Contemporary Art

There is a point in my youthful years, where I used to write rather trashy reviews about the works I saw in the Venice Biennale 2005. Some people who read it thought that it was rather “humerous”, but I personally don’t like what i wrote. Hence, when I decided to write about my first experiences at the Singapore Biennale 2008, I had second thoughts. Reconsidering it, I am actually rather interested in the space the exhibition took place in – The City Hall.

I think that for many of the works I see, especially the video works, there is a strong feeling of the history of the space mixed into the work. Especially the pieces that are projected in the “Court Rooms”, there is an institutional feeling, that I feel produces certain healthy conflict with some pieces like Apitchatpong’s “Morakot” depicted in the images below. Apitchatpong’s piece is beautiful and lyrical, one of my favorite works in the show. But with the projection opposing the “seat” of the judge, and the audience stranded in the middle, I felt like some kind of interrogator. It was a little unsettling. “Morakot” depicts empty spaces of an old hotel with fluffy feather like particles floating in the air; a voice over depicts a conversation between a woman and a man, recounting certain memories and dreams; an electrical lamp hovers in front of the projection, providing some kind of an object of contemplation or focus as it emits orange and greenish light.

The images invite a certain imagination towards what the old hotel used to be like, how its former glory are lurking in the dark shadows of the room. The feathers conjure a fantasy world that makes us think that perhaps the old and the aging side of the hotel is but a dirty cover, once torn apart, it will be restored into its original state. The same feeling starts tearing into the installation space as we look at the empty courtroom. Who used to be trialed in the space? Where did the criminals once stand? Where were the lawyers? I pictured invisible eyelines bouncing around the room, and my imagination faltered and collapsed, and I am back into the dark and empty space, staring at the video and the lamp.

One of my favorite exhibition rooms in the Cityhall housed Sherman Ong’s exhibit, titled “Banjir Kemarau” (flooding in the time of drought). It is my favorite room because of the gracious white sofa – the only one of its kind in the whole show. As I slumped onto it, I relaxed, ooo it feels good, and I began to watch the video projected across the space. The video is more of a narrative film, which makes it interesting in the context of the exhibition. I have always wondered why the history of cinema and that of video art are seperated into two different streams, when the medium of moving-image itself is inherently a family of its own. If one is to argue that cinema is more “commercial”, appeal more to the masses, what about experimental films? How do you draw the line between them and video art? Personally, they are all the same to me. Maybe film as in celluloid film is different than analog or digital video, but brushing aside the technical aspect of things, we really cannot put throw “films” and “art” into different realms, and pursue separate discourses.

In the scenario of Sherman’s work, I would rather not call it a “narrative film played in loops in a contemporary art exhibition space”, but rather, a “moving-image work” where the artist/filmmaker decided to display it within a specific context – that of a white cube (museums, galleries, art spaces) as compared to a black box (theater). Coming back to “Banjir Kemarau”, the film first comes across as having a systematic rhythm. It depicts different families of migrants, foreign workers and permanent residents, in the context of HDB flats, plus a little twist – a Singapore that is running out of water. One immediately recalls thematically, Tsai Ming Liang’s “Wayward Cloud” and stylistically the films of Hou Hsiao Hsien. The various families including malay, Japan, Chinese, Indian and Italian, were shot having dialogues about different problems they face in their life, socially, politically and economically. The film was initially composed of only single wide shots, and stays this way for a while, until towards the end when Sherman start using a few close-ups and finally one and only one moving shot.

I enjoy the very natural acting by the cast, I am almost certain that the dialogue of the actors were developed from real life experiences, and the families were real “families”. In that sense, it is a kind of a documentary made with a certain structure dictated by the director, which is really interesting. After an hour or so, the film starts looping again, and I left the space. I bumped into Sherman incidentally later in the exhibition, as he was doing some sort of photo documentation around the Cityhall. He told me that his film will evolve over the course of the Biennale, and I will surely be back for a more exciting “second half” of the film, as he had promised.

At this point, I am rather tired as it is getting late in the night, and my mind just need some space from all the art I saw today. On this note, I just want to show some of the photographs of other works that I took an interest or liking to, which I photographed. Enjoy the images, and if you could, do go down to the site of the Singapore Biennale and look at the exhibitions.

“Maggots”, 2004, Sculptural Installation, by Pham Ngoc Duong