viewers. A single touch of the elastic connectors sends reverberations through this simulacrum of a universe, allusively drawing attention to concepts of social theory, patterns of networks and spheres that seem to articulate the basic structures of contemporary interaction.

Tomás Saraceno. Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, 2009; installation view, Venice Biennale, 2009. Courtesy of Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Alessandro Coco.

As far as exhibitions go, Saraceno’s ambitions are hard work, literally and figuratively. They straddle high conceptualism and scientific research, borrowing heavily from the technical language of visionary architects like Buckminster Fuller, and require years to complete. Underlying the web’s intertextuality is the subliminal emphasis on the selfless collective, and in a culture where individualism dominates, that is perhaps the hardest to understand.

Tomás Saraceno: Arachnid Orchestra Jam Sessions is on view at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore through December 20, 2015.

[1] Tomás Saraceno: Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions. Press release and exhibition catalog.

Entang Wiharso. Never Give Up, 2015; Aluminium sheet, laser cut, graphite, Saunders paper 638g; 165.5 × 116 × 3 cm. Courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Never Give Up (2015) is an exemplary study of Entang Wiharso’s oeuvre: an allegorical undertaking that depicts the narrative of the postmodern human condition caught in the crossroads of political, ethnic, and religious systems. In fact, Never Say No, Wiharso’s latest show at Singapore Tyler Print Institute, reads like an expanded, digressive effort to interrogate notions of inconsistent social realities in a geopolitically transformed Southeast Asia, a region still strongly tied to tradition as it continues to navigate the benefits and pitfalls of the global economy.

Entang Wiharso. Borderless #1, 2015; lithography on Saunders 638g paper; 108 × 145 cm. Courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

With their strange proportions, Wiharso’s images reference the dramatic characters of wayang kulit, an ancient Javanese storytelling tradition that uses shadow puppetry and draws from both Hindu myths in India and prehistoric animistic rites in Southeast Asia. The works in this show were created with a paper-casting process that introduces color and texture made by threads of soft yarn. The result is a dreamlike flatness, a visual mimicry of the two-dimensional forms of the wayang kulit, as a drama is played out that casts the viewer as a distant witness to a time when gods and humans coexisted and depended on one another.

Entang Wiharso. Shelter: Forest of Eyes, 2015; aluminum sheet, laser cut, C-type print; 127 × 184 × 3 cm. Courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Characters in Shelter: Forest of Eyes (2015) metamorphose into beings made of vines and branches (they look more like woodland hybrids than human beings) in a labyrinthine tangle of tongues, tendons, and intestines—a visual and corporeal allusion to the medieval concept of the world as a perilous maze where the sacred and the profane intersect. In contrast, Home Sweet Home (2015) is quite entertaining, a vision of what wayang kulit characters might look like in a familial portrait when the chaos in the archetypical battles of good versus evil momentarily halts for a photographer’s hurried snapshot. There is also no lack of satirical playfulness operating in works such as Her Shifting Identity #1 (2015), in which a figure made from a psychedelic mix of colored splotches curls up in a manner that is reminiscent of a somersaulting fetus in a womb.

Entang Wiharso. Her Shifting Identity #1, 2015; colored paper pulp, yarn, acrylic paint, stencil; 132.5 × 168 cm. Courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

But unlike the ancient myths of Southeast Asia that wayang kulit recounts, Wiharso’s narratives are wholly steeped in the contemporary notions of cultural appropriation and borderless living. Almost boring in comparison to the wildly rambunctious visual vocabulary of Wiharso’s varied oeuvre, Under Protection for 24 Hours (2015) is a depiction of two women in traditional clothes standing at barred windows against the backdrop of an old European town. One holds a gun, but both are on guard against the influences of foreign ilk, with long, braided hair that ends in crab claws. In a region deeply marked by postcolonial histories and the processes of rapid globalization, the art that is produced often parallels social concerns as evinced by the consistent evocation of identity with the use of the body as a site of contested territory. It is unsurprising that Wiharso, like many other artists of Southeast Asian origin, revisits these conflicting notions of power and tolerance for this exhibition, whose title is a gauntlet clearly thrown to challenge reigning paradigms. There is an unsettling sense of violence—of raw brutality—that seems inherent to many of the images, as body parts stretch out of proportion and sharp daggers hang over the heads of hybrid figures.

Entang Wiharso. Art as Gift: Comic Book Series, 2015; cast paper, acrylic paint, yarn, metal leaf, STPI handmade paper; 145 × 225 × 4 cm. Courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

In Art as Gift (2015), intertwined bodies tussle viciously for dominance in a display of penetrative acts that are both erotic and menacing. It is the human condition made flesh, or rather, paper that is made to resemble puckered flesh, with images fashioned as though by razor-sharp claws and teeth, created by the need to survive in a present moment that is entangled by conflict. But Art as Gift is simply another take on Wiharso’s ambivalent stance, one that pits contemporary life against archaic folkloric tradition. This theme is so prevalent that it’s impossible to ignore the sense of paralysis that dominates his images—a dire consequence of being trapped in a field of contesting moral compulsions and conflicting expectations.

Entang Wiharso: Never Say No is on view at Singapore Tyler Print Institute through May 30, 2015.

Gilbert & George. They Shot Them!, 2014; photomontage; 254 × 453 cm. Courtesy of Arndt gallery and the Artists.

The twenty-six photomontages of Utopian Pictures at Arndt Gallery in Singapore, by the British artistic team Gilbert Prousch & George Passmore, gleefully parody that lofty ideal. Each photomontage presents utopia’s flip side and depicts a fiercely hostile, turbulent environment of dire warnings, threats, and nonsensical graffiti in a provocative mishmash of garish colors, as though cataloguing the battle scars of a city splintered into factions. Defiant voices (“Anti-fascist zone,” “No racists in working class areas,” “Toffs out”) clamor to be heard and clash with the heavy hand of authority amid sinister undercurrents of racial, class, and sexual exclusions.

Gilbert & George. Hakenkreuz, 2014; 191 × 226 cm. Courtesy of Arndt gallery and the Artists.

Gilbert & George. Homo Riot Homo, 2014; 191 × 226 cm. Courtesy of Arndt gallery and the Artists.

The irony is heavy and unmistakable, of course. It seems cheekily fitting that Gilbert & George have chosen, for their first solo exhibition in Southeast Asia, to stage Utopian Pictures in the conservative city–state of Singapore, whose infamously repressive laws have been simultaneously lauded and disparaged by people living in and outside the country. But one doesn’t need to travel that far to see such aspects of authoritarian rule in action; Gilbert & George have asserted that the divided reality of the city can be found in its entirety in the gritty East End of London, where they live and work.

Gilbert & George. God Guides Us, 2014; 151 × 191 cm. Courtesy of Arndt gallery and the Artists.

Unlike the rhetoric of the literary vision of utopia that imagines a future surpassing the general living conditions of the present, the chilling pluralities in the photomontages of Gilbert & George ground us strictly in the unfiltered, raw hues of urbanism. The stark pronouncement of ”God guides us” is surrounded by St. George’s dragon, which has the English flag for wings and is incongruously matched with the warning, “Alcohol control zone,” bordered by the white squares containing red “prohibited” signs. On large grids demarcated into sections, scrawls of “Homo Riot Homo,” “Nationalists make me sick,” and “The only good fascist is a dead one” capture the decay and rot of London, of humanity stripped down to its ugliest. This is no blueprint for the future, but rather a showcase of the cracks evident in the system. The artists’ works appear to imply that laws exist only to be defied; it is as though restrictions on aberrant behavior result in a proportionate amount of the very behavior these laws are trying to prevent.

Gilbert & George. Vomit, 2014; 226 × 317 cm. Courtesy of Arndt gallery and the Artists.

Through it all, the artists themselves are two silent sentinels ever present in their own canvases, their faces covered by masks, paint, balaclavas, or medieval armor as they preside over the dizzying images of chaos and rebellion. Their stares are blank but nonjudgmental even as they actively insert themselves into the estrangements and anxieties in the extraordinary schisms that exist in this era. They exist not as complicit or disapproving figures but as part of the hieroglyphs of their montages, like repeated motifs that ghost through every slogan, threat, or warning; they are as dissonant as the seemingly endless number of labels defining the multilayered social reality we live in.

Utopian Pictures is on view at Arndt Gallery at the Gillman Barracks through April 12, 2015.

Ding Yi. Appearance of Crosses-12, 2013; acrylic on canvas; 120 x 140 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and ShanghArt Gallery Singapore.

The masterful, intricate complexity of the Appearance of Crosses (2014) series is impressive and unsurprising; after all, Ding’s unswerving commitment to rational abstraction began nearly thirty years ago, in the years of socio-political upheaval following China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Like many artists of that time, Ding’s earliest venture into abstraction was a personal act of rebellion against the earthy tones and glib smoothness of Russian socialist realism, a figurative style that had heavily influenced the propagandistic art of the revolution. Looking instead to the Post-Impressionists, the Abstract Expressionists, and the De Stijl movement, Ding painted Taboo (1986) out of a limited palette of muted tones and bold, long brushstrokes depicting a dynamic combination of marks, its anxious, forceful energy seeming to mirror the turmoil of state and self in the aftermath of the revolution. Just two years later, he had created the first of his so-called “cross paintings,” a template of abstraction that he would follow for the next three decades as the contemporary Chinese art world made its own great leap forward.

Ding Yi. Taboo, 1986; 84 x 84 cm.

The persistent influence of abstract modern art on Ding’s oeuvre has nonetheless inevitably led to attempts to analyze the discursive underpinnings of his works through the major modes of critical inquiry in Western art history. It could, of course, be argued that Ding’s adherence to the grid structure—emblematic of the modernist ambition in the visual arts—is precisely because it is anti-narrative and anti-developmental[1], or that his prolific use of crosses is in fact a mass of codified signs charged with symbolic and religious value across cultures, left for the viewer to ascribe meaning to them.[2]

Ding Yi. Appearance of Crosses-5, 2009; acrylic on finished fabric; 200 x 80 cm.

But Ding himself shies away from these interpretive frameworks of his art, insisting that Appearance of Crosses is “just meaningless crosses and nothing more, [where] the symbols are used to inhibit the inert meanings from experience,” although he acknowledges the element of spirituality inherent in their creation. If anything, he would rather assert a more innocuous and direct connection to Shanghai, the city he lives and works in; the bright, criss-crossing colors of the Appearances of Crosses series (1991–93) are loosely reminiscent of the entire grid-planned city and its neon lights at night. From the beginning, his concern had been to develop a visual language that was less complicated and more impartial and rational than the emotionally charged works of Abstract Expressionism, and he did so by prioritizing the artistic process, leaving the endpoint almost an afterthought.

Ding Yi. Appearance of Crosses-3, 1991; acrylic on canvas; 140 x 180 cm.

Emptied of preconceptions and ascribed meaning, Ding’s aspiration to simplicity is almost akin to entering a meditative state, a conscious turning away from reality that is not unlike the metaphysical practice of Chinese calligraphy or traditional craftsmanship. Conscious of the different moods that the combination of colors would evoke, Ding superimposes layer upon layer of the motifs, forming elaborate patterns that resemble the flat surfaces of traditional cloth weaves, fields of green and yellow, or even the pixelated grids of digital art. The repetitive motion of adding these motifs, once serving to counter the ideological aspects of art production, seems to provide through line and color an experience that transcends sensory perception.

Ding Yi. Appearance of Crosses-13, 2013; acrylic on canvas; 140 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and ShanghArt Gallery Singapore.

Or perhaps that really is the point: Stripped of intellectual backwash, Ding’s canvases are simply cleverly interwoven threads of pure color, a sublime configuration of grids and crosses in which subject and object can lose themselves.

Ding Yi: Ivory Black is on view at ShanghArt Gallery at the Gillman Barracks through March 15, 2015.

[1] Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). As a static and infinitely repeatable form, the grid can be overlaid, mapped onto, and used to chart shifting terrain, which appears to be what Ding is trying to achieve.

[2] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

Today, it is a federal city within the Crimean Federal District that has recently been the lynchpin of a struggle between Ukraine’s new leaders and those loyal to the Russian Federation. Its current political status as a de facto territory of Russia remains internationally unrecognized after a closed referendum. Often mired in territorial dispute since its founding, Sevastopol has a legacy of enduring conflict and violence.

Justin Mortimer. Nes Ziona, 2014; oil on canvas; 86 3/5 x 63 in. Photo courtesy Future Perfect Asia, Singapore, and the Artist.

It seems fitting that Sevastopol, by British artist Justin Mortimer at Future Perfect gallery, is a series of paintings examining the visual discourse of resistance where key ideas—such as dissent, protest, and the power of the individual against the state—are represented by forms that teeter between the abstract and the concrete. Mortimer’s canvases exhibit a contradictory aesthetic sensibility; they are elegant and painterly but also theatrical and distorted, driven by an unmistakable undercurrent of hostility and anger.

Working from collaged photographs gleaned from the Internet or found in secondhand books, Mortimer reproduces and reappropriates them on canvas after first assembling them into a digital collage on his computer. The artist distresses his surfaces with rags and newspapers, consequently erasing the original contexts in which the photographs appear through brushstrokes that obscure rather than define. Bending forward, a solitary, half-naked figure wrapped in a sheet is keeling over, thrusting its head into bright orange flame against a bunch of coniferous trees typically found in the forests occupying the higher latitudes of the world. Farther back, the forest fades into indistinct boundaries of washed-out greens, browns, and pink against a dull blue sky dotted with clouds. Yet the muted protest of the individual here, in Nes Ziona (2014), is sharply contained within a generic setting that eschews any attempt at identifying specific political situations or partisan leanings, presenting a visual puzzle of unvocalized conflict.

Justin Mortimer. Joker, 2014; oil on canvas; 94 2/5 x 63 in. Photo courtesy Future Perfect Asia, Singapore, and the Artist.

Stripped of context, each work itself becomes an evocative site of conflict where protests are seen but not heard, like a video permanently put on mute. Clad in balaclavas, the figures in Joker (2014) are locked in the motions of defiance and confrontation, teetering on the brink of violence threatening to erupt. Framed by an innocuous washing line—a symbol of generic suburbia—in the foreground, the first figure stands with hands outstretched, clad in a black T-shirt with the face of Batman’s Joker as his symbol of rebellion. Behind him, the second figure’s pose of apparent submission underscores the never-ending cycle of revolt and suppression. Like Joker, Jabalya (2014) captures a moment during a demonstration or a strike as a person holds up a protest placard against a shadowy background. The placard obscures the protestor’s face; even the words on the sign are blurred, suggesting that the language of protest is better understood when visually represented rather than spoken.

Justin Mortimer. Jabalya, 2014; oil on canvas; 19 3/5 x 27 1/2 in. (detail). Photo courtesy Future Perfect Asia, Singapore, and the Artist.

Yet can a work of art ever be freed of its context? The presence of purposefully vague morsels of interpretive cues—the specific use of color, shapes, and forms, for instance—is a seductive invitation to draw parallels between the painted figures and their referents, despite Mortimer’s adamant insistence that it is the individual’s subjective experiences that construct meaning and context from his works. Take, for example, the compelling parallels that could be drawn between the balaclava-clad figures in Hijab I (2014) and the trademark colored masks worn by protestors at the Pussy Riot demonstrations in 2012.

Justin Mortimer. Hijab I, 2014; oil on canvas; 11 4/5 x 9 2/5 in. Photo courtesy Future Perfect Asia, Singapore, and the Artist.

But that is the viewer filling in the blanks, as Mortimer would point out, eagerly foisting contextual readings onto his canvases, indulging the basic human tendency to scratch beneath the surface and participate—whether willingly or unwillingly—in a sensational, sordid narrative. The last laugh is his: forced into an uncomfortably voyeuristic role, suddenly we become the very figures in his canvases, complicit in the artist’s narrative of protest and resistance.

Justin Mortimer: Sevastopol is on view at Future Perfect at the Gillman Barracks in Singapore through February 22, 2015.

In 1992, Rirkrit Tiravanija converted the spaces of 303 Gallery in New York into a kitchen where he served rice and Thai curry to a crowd that became unwitting participants in a hybrid installation titled Untitled (Free). Seven years later, Tiravanija further blurred the experience between art and life in Untitled (Tomorrow Can Shut Up and Go Away) (1999) by re-creating the interior dimensions and spaces of his three-room East Village apartment, then extending the invitation to the public to spend time in it the way they would in a friend’s home.

The transactional quality in Tiravanija’s hybrid installations is unmistakable, even for those who are sceptical of art that takes participation as its point of departure as well as its endpoint.[1] In fact, it’s better termed as relational aesthetics, a concept coined by Nicolas Bourriaud as a practice that seeks to establish “live” encounters in a carefully constructed environment where the experience of the viewer becomes the art in question, despite that smacking a little too optimistically of art’s relatively recent paranoia regarding the audience’s role and function in the gallery space.

Rirkrit Tiravanija. Doubt Does Not Travel in a Straight Line, 2013; etching, screen print, metal foil, horse hair, STPI handmade abaca paper; 99.5 x 99.5 cm. Edition of 6. Image courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

At the very least, Tiravanija’s staged tableaux of exaggerating, then capturing unscripted human responses throws the spotlight on the fine demarcation lines that stand between viewer, materiality, and artist by shifting the onus of art production to spectator-artist interactivity, even if the purpose of what the spectator is supposed to glean from his or her participation is often unclear. Considering Tiravanija’s constant desire to redefine these boundaries, it is surprising to find the apparent absence of the patois of socially engaged art and interpersonal activity in his latest show Time Travelers Chronicle (Doubt): 2014 – 802,701 A.D. at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, a conceptually driven exploration of time and space that’s loosely inspired by H.G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine.

Rirkrit Tiravanija. Almost, Always, Never, The Further the Distance the Closer Is Time, 2013; etching, screen print, metal foil, horse hair, STPI handmade abaca paper; 99.5 x 99.5 cm. Edition of 6. Image courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Rirkrit Tiravanija. The Time Travelers Calendar B, Negative Present, 2013; embossing, screen print, thermochromatic ink, STPI handmade extra-thick cotton paper; 114.5 x 114.5 x 3 cm. Edition of 4. Image courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

At first glance, Tiravanija’s latest offerings appear to be set in stylish and sombre silver-gray flat surfaces that form circular planes of sharp but sterile contrasts against sterile white gallery-wall space. The quirky details emerge upon closer scrutiny: bold, squiggly sketches, the crooked branches of trees, precise mathematical lines that appear to be drawn by a giant compass—contained within silver circles of varying sizes. Silver is the show’s dominant color in white gallery space, chosen for its ability to “reflect and absorb time and space” and “to represent the possibilities of present, past, and the future.”[2]

The installations seem to be constructed around a narrative of measuring time in the realms of the physical (Moon Rise – Time Is Setting – Tomorrow Never Arrives posits the means of chronicling time through phases of the moon) and the metaphysical (Eight Chapter: Return to the Unknowing Desire, The Further One Travels the Closer One Returns (To Doubt); Spongebob’s The Surreal Realm of Nothingness, He Wakes Up Under the Tree Again). Arguably the most eye-catching of the works are eight life-sized screen prints, each chronicling a chapter in a traveler’s logbook, each telling a story of a merry romp through space and time beginning with evolutionary time and Charles Darwin’s tree of life (First Chapter: The Tree of Life, The Eclipse and Drink a Nigrone to the Future).

Rirkrit Tiravanija. Sixth chapter: take the spin off, unwind, reverse directions, and shatter the bonsai, on the way back don’t forget to smile, 2013; screen print, metal foil, cast paper, STPI handmade cotton paper, stainless steel pedestal, 3D printed object; 259.5 x 259.5 cm; 4 sheets. Image courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Jocularly playful, the amusingly long titles of each work are guaranteed to trip up every well-meaning viewer, departing from the formal logic validating Wells’s narrator’s journey into the future. Throw a bowl of curry noodles, a martini glass, a math compass, and a miniature toy of Spongebob into the loop and these small three-dimensional objects on stainless-steel plinths, deliberately positioned in front of each flat screen print, add effervescent absurdity to the entire show. In all the materials used in the show, we’re also given glimpses into Tiravanija’s retrospective reconstructions of his entire oeuvre: the iconic curry experience way back in 1992, the Negroni cocktail imbibed before flights, or the mirrored surfaces in Untitled 2002 (He Promised) that explicitly reflected human activities rather than the architectural structures of the building. As such, they present a conflation of memories—and a retrospective of sorts—that override the phenomenological experience of time and bear witness, by their material presence alone, to the porousness that exist in the apparent lines dividing audience and artist.

Time Travelers Chronicle (Doubt): 2014 – 802,701 A.D. will be on view at Singapore Tyler Print Institute through June 28, 2014.

[1] Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110, Autumn 2004.
[2] Rirkrit Tiravanija, Exhibition Catalog, Singapore Tyler Print Institute, 2014. 

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.

Kiri Dalena. Monument for a Present Future, 2013; installation view, single-channel video and mixed media installation (wood, clay, and stone); dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

On paper, at least, there’s much to get excited about after reading SB2013’s vague but stylishly crafted curatorial brief. Above all, there’s the anticipation that nascent ideas embedded within these keywords will become sites of exchange and experimentation, and it is within this framework that SB2013 attempts to operate, weaving strands of commonality (though tenuous at times), shared tensions, themes, and attitudes. As academia continues to mull over the definition of Asia as an incoherent, multivalent concept rather than a homogeneous physical, social, and cultural entity, SB2013’s vision appears to be almost a dramatic, metaphorical realization of this idea. Even though this vision consists of a nebulous collection of words that, on their own, are theoretical concepts and linguistic connectors to a wider dialogue on art and its shared values, the lack of a more precisely crafted statement also presents the discursive slippages in which the collaborative team of curators can operate more fluidly as they seek to represent the varied cultures and identities of the Southeast Asian nations. If the distilled purpose of Biennales is to display a hybrid variety of art forms produced by artists working in specific cultural contexts, If the World Changed certainly succeeds in reinforcing the rhetoric of the region’s socio-economic, aesthetic, and ideological complexities with what is at times a beguiling mix of artworks.

Works that explore the quotidian social injustice that millions in the region suffer are plentiful and cast a harsh light on the costs we bear as humanity slowly destroys itself. Nikki Luna’s Tiempos Muertos (2013) is an installation of a thousand diamonds cast from sugar that details the exploitation of cheap labor, while Adrian Ho’s Fruits of Life (2013) registers its mournful concern for the Bornean forests that have fallen prey to palm-oil corporations. In an installation comprising fragments of body parts made of wood, clay, and stone scattered in foetal positions, Kiri Dalena’s Monument for a Present Future (2013) recalls the ash-covered bodies in the wake of Mt. Vesuvius’s eruption in A.D. 79, suggesting that the loss of lives will always count as the greatest tragedy in the aftermath of catastrophes or atrocities.

Oscar Villamiel. Payatas, 2012; installation view; excavated dolls, bamboo rods, zinc shed, wood chips, drawing; dimensions variable. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

Toni Kanwa. Cosmology of Life, 2013; wood; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

Cosmic ideas of spiritual change coupled with nostalgia for lost tradition are perpetually present in Toni Kanwa’s Cosmology of Life (2013) and in Nasirun’s Between Worlds (2013). Oscar Villamiel’s Payatas (2012) is an installation of thousands of dolls salvaged from a Manila landfill, an evocative parallel of how its inhabitants forage through this landscape of refuse for usable items. Rapid industrialization of third-world nations—and the corresponding impact on the environment—also seems to be a common theme that runs through a number of works. Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nuclear Nations by Japanese pair Ken and Julie Yonetani underscores the global proliferation of nuclear-generating nations through the use of radioactive uranium glass; Bounpaul Phothyzan‘s We Live (2013) is a site-specific exploration of politicized environmental damage in Bolikhamxay Province in Laos.

TeamLab. Peace Can Be Realised Even Without Order, 2012; interactive digital installation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Singapore Art Museum.

The examples in the paragraphs above are nevertheless typical of the characteristics of contemporary Asian artworks, many of which still bear the constant burden of voicing oft-contested issues of social engagement, the erosion of traditional values and beliefs, and political sea change. That isn’t to say that there are no standouts: Jeremy Sharma’s Terra Sensa-Lovell (2013) consists of casts of radiographs of collated data from collapsed stars, a surreal meditation on humankind’s unceasing obsession with extraterrestrial terrain light-years beyond Earth; Peace Can Be Realised Even Without Order (2012) by teamLab is a massive, interactive platform of holographic musicians and dancers clad in traditional garb that respond to viewers’ movements and reactions. El Fin del Mundo (The End of the World, 2012) is a stirring two-screen video installation by Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho that depicts two worlds, separated by time, where two characters—one living in a world on the brink of the apocalypse, and the other in a post-apocalyptic, sterile habitat—work to collect objects that come to define humankind. The first screen shows an artist in his studio at the end of the world, collecting discarded items. This man is juxtaposed on the second screen by a woman who works in a laboratory built on the same physical site at some point in the future. By assembling an archive of samples in order to rediscover the basic tenets of human life, the scientist finally leaves her workplace at the end of the film after packing away twinkle lights, the implication suggesting she has found the answer to the meaning of human existence in a quiet, epiphanous moment. El Fin del Mundo goes beyond imagining a dystopia; as part of a larger series of works collectively entitled News from Nowhere, Moon and Jeon’s work posits that the essentiality of art and human consciousness will continue in the absence of formal socio-political and economic structures. The world that we know and perceive, as Moon and Jeon seem to insist, is, after all, predicated on intangible, metaphysical qualities—such as aesthetic wonder—that will always transcend humankind’s reductive attempts to explain them.

Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho. El Fin del Mundo (The End of the World), 2012 (film still); 2-channel HD video installation; 13:35 mins. Courtesy of the Artist.

For all the Singapore Biennale purports to do, it does not stray too far from revisiting these preoccupations. Whether it’s a result of the absence of artistic direction or oversight, the fact remains that the lack of spatial and curatorial coherence prevents SB2013 from plumbing the depths of the diversity of these artistic affiliations to greater effectiveness. While not lacking in ambition, If the World Changed’s most glaring weakness is its inability to sufficiently move away from the existing discursive pathways that have for some time defined this geographical region and its communities as a an elusive construct of political engineering. Its narratives are sweeping and grand but uninvigorating, failing to challenge its viewers’ perspectives beyond portraying the usual fixations of contemporary art of the region.

If the World Changed will run until February 2014 at various venues in the Civic District, Singapore.

Chun Kwang Young. Aggregation 07 A135, 2007; mixed media with Korean mulberry paper; 171 x 139 cm. Image courtesy of Michael Culme-Seymour and Art Plural gallery.

Up close, the careful triangle arrangement that is an accumulation of basic units of information yields an uncompromising, ravaged topography that rises and falls within the canvas. In some Aggregates, waves of tightly-packed, forward-leaning triangles pushes uncomfortably against an opposing tide of edges then dip under the onslaught of sunken projectiles and circular masses. In others, the surfaces resemble natural rock formations, showing no particular form. Put together, Chun’s surfaces are abstract, quasi-sculptural spaces in continuous flux or crisis, with the broad, expansive swaths of colour reminiscent of Helen Frankenthaler and the gradients of Jules Olitski—a composite style that is the result of his efforts at reconciling two seeming opposing worldviews: the conservative values of a Korean upbringing and the overwhelmingly secular and material world with which he came into contact when he relocated to Philadelphia to earn his graduate degree in the Fine Arts in the 1970s.

Chun Kwang Young. Aggregation 07 DE146, 2007 (detail); mixed media with Korean mulberry paper; 250 x 205 cm. Image courtesy of Michael Culme-Seymour and Art Plural gallery.

The mulberry paper is a site on which these opposing forces meet, a malleable, durable agent that was once commonplace in traditional Korean life. In the Korea of yesteryears, hanji was glued onto doorways as an insulating material; at the same time it was used for wrapping food to keep it from decay; as writing paper, it was used to print journals, registries and books. In the Aggregation series, hanji forms the basis of Chun’s individual units, a symbolic statement of the strength of Korean tradition, yet the accumulative result of these units put together is an undulating landscape of forms that seems to play out the Western aesthetic of abstract painting.

Chun Kwang Young. Aggregation 13 MA006 Blue, 2013; mixed media with Korean mulberry paper; 184 x 230 cm. Image courtesy of Michael Culme-Seymour and Art Plural gallery.

But Chun’s brand of conceptualism is not just a series of colliding shapes wrapped in paper that embodies the Korean experience; they are inherently textual and perhaps derive their greatest power from the deconstructive impulse that is presented in the way the Korean and Chinese characters bend and twist on each polystyrene triangle. Apart from the strong nostalgic element contained within the mulberry triangles, the hanji that Chun appropriates is taken from various literary sources, and while the black print provides an additional planning effect to cast the entire canvas in three-dimensional shading, they also call attention to the embedded but splintered narratives that defy any attempt at contextualisation.

Chun Kwang Young. Aggregation 11 OC077 Red, 2011; (detail); mixed media with Korean mulberry paper 113 x 163 cm. Image courtesy of Michael Culme-Seymour and Art Plural gallery.

Chun Kwang Young was born in 1944 in Hongchun, Korea. He received his BFA from Hong-Ik University, Seoul and his MFA from the Philadelphia College of Art. He currently lives and works in Korea.

Chun Kwang Young: Assemblage will be on view at Art Plural Gallery through July 27, 2013.

Kim Kun Ju, Myth 1, 2007 (installation view), mixed media, 180 x 190 x 11 cm, 2007. Image: Courtesy of Taksu gallery.

New Waves, Korea in Taksu gallery is a show that seems to serve as a modest introduction to the broad field of contemporary Korean art, surveying the artistic output of three artists (Kim Kun Ju, Sang Taek Oh and Sung Chul Hong) working across a variety of media to highlight the fundamental issues of urban living such as desire, isolation and re-contextualisation. Kim, Sang and Sung share a common background; they were born in Korea but educated abroad in the West. Even their seemingly disparate artistic visions are perhaps more similar than they seem, championing the thoroughly (and the fashionable) postmodern notions of arbitrariness and disjointed narratives.

Mounted on a bright orange canvas, Kim Kun Ju’s Myth 1 (2007) comprises a myriad of reliefs or cut-outs of familiar shapes layered over each other in order to form a new, unrecognisable entity that hangs in three-dimensional space. As disparate as these elements are, like part-painting and part-sculpture, they coalesce with striking visual impact, a defamiliarised site in which multiple signs converge.

Sang Taek Oh, Closet 23 - 25, 150 x 95 cm each, photographic colour print on canvas, 2012. Image: Courtesy of Taksu gallery.

Clothes gently billow in the black, endless closet spaces of Sang Taek Oh’s photographic prints like still life portraits of the inanimate. But if traditional still life is an expressed fascination with the science of vision and the natural world, Sang’s painterly depiction of lavishly formal attire seems to eschew the natural in a bid to capture the constructed consumables.

Sung Chul Hong, String Hands 0338 , print on elastic string and steel frame, 150 x 100 x 14 cm, 2013. Image: Courtesy of Taksu gallery.

In Hong Sung Chul’s Strings Mirror series (2011-2013), pictures of parts of the human body are printed out on strings, then reconstructed on different levels to yield a three-dimensional-like image that remains nebulous to the eye. The illusory, or mirage effect created by the gap between the strings would mean that the ‘whole’ image is never fully revealed; consequently, it is only the viewer’s movement around the canvas that will bring different parts of the image into focus at varying standpoints. Intertwined hands in String hands 1365 (2011) look as though they are grasped in solidarity or struggling to get free from one another when observed from differing angles. It is in this manner that Hong’s works emphasise the subjectivity of human vision, where intangible ideas of entanglement seem more real than the tangible image.

New waves, Korea will be on show at Taksu Singapore until 29 May, 2013.

Dominus Aeris: Escape 3, Jiten Thukral & Sumir Tagra, 2012. Oil on canvas 96 x 72 inches. Image: Courtesy of Art Plural gallery.

Windows of Opportunity (2013), Jiten Thukral’s and Sumir Tagra’s (branded as Thukral & Tagra) latest show at Art Plural gallery, gives expression to the cacophonous spectacle of hybridity that defines contemporary India, a site that they deem to be a hotbed of conflicted histories and global transactions. These issues of societal flux are explored in their oeuvre through an eclectic visual language composed of cartoonish sketches, pop art and marketing media, serving also as a reminder of the days when Thukral & Tagra worked in the commercial realm of communication design at the beginning of their careers.

Weekend-bonanza-2, Jiten Thukral & Sumir Tagra, 2007. Oil and acrylic on canvas 72" x 144". Image courtesy of Nature Morte gallery.

The glyphs of their works are immediately recognisable: stock images of hot-air balloons and architectural postmodern buildings (Dominus Aerius, 2011), the consumerist’s supermarket trolley, popular culture’s action heroes (Science, Mystery & Magic, 2011). Stylistically combined, these images come together like a surreal dreamscape, blurring the line between kitsch and high art to become a product of strategic brand management created from a wide spectrum of media, weaving a narrative of dissimilar elements like a cheeky and humorous literary conceit. As deft as it is, one can’t help but think each work stumbles on its own cleverness when it is mostly reliant on a backdrop of an elaborate system of art-historical- and cultural-allusions that demands a measure of such literacy in their audience.

BoseDK, Jiten Thukral & Sumir Tagra, 2007, installation view.

Thukral & Tagra do however, demonstrate an awareness of their recursive complicity in this phenomenon[1], the result of which was the self-referential creation of ‘BoseDK’ products in an installation of a supermarket interior at Nature Morte in 2007. With a name that is a transliteration of a term of abuse in the Punjabi language, the fake label ‘BoseDK’ is an ironic statement on globalisation’s narrative of homogeneity as well as an admission of the commercial trappings of commodification and fickle tendencies of the art market.

Windows of Opportunity, Jiten Thukral & Sumir Tagra, 2013. Oil on canvas, 18 x 28 x 2.5 inches each. Image: Courtesy of Art Plural gallery.

In Windows of Opportunity (2013), a series of paintings and wall reliefs for which the exhibition is named, Thukral & Tagra shift their focus to the immigration aspirations of young Indians through the enduring images of pinball machines, sports memorabilia and the oval outline of an aeroplane window. Despite their efforts to leave the country, there is no anchoring destination for them, no identifying indicators of skylines or architectural landmarks, merely indicators of the mileage they accrue as a measure of their success. Their side-portraits are triple-framed: by the borders of the canvas, by the small, oval window of a plane, and finally by the confines of a pinball machine. It is a reinforced metaphor of the demarcating limits of their dreams as players who try their luck at a stunted game that consists of seemingly endless circular movements of transit and transience, the end of which could very well be the very beginning. Recurrent motifs of competitive athletics – medals, unreachable targets and more obviously the white-and-orange racetrack that weaves its way around the paintings – seem to reiterate the impossibility of success where the ultimate prize still lies beyond reach.

Perhaps what is most compelling about Thukral & Tagra’s oeuvre is the articulation of heterogeneity that does not point to an obvious signification. Part of the reward of engaging with their works is that these brightly coloured canvases invoke the automatic desire to unfold their idiosyncrasies into assemblages of meaning. But as in a guessing game however, we don’t always get it right.

Jiten Thukral was born in 1976 in the city of Jalandhar in the state of the Punjab, Sumir Tagra in 1979 in the capital city of New Delhi. They live and work in the New Dehli suburb of Gurgaon. Thukral & Tagra: Windows of Opportunity will run at Art Plural gallery till 25 May 2013.