Was really excited when we decided to go for Singapore Biennale on a Friday. It was a really great experience and opened my eyes to different artforms from all over the world.
Sadly though, I only managed to go to the South Beach Development and City Hall’s (so basically I missed out all the slippers and containers installment!!!). Here are some of the shots taken that day. In the second part of the entry I’d start on the blog assignment and talk about the artwork that I felt was good and one that I felt wasn’t really.
City Hall
Tropicana
Maggots
Raw Canvas
Xteriors
I seriously seriously loved this. Cracks me up everytime I see it.
Bachelor – The Dual Body
Blackfield
Irrelevant, but this little girl was so cute! She was dancing and twirling in her own world outside the Supreme Court that day when we were standing outside.
South Beach Development
This place is totally cool – Ms Chiang said if she were to have an exhibition it’d be her kind of place. I can understand why after being there! It’s rundown, old, tattered, very textured and the building itself seems to have so much to say.
Anyway, here are some of the shots there.
Fei Zao
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Creepy Area
Hair Salon
Okay there were alot others which I’ve not really processed and uploaded. But anyway, here’s the start of the blog exercise (Sorry about the overflooding of pics).
For me, I feel that art is very fluid, dynamic. I think that ideas and the spirit of the artist are the things that are more permanent. However, of course, nothing is permanent. For art installations, I love those that disintegrates itself or changes over the whole timespan of the exhibition.
So I kind of liked the September Sweetness decaying work, even though most found it disgusting and slightly senseless (well the smell kind of stinks though). I thought it was rather amazing, the work which the artist put through, and let it decay/get eaten/melted in the hot sun. the way the Biennale guide explained it, “..will deteriote as the days of the Biennale progress. In some places it will melt and spill into syrup. In others, it will crack and fall in chunks; elsewhere, armies of ants will slowly dismantly the edifice granule by granule. Heavy rain brought about during monsoon season could destroy the piece quickly. The hoice of sugar as material locates the work in a soceity that percolates in bitterness, a sweetening agent that appears to make things palatable..” (I found his flickr set!Click)
Anyway, back to the topic, I’m torn between two installations for “good” pieces I like.
I love the work Tropicana, by E Chen. The sculptures were made of woollen yarn.
(the scooter, bushes, flowers, ivy growing on walls and around the lamp etc)
I guess with a mother who crochets and me trying to learn how to knit makes me more interested in such works. However, one part of the artwork which caught my interest was the tips of the yarn were hooked to the ceiling.
Initially, I thought it was for extra support so that the artwork won’t fall (or something). But after reading the guide (and incredulously thinking to myself why would the artist hold up his work with the yarn connected to the sculptures (when obviously it’d just cause the artwork to disintegrate and become, well, a lump of yarn if you attempt to support the whole weight on it), I realised that it’s acutally pulled by a motor inside the ceiling which was very slowly winding up the yarn. Basically, the installation would have been gone after the exhibition. It coincides with my ideas of how nothing is permanent.
Another reason to why I like it is because it broke the convention of how sculptures should be – solid, angled, fixed and more.. “cold”. This work is very alive, soft, flexible and appealing.
The other “good” artwork that I like is the Blackfield by Ben-David, Zadok. I found the use of colour (one side black and the other side coloured), intricate details of each piece of metallic plants to how each is “planted” on the sand in the installation area brilliantly amazing. All the coloured side are facing one direction (thus the black side will be facing another direction).
The coloured side of the installation is very cheerful and happy, and the other side is stark black. According to the guide, the black side is like a scorched landscape against the sand. Maybe the artist meant it to show how we’re kind of destroying the colourful, joyful landscape with global warming and what-nots and destroying it? I’m not really sure about that, but it was beautiful nevertheless.
The “bad” artwork I didn’t get, totally, was The Yellow Mountain, Tse, Su-Mei.
(I didn’t take a picture of that. Think was too shocked.)
Upon entering the really dark room, we were greeted by a very eerie, mournful music and this yellow ball rose up in the midst of the chinese painting. So basically we stood there for very long to see what’s going on. But nothing came out! We left the room feeling very baffled.
..However! I did a little search because I cannot believe that it is THAT meaningless – this is the Biennale after all! And this is what I found.
“my other favourite, “the yellow mountain” by Tse, Su- Mei. She has another work at the south beach development which i quite like too. I “googled” her and found some of her other pieces which resonated with my thinking. anyway, this is a video which shows a shan shui hua and a moving orange circle. the circle rises like the sun initially but then it gradually moves around the “painting” to cease being a sun. The description for this work says that it is the artist trying to poke fun at chinese paintings. Because when we hear that it is a chinese painting, we immediately have pre-conceived ideas of how it should appear, in fact my friend refused to enter the room to look at it. Luckily my curiosity got better of me and in the end we both liked it. The humour was in the orange circle that we all assumed is the sun, but ended up to be like pac-man when it devoured a huge chunk of the mountain. I liked the music that came with the video, it was a good match, which is not surprising since the artist was born into a family of musicians. i’m glad i saw this. “
..okay. I guess we really totally missed the pacman part. It would have been funny I guess.
