(no subject)
Went to the Singapore Art Museum today!
What brought this on? Well - I’ve been a lot of places this holiday (Thailand and Japan, both of which were absolutely amazing) - and on the Thailand trip I was telling Mr Jeff Lim - if we brought someone to Singapore what in the world would we show him/her? We don’t have the depth of Buddhist heritage that Thailand does, we don’t have funky elephant camps... in the case of Japan, we don’t have high schools full of cute boys. ^___~ Neither do we have the scope and pace and heat of Tokyo, or the history of places like Kamakura. Waseda University was beautiful and picturesque with the autumn trees in full glory - I’m sorry but somehow NUS doesn’t quite measure up.
So I returned from both trips brooding about what Singapore has to offer. And then, on Friday I saw a little advert for the National Heritage Board’s photoblogging competition. Saturday I was busy volunteering for the One Life Experience. (Also something all of you should go for! We’re trying to raise awareness about AIDS. It’ll only take maybe twenty minutes of your time. The exhibit will be at the National Library till 31st after which it’ll be at SMU Campus Green from 5th Jan to 3rd Feb. Go! Go!)
So I went today instead.
(Friends-cut for the massive amount of rambling. Photo-heavy also, not too dial-up friendly! Click if you want to.)
After the trip? I take it back. There are things to show tourists in Singapore - in fact, if all the museums are like SAM, there’s plenty to show them, and it’s a pity that I never found out earlier. I shall go to every museum in Singapore over the next few Sundays (they’re all clustered in the City Hall area anyway.)
The place used to be the old St. Joseph’s Institution, so it retains a wonderful old-world feel admidst the bustle of the city. If you look out the windows you’ll see things like this - the spire of the building juxtaposed against the under-construction scaffolding of the Oxford Hotel, or the dome of their cathedral beside SMU’s glass-and-steel façade.
I got in for free - hurray for being a student. Though I think it’s got something to do with being from VJ as well - some schools have tie-ups with the NHB or something? And even if I had to pay the $8 (adult fee), it would have been entirely worth it.
Currently there are several exhibits going on in SAM, besides their permanent exhibits.
The first floor encompasses From the Everyday to the Imagined: An Exhibition of Indian Art. I’d love to show you what it was like inside the gallery. Unfortunately:
Yup, no photography inside the galleries. Nonetheless - let me go on to describe some of my favourite exhibits.
I confess - I went there as a writer looking for possible inspirations, and as a tourist looking for a good time. Not as an artist (I know pretty much natch about art), but I’d like to think that there are some similarities between writing and art. There was an exhibit titled Some Chairs - big black words on a wall with images of chairs, and four chairs lined up along one wall. The idea, I think, was that chairs can be a metaphor for people - ‘some are corny while others are smooth and slick’, ‘neat folded chairs that cross their legs and squint’ - much as I myself was doing at that point! - ‘in engrossed meditation’.
But after looking a little closer - I realized it wasn’t a metaphor for people. It was a metaphor for women. Chairs that ‘hold you like a womb’, and most amusingly, the last line: ‘But every now and then / they invent new ones to suit the tastes of men. ‘ To boost their egos or soothe their aching seats.’
Well, this is the chair I sat on to think.
*
There was once a brown chair. It was unassuming and oblong beside its flashier cousins - at Chinese New Year gatherings it merely huddled in the corner, while the chairs gathered around to admire each other’s rose-printed upholstery or ornate Victorian armrests, and to compare price tags.
It didn’t even have a backrest or armrests. It was a very simple chair.
Simple is not bad, you say? Oh, no! Simple is not bad if it is the minimalist kind of simple - the sort of simple that involves a great deal of metal and black and white and a hefty price tag or a designer label.
It was a very plain chair.
When they were all sent to be sold, the brown chair sat, forlorn in the warehouse. The tag on it said ‘wooden bench’.
Not even a chair anymore, then. Just a bench.
And then, one day, the unthinkable happened.
The men came for the brown chair, wrapping it up and hefting it onto a van, like the rose-upholstered cousins or the Victorian sisters -
They put it in the very, very centre of a big, big white room, full of nothing. The floor was simple brown parquet as well, and the chair did not feel quite so out of place. And then they hung pictures on the walls, the white, white walls, pictures that spoke about chairs.
The chair read the words and wondered - what kind of chair am I?
*
I hope the chair figures it out. It’s a very lovable chair.
The Indian galleries try to present ‘everyday social realities’ against ‘the rich tapestry of Indian mythology, tradition and fantasy’, and I think that in any rapidly modernizing society any artist’s attempts to address this always present a rather sinister contrast. Take, for instance, Farhad Hussain’s pictures of Indian families.
They all look normal on the surface, but the people are painted in monochrome off-white and black and grey, and the colors they wear are bright and livid and almost terrifying. There’s one particular picture - the Family with Rooster - where the two men are grabbing onto the branches of trees in the background. The branches are tiny as twigs in their fat hands. You realize with a start that the family is actually monstrously, grotesquely gigantic.
It’s Indian art, but all of it is particularly applicable to Singapore as well. India is struggling to reconcile modernity with tradition - for us; we sped so fast into modernity that it’s hard for us to find tradition at all. But I’ve decided I’ve had enough of the debate on what is ‘uniquely’ us. The artists are Indian but clearly their message is not just Indian - why else would it be here in Singapore? (The exhibition will also be going to Seoul, so I rest my case.) Does an American or British writer think of himself or herself as purely American or British? I don’t think so. If so, why should our artists be restricted to searching for a Singaporean subject? We should be Singaporean artists. Not artists about Singapore.
*laugh* I personally think that one tradition we can totally lay claim to is our tradition of searching for tradition. And I’ve reconciled myself with the fact that we’re just over forty and this adolescent-nationhood angst is perfectly alright.
To the second floor!
The way up is also graced by Jason Lim’s installation piece Just Another Dharma - a beautiful cascade of porcelain flowers with lightbulbs, meant to illustrate the dual nature of hope - how it can sustain but can give way to despair.
On the second floor, I was greeted by Vincent Leow’s Andy’s Venice Souvenir. Quite honestly - it freaked me out.
The wall plaque is a very tame description - ‘the complex relationship we have with our pets’, ‘a reflection of ourselves, like when we place photographs of dear ones, souvenirs of our travel’, ‘domesticated animals tend to fill the void felt in our lives’...
Sounds good?
What we get is a shock-silver model of a dog with a man’s face with a spiked collar sprawled on its back with a hideous grin that reminds me of nothing so much as Batman’s Joker, reclining on a red cushion made of plastic and placed atop a black gondola polished to a dominatrix’s patent leather shine. Kitschy, Pop Art inspired - all these come together for a truly disturbing effect. Go see it. If you don’t recoil at first glance I’ll give you a dollar.
If that’s a ‘reflection of ourselves’, I’ll never look in a mirror again.
After that, I browsed the permanent collections, which feature Southeast Asian artists and a variety of mediums ranging from Chinese ink paintings to sculpture to pottery to acrylic. The array of art is positively dazzling - and there is a very distinctly local, Southeast Asian (if not always Singaporean) tinge in the works, while still allowing the distinctive features of the style to shine through. There was a Chinese ink painting of an old wise Malay man - and the lines on his forehead were rather tiger-like, much in the way tigers are often the subject of Chinese paintings - the wisdom was evident in the painting, but the style gave it the fierce sort of patience that I’ve come to associate with tigers and hunting animals.
One other work I particularly liked in the permanent collection - Kumin Lertchaiprasert’s (Thailand) depictions of the traditional Buddha and a modern man. The modern man - often in jeans and T-shirt - is the only photorealistic thing, and the contrast is rather brilliant. He used it to illustrate traditional stories of the Buddha - like the subduing of Argulima (translation: ‘garland of fingers’. To simplify the story, he was a murderer who wanted to collect a garland of a thousand human fingers. He got hold of 999, and then decided to kill his own mother for the 100th. Luckily for his mother, he met the Buddha along the way and was converted.) I think it shows that even now in this denim world we can come to the Buddha and the Buddha’s works and wisdom.
Another work with a similar Buddhist theme is Re-Woven by Benny Ong, a display of ethereal silk weavings that are dedicated to jubilation and contemplation. What moved me most was the last room, with the quotations of the Buddha’s works above woven hangings depicting the Buddha, centered around silk weavings of golden moths in flight, titled Emptiness.
The work and the thought that went into each piece is just... Wow.
Besides these - there’s also the Big Picture exhibit, where the scope of the canvases is often awe-inspiring.
There’s a painting by a Philippines artist - Edgar Talujan Fernandez, titled Unfinished Painting of the Present. It’s made of 10 panels - 5 by 2 - with each panel as tall as me and thrice as wide. A panoramic history of the Philippines in images, ranging from the war and unrest of the Marcos regime to the artist’s hopes for the return of Man to nature. Wow. It’s amazing, for the artist to have not only painted this but to have conceived of it at all - the intricacy of the detail is breathtaking.
I was wandering around the second floor (attempting to get to the third floor), and I stumbled across these!
At first I had no clue what these things were...
Then I saw this!
No, there are no real animals. I was wondering if they were going to do a Damien Hirst and serve up sliced-up sharks and cows as art, but nope - apparently those little plaques are animal designs! You get a piece of paper and rub a pencil over them to see the design. So cute! =D
Even cuter:
Tiger: Noooooo! Save me! It's the Blue Rabbit!
*grins*
Lastly but not least: there’s U.S. Hoong’s Art of Seal Carving.
I never really thought about how much effort goes into these seals before this, but the calligraphy and the intricacy of the carving and the use of negative space is just as important in this as in any other art form - maybe more so because the space you have to work with is so tiny.
Apparently, this is one of the four arts of any scholar-artist in olden China - the other three being painting, calligraphy and poetry.
I’m glad they’ve loosened the standards for scholars nowadays. *laugh*
Besides the amazing exhibits, the museum itself is beautiful. I wandered around for a little more after that, taking random shots.
And since pictures are worth a thousand words, this photoessay of mine is worth a measly two pictures (though that doesn’t include my own photographs). I certainly saw many, many more artworks than that: so if this teensy little essay managed to interest you, what more the real thing? Make a trip down yourself.
It was a wonderful afternoon.
What brought this on? Well - I’ve been a lot of places this holiday (Thailand and Japan, both of which were absolutely amazing) - and on the Thailand trip I was telling Mr Jeff Lim - if we brought someone to Singapore what in the world would we show him/her? We don’t have the depth of Buddhist heritage that Thailand does, we don’t have funky elephant camps... in the case of Japan, we don’t have high schools full of cute boys. ^___~ Neither do we have the scope and pace and heat of Tokyo, or the history of places like Kamakura. Waseda University was beautiful and picturesque with the autumn trees in full glory - I’m sorry but somehow NUS doesn’t quite measure up.
So I returned from both trips brooding about what Singapore has to offer. And then, on Friday I saw a little advert for the National Heritage Board’s photoblogging competition. Saturday I was busy volunteering for the One Life Experience. (Also something all of you should go for! We’re trying to raise awareness about AIDS. It’ll only take maybe twenty minutes of your time. The exhibit will be at the National Library till 31st after which it’ll be at SMU Campus Green from 5th Jan to 3rd Feb. Go! Go!)
So I went today instead.
(Friends-cut for the massive amount of rambling. Photo-heavy also, not too dial-up friendly! Click if you want to.)
After the trip? I take it back. There are things to show tourists in Singapore - in fact, if all the museums are like SAM, there’s plenty to show them, and it’s a pity that I never found out earlier. I shall go to every museum in Singapore over the next few Sundays (they’re all clustered in the City Hall area anyway.)
The place used to be the old St. Joseph’s Institution, so it retains a wonderful old-world feel admidst the bustle of the city. If you look out the windows you’ll see things like this - the spire of the building juxtaposed against the under-construction scaffolding of the Oxford Hotel, or the dome of their cathedral beside SMU’s glass-and-steel façade.
I got in for free - hurray for being a student. Though I think it’s got something to do with being from VJ as well - some schools have tie-ups with the NHB or something? And even if I had to pay the $8 (adult fee), it would have been entirely worth it.
Currently there are several exhibits going on in SAM, besides their permanent exhibits.
The first floor encompasses From the Everyday to the Imagined: An Exhibition of Indian Art. I’d love to show you what it was like inside the gallery. Unfortunately:
Yup, no photography inside the galleries. Nonetheless - let me go on to describe some of my favourite exhibits.
I confess - I went there as a writer looking for possible inspirations, and as a tourist looking for a good time. Not as an artist (I know pretty much natch about art), but I’d like to think that there are some similarities between writing and art. There was an exhibit titled Some Chairs - big black words on a wall with images of chairs, and four chairs lined up along one wall. The idea, I think, was that chairs can be a metaphor for people - ‘some are corny while others are smooth and slick’, ‘neat folded chairs that cross their legs and squint’ - much as I myself was doing at that point! - ‘in engrossed meditation’.
But after looking a little closer - I realized it wasn’t a metaphor for people. It was a metaphor for women. Chairs that ‘hold you like a womb’, and most amusingly, the last line: ‘But every now and then / they invent new ones to suit the tastes of men. ‘ To boost their egos or soothe their aching seats.’
Well, this is the chair I sat on to think.
*
There was once a brown chair. It was unassuming and oblong beside its flashier cousins - at Chinese New Year gatherings it merely huddled in the corner, while the chairs gathered around to admire each other’s rose-printed upholstery or ornate Victorian armrests, and to compare price tags.
It didn’t even have a backrest or armrests. It was a very simple chair.
Simple is not bad, you say? Oh, no! Simple is not bad if it is the minimalist kind of simple - the sort of simple that involves a great deal of metal and black and white and a hefty price tag or a designer label.
It was a very plain chair.
When they were all sent to be sold, the brown chair sat, forlorn in the warehouse. The tag on it said ‘wooden bench’.
Not even a chair anymore, then. Just a bench.
And then, one day, the unthinkable happened.
The men came for the brown chair, wrapping it up and hefting it onto a van, like the rose-upholstered cousins or the Victorian sisters -
They put it in the very, very centre of a big, big white room, full of nothing. The floor was simple brown parquet as well, and the chair did not feel quite so out of place. And then they hung pictures on the walls, the white, white walls, pictures that spoke about chairs.
The chair read the words and wondered - what kind of chair am I?
*
I hope the chair figures it out. It’s a very lovable chair.
The Indian galleries try to present ‘everyday social realities’ against ‘the rich tapestry of Indian mythology, tradition and fantasy’, and I think that in any rapidly modernizing society any artist’s attempts to address this always present a rather sinister contrast. Take, for instance, Farhad Hussain’s pictures of Indian families.
They all look normal on the surface, but the people are painted in monochrome off-white and black and grey, and the colors they wear are bright and livid and almost terrifying. There’s one particular picture - the Family with Rooster - where the two men are grabbing onto the branches of trees in the background. The branches are tiny as twigs in their fat hands. You realize with a start that the family is actually monstrously, grotesquely gigantic.
It’s Indian art, but all of it is particularly applicable to Singapore as well. India is struggling to reconcile modernity with tradition - for us; we sped so fast into modernity that it’s hard for us to find tradition at all. But I’ve decided I’ve had enough of the debate on what is ‘uniquely’ us. The artists are Indian but clearly their message is not just Indian - why else would it be here in Singapore? (The exhibition will also be going to Seoul, so I rest my case.) Does an American or British writer think of himself or herself as purely American or British? I don’t think so. If so, why should our artists be restricted to searching for a Singaporean subject? We should be Singaporean artists. Not artists about Singapore.
*laugh* I personally think that one tradition we can totally lay claim to is our tradition of searching for tradition. And I’ve reconciled myself with the fact that we’re just over forty and this adolescent-nationhood angst is perfectly alright.
To the second floor!
The way up is also graced by Jason Lim’s installation piece Just Another Dharma - a beautiful cascade of porcelain flowers with lightbulbs, meant to illustrate the dual nature of hope - how it can sustain but can give way to despair.
On the second floor, I was greeted by Vincent Leow’s Andy’s Venice Souvenir. Quite honestly - it freaked me out.
The wall plaque is a very tame description - ‘the complex relationship we have with our pets’, ‘a reflection of ourselves, like when we place photographs of dear ones, souvenirs of our travel’, ‘domesticated animals tend to fill the void felt in our lives’...
Sounds good?
What we get is a shock-silver model of a dog with a man’s face with a spiked collar sprawled on its back with a hideous grin that reminds me of nothing so much as Batman’s Joker, reclining on a red cushion made of plastic and placed atop a black gondola polished to a dominatrix’s patent leather shine. Kitschy, Pop Art inspired - all these come together for a truly disturbing effect. Go see it. If you don’t recoil at first glance I’ll give you a dollar.
If that’s a ‘reflection of ourselves’, I’ll never look in a mirror again.
After that, I browsed the permanent collections, which feature Southeast Asian artists and a variety of mediums ranging from Chinese ink paintings to sculpture to pottery to acrylic. The array of art is positively dazzling - and there is a very distinctly local, Southeast Asian (if not always Singaporean) tinge in the works, while still allowing the distinctive features of the style to shine through. There was a Chinese ink painting of an old wise Malay man - and the lines on his forehead were rather tiger-like, much in the way tigers are often the subject of Chinese paintings - the wisdom was evident in the painting, but the style gave it the fierce sort of patience that I’ve come to associate with tigers and hunting animals.
One other work I particularly liked in the permanent collection - Kumin Lertchaiprasert’s (Thailand) depictions of the traditional Buddha and a modern man. The modern man - often in jeans and T-shirt - is the only photorealistic thing, and the contrast is rather brilliant. He used it to illustrate traditional stories of the Buddha - like the subduing of Argulima (translation: ‘garland of fingers’. To simplify the story, he was a murderer who wanted to collect a garland of a thousand human fingers. He got hold of 999, and then decided to kill his own mother for the 100th. Luckily for his mother, he met the Buddha along the way and was converted.) I think it shows that even now in this denim world we can come to the Buddha and the Buddha’s works and wisdom.
Another work with a similar Buddhist theme is Re-Woven by Benny Ong, a display of ethereal silk weavings that are dedicated to jubilation and contemplation. What moved me most was the last room, with the quotations of the Buddha’s works above woven hangings depicting the Buddha, centered around silk weavings of golden moths in flight, titled Emptiness.
The work and the thought that went into each piece is just... Wow.
Besides these - there’s also the Big Picture exhibit, where the scope of the canvases is often awe-inspiring.
There’s a painting by a Philippines artist - Edgar Talujan Fernandez, titled Unfinished Painting of the Present. It’s made of 10 panels - 5 by 2 - with each panel as tall as me and thrice as wide. A panoramic history of the Philippines in images, ranging from the war and unrest of the Marcos regime to the artist’s hopes for the return of Man to nature. Wow. It’s amazing, for the artist to have not only painted this but to have conceived of it at all - the intricacy of the detail is breathtaking.
I was wandering around the second floor (attempting to get to the third floor), and I stumbled across these!
At first I had no clue what these things were...
Then I saw this!
No, there are no real animals. I was wondering if they were going to do a Damien Hirst and serve up sliced-up sharks and cows as art, but nope - apparently those little plaques are animal designs! You get a piece of paper and rub a pencil over them to see the design. So cute! =D
Even cuter:
Tiger: Noooooo! Save me! It's the Blue Rabbit!
*grins*
Lastly but not least: there’s U.S. Hoong’s Art of Seal Carving.
I never really thought about how much effort goes into these seals before this, but the calligraphy and the intricacy of the carving and the use of negative space is just as important in this as in any other art form - maybe more so because the space you have to work with is so tiny.
Apparently, this is one of the four arts of any scholar-artist in olden China - the other three being painting, calligraphy and poetry.
I’m glad they’ve loosened the standards for scholars nowadays. *laugh*
Besides the amazing exhibits, the museum itself is beautiful. I wandered around for a little more after that, taking random shots.
And since pictures are worth a thousand words, this photoessay of mine is worth a measly two pictures (though that doesn’t include my own photographs). I certainly saw many, many more artworks than that: so if this teensy little essay managed to interest you, what more the real thing? Make a trip down yourself.
It was a wonderful afternoon.