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.

Bruce Nauman, Going Around the Corner Piece, 1970, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian

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 politics of image-making and its ability to place the spectator as an indispensable agent in a work’s existence are significant tenets on which the exhibition is established. The infinitely widening scope and scale for the production and interpretation of (moving) images, the mode of their dissemination, and the documentation of performances (technical or otherwise), pose several key but general questions around which the works are grouped.

The pertinence of such questions however, falters in the collaborative effort that has shown up more differences than similarities. Reconciling the inventory of the Singapore Art Museum with the Centre Pompidou’s reveals the tentative forays into the processes of historicisation that are only beginning to develop in Southeast Asia and the inevitable rift in the standpoints of Western art and Southeast Asian art history. The Pompidou’s international collection stretches back 4 decades to the genesis of video art; the Singapore Art Museum’s inventory spans approximately a decade that really began with the Asian Financial Crisis (1997-8) and is focused on works produced in the surrounding geographical region. The wider ramifications of this collaboration go beyond an overwhelming inventory imbalance and the expanded visual vocabulary that video technology provides; indeed the emerging ideological differences become apparent when speculative comparison – the attempt at a comparative video-art history, should it even exist – inevitably sets in.

Pipilotti Rist, A la belle étoile (Under the Sky), 2007, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian.

The seeming futile effort of historicising video art in this instance, is thus mitigated by several thematic (and loosely chronological) focuses that ground the show: television critique, the representations of self, the documentation of performance, installation in space, landscape as metaphor, video-as fiction and the deconstruction of narratives.

If early efforts by video pioneers such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman and David Hall took the definition of an art object beyond its conventional parameters as a static entity produced for visual consumption, perhaps the greatest strength of video art triumphed in this show is the unprecedented potential of experiential interactivity between artist, installation and spectator. Peter Campus’ Interface (1972) invites the viewer to superimpose their reflection onto their projected image after which they simultaneously face 2 images of themselves – one of the video image and their reflection on the glass screen. The inherent sense of ego coupled with a measure of curiosity is a potent brew, particularly when facets of the multi-layered self are revealed in art. Like the literary Doppelgänger (the ghostly and sinister double), artists’ early efforts recognised the potential of video art in exploring the loss of existential reference in which the traditionally held view of the consecrated sense of self is destabilised. In Bruce Nauman’s Going around the Corner Piece (1972), the surveillance set-up is symmetrical and simple: perched in the corners in a white square-room are closed-circuit cameras and small TV monitors that capture visitor movements going around the corner of the enclosed space. The spectator’s image disappears from view as he/she rounds a corner; speeding up in an attempt to play catch-up with one’s image results in a unsuccessful tail-chasing endeavour – which is probably the glorious core and yet most vexing part of this work.

Peter Campus, Interface, 1972.

Departing from the investigative preoccupation with the apparatus and the monolithic hold that television had, video art had, by the 1980s, begun deconstructive strategies of memory and narratives, debunking on its way, stereotypes of sexuality, ethnicity and gender perpetuated by the very same mode. Nam June Paik’s semi-documentary Guadalcanal Requiem (1979) explores the subjectivity of memory through the deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of narratives, in a film that coalesces history, time, cultural memory and mythology on the site of one of World War II’s most devastating battles in the Solomon Islands. Surrealistic images of archival footage, interviews, Charlotte Moorman’s fragmented cello performances come together like a scratchy Hitchcock–Buñuel/Dali crossover. The haunting collage is often fraught with poignant tension and a sense of the macabre: interviewees with singular (or paltry) memories picking up where some have left off; Moorman playing a cello with a long palm leaf against a thunderous horizon, and at another time, performs concealed in a body bag.

Guadalcanal Requiem, Nam June Paik, 1979, © Nam June Paik Estate video still Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EIA) New York

A deconstructive approach to the moving image seemed to be video art’s trajectory from the 1990s into the early 21^st century, incorporating new developments of photo processing, digital editing and image layering in contemporary visual culture. Swiss conceptual artist Pipilotti Rist’s A la belle étoile (2007) moves between micro- and macrocosms on horizontal and vertical surfaces. As suggested by curator Christine Van Assche, such works operate on removing depth of field, redefining in the process, the spectator’s own rapport with space.

Despite the influence of the commercial mainstream, video art has nevertheless, retained its earlier forms: the performance documentary, mixed-media texts, or even the visual portrait. Such forms seem conceivably better suited to the preoccupation with art’s social purpose and its context of production that remain dominant traits in Asian-produced videos; perhaps most similar to the historical Western notions where art was produced within corresponding socio-political backgrounds. Just as Gustav Courbet’s post-romanticism was a rejection of academic and bourgeois juste milieu, much of Southeast Asian works are filled with the rhetoric of social change in which media artists show no desire to be unbound from their local cultural matrices. By continuing to invoke ties to tradition, incredibly varied configurations (or even fragments) of history that appear in Asian works at best, seem to read as disjointed narratives to the viewer unschooled in the intricacies of China’s tumultuous last few decades.

Yang Fudong, Backyard - Hey! Sun is rising, 2001.

Yang Fudong’s Backyard – Hey! Sun is Rising (2001) follows the Keatonesque slapstick antics of four young men enacting military rituals and traipsing around with swords, questioning the meaning of rituals in the wake of social changes. A richer meaning however, could be gleaned from Yang’s work if considered in the light of the communism’s wane, as well as in the historical traditions of Zen, martial arts and the aesthetic disciplines of poetry, painting and calligraphy – all of which are mirrored in aesthetic form and content in his videos. Like Yang’s disoriented characters who seem to seek penance in an environment marked by repression, The Propeller Group’s Uh… (2007) confronts Vietnam’s youth culture’s adaptations to the changing socio-cultural and political landscape through the symbolic use of graffiti, and the disorder and spontaneity it represents – the antithesis of Vietnam’s ordered socialist state.

Uh..., The Propeller Group, 2007, Singapore Art Museum Collection

Manet's Luncheon on the Grass and the Thai farmers, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Two Planets series, 2008, Singapore Art Museum collection

While Western artists like Pierre Huyghe and Issac Julien integrated mixed media installations with the spectacular and immersive experience of cinema, Asian filmmakers also tended to persist with the use of narrative (and at times, the meta-narrative) as a didactic strategy. In Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s The Two Planets Series (2008), Thai farmers – groups of people blithely oblivious to the cultural or economic baggage associated with canonical works of Western art history – talk about several cornerstones of modern European painting. Their discussions of Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (1863), van Gogh’s The Siesta (1889-90) and Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) are artlessly literal, context-less and extremely humourous, with the constant comical tendency to drift towards off-topic situations. Straddling the diverse worlds of rural farming and art history, Rasdjarmrearnsook raises questions of socio-cultural context, the parameters of interpretation and appreciation, but stops short of suggesting that our efforts in basting together a coherent narrative and interpretation of art are vain but significant detractors from the lost pleasure of looking.

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Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010 is presented by the Singapore Art Museum and the Centre Pompidou, and runs through 18 September 2011.

Cheo Chai-Hiang, 35 Black Cowries (detail), 2009, 35 stainless steel characters, cowries, bags. Courtesy of Osage Gallery

Inventory: New Art from Southeast Asia at Osage Gallery Singapore presents recent works by eight key artists in Southeast Asia. In 35 Black Cowries, 35 stainless steel Chinese characters are displayed in opened square miniature suitcases and each stainless steel Chinese character includes a black cowry shell to replace the Chinese symbol 贝(bei). The classical Chinese symbol 贝(bei) for money, originated as an ideogram of a cowry shell, being a form of currency exchange in ancient China (and other parts of the world). Since then, many Chinese characters associated with words revolving around money possess this symbol as a radical. The act and visual significance of replacing the symbol 贝(bei) with a physical cowry prompts a consideration of the meaning of the word and the extent to which it has evolved from its roots. The choice of the 35 Chinese characters draws out not only the inter-connections and meanings within and between each pair of characters, but also points to the relationship between the evolution of the Chinese language and contemporary capitalist society. Born in 1946, Cheo was one of the earliest artists in Singapore to boldly call for a rejection of formalism and his experimentation with art driven by concepts and processes started in the 1970s. His international practice includes curating, lecturing and writing, and his recent participation in the Singapore Biennale 2008 and Asian Pacific Triennale 2009, Brisbane, Australia had works which drew also on history and language.

Wit Pimkanchanapong; Pear, Apple, Banana, Mangosteen, Orange, and Starfruit; 2009, Paper models. Courtesy of Osage Gallery.

Wit Pimkanchanapong‘s Pear, Apple, Banana, Mangosteen, Orange, and Starfruit is a work of tropical fruits made from paper models. Wit commenced his series of works based on paper models since 2002, driven by an interest in connecting electronic media and cubism as both call into question the ability to have a fixed representation and perspective. In this work, he draws on the idea of hypertext, or text leading to other related information, and prints words of other fruits on each paper fruit model. The folded fruit with the tiny printed words of other fruits in different languages point to the multiple identities one can assume in the virtual realm, aided by electronic media. Born in 1976 in Thailand and trained in architecture, Wit’s art projects also embody a strong element of using and playing with social space. At the 8th Sharjah Biennale 2007, Wit, together with collaborators of Soi Project, transformed the space in front of the Sharjah Art Museum into a lively fruit market, inviting passersby to construct paper fruit models. His practice encompasses music, and he curates an annual exhibition as part of the Music Festival in Bangkok.

Tintin Wulia, Lure, 2009, Installation Dimensions variable Installation view, Osage Kwun Tong, Hong Kong, 2009. Courtesy of Osage Gallery.

A trail of miniature passports from around the world laid on the ground of the gallery entrance, and across the walls and ceiling, leads visitors to a claw vending machine half-filled with passport reproductions. Visitors are invited to insert a coin and operate the claw for a chance to win a passport. Tintin Wulia‘s installation, Lure, speaks to both the relationship between chance and citizenship, as well as the notion that the sense of belonging to a nation can be constructed and imagined. Her sensitivities to the multiple relationships connected to her Indonesian, Chinese, and Balinese roots together with her dream since young, of being a citizen of the world, have fuelled her investigations in the tensions between personal memories, choices, and realities, pertaining to issues of mobility, migration and identity. Lure is part of an ongoing project, (Re)Collection of Togetherness, an effort since 2007 at collecting and reproducing passports of all the nation-states in the world. Earlier stages involved working with materials from mosquitoes and kite-making, and a recurrent choice of stop-motion animation in her films – all with intimations of borders or a disregard of them. Born in 1972 in Bali, Indonesia, and now based in Melbourne, Australia, Tintin’s academic background in architecture, music and fine art have guided her experimentation across artistic disciplines, with recent presentations at Centraal Museum in Utrecht, the 2009 Jakarta Biennale, and the 28th International Film Festival Rotterdam.

The exhibition runs till 25 April 2010, and also features works by Poklong Anading (Philippines), Ho Tzu Nyen (Singapore), Lee Kit (Hong Kong), Vincent Leong (Malaysia) and Pratchaya Phinthong (Thailand).