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Overview | Singapore Arts Festival | Singapore Art Show | Singapore Writers Festival | Singapore Biennale | ArtReach Events | Music Competitions | Golden Point Award | Sing Singapore | Noise Singapore | Busking Scheme | Other Events | Singapore Pavilion at Venice Biennale | Artists and their Works
Full curriculum vitae of the artists are available on request.
UNTITLED, 2007
Installation with metal beds, table, altar, paper, photographs, plantain trunks & sound recordings
About the Work
Invoking folk and urban myths, Da Wu Tang's spectre of the itinerant, Nomadic Traveler/Wanderer emerges in his installation for the
Singapore Pavilion. An iconic figure in Asian and Singapore contemporary art, Tang has been hugely effective in his deployment of signs,
symbols, metaphors and simple visual imagery in his practice, creating deeply affecting visual configurations in his installations.
This installation, assisted by the artist's son, sound artist Zai TANG, raises the metaphor of the 'road trip', rendered more poignant
in the context of the artist's personal history and journeys with his son. Two companion beds, positioned upright rather than on all
four legs, suggest the restlessness, rootless-ness, spiritual wandering and emotional estrangement that mark the travelling life. A
portable ancestral altar, a hand-made album of drawings and photographs and other found objects underscore a somewhat monastic,
transient existence that is marked by conscience, remembrance and reconciliations.
Da Wu Tang incorporates in this installation the Jantung Pisang series, which traces the folk myths of the versatile banana plant. The
plant or bud is not only consumed in various rituals in Southeast Asia but forms an integral part of the legends and narratives of
regional culture. The artist's drawings, featuring profiles and portraits of people and faces, are wrapped round the plantain tree trunks
and strapped to beds as well as benches for viewers to mount.
The meticulous, almost obsessive register of aural recordings offer a glimpse into the extraordinary fullness and richness of sounds in
a single day in Venice - spanning the rumble of early trains on tracks, church bells, canal boats, pigeons in the piazza and the strains
of street buskers from violinists to accordion players and singers. These extracts of sounds, fleeting sensations and edited film
footage, intentionally obscure time and enact the experience of encountering a location through glimpses and partial views - suggesting
the frailties of such recollections and memories.
About the Artist
Da Wu Tang (b 1943) is an iconic figure in Asian contemporary art and Singapore's performance art history. The 1999 Laureate of the 10th
Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize (Arts & Culture), Japan, Tang is recognised as profoundly shaping a generation of contemporary artists in
Singapore. In the late 1980s, Tang founded The Artists Village (TAV) - the first notable artists' colony-commune in Singapore. TAV
fuelled alternative art through a broad 'culture of resistance' to the conventions and protocols of mainstream art practice in Singapore.
Tang's work through the vehicle of the collective was immensely influential, impacting on successive efforts by contemporary local
artists to form and run other art collectives.
A graduate of National Youth Leadership Institute, Singapore (1968), Tang had his first solo exhibition of drawings and paintings in
1970. He later pursued advanced art studies at the Birmingham Polytechnic of Fine Art, UK, graduating with First Class Honours in Fine
Art (majoring in Sculpture) in 1974, and started performances as part of his repertoire in 1979. During the 1980s, Tang enrolled at St
Martin's School of Art and subsequently graduated with a Masters of Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London (1985). He was
also actively participating in performance art festivals during the 1980s. Many of Tang's works employ simple, powerful motifs as well
as the poetics of myths and narratives (eg Jantung Pisang series). His performances and signature graphite drawings address topical,
environmental and social issues, including the consumption of endangered animal parts (Tiger's Whip, 1991) and national and cultural
identities (I Was Born Japanese, 1995). Tang's belief in the potential of the individual and collective to effect social changes
underlie many of his community / public art projects, workshops and performances (One Hand Prayer Project, 1996).
ANDY'S WONDER LAND, 2007
- Hawk Suburbia Lawn
- Andy Padded Cell
- Harry Pet Hotel
- Haven Rapture Garden
- Holy Lounge
About the Work
The idea of peregrinations (wandering by foot) surfaces in the 5-room installation by Vincent LEOW, frequently referred to
as an enfant terrible of Singapore contemporary art and founder of the alternative art space, Plastique Kinetic Worms (PKW). In the
spirit of the fabulous beasts of Venetian fables, Andy's Wonder Land features the hybrid creatures of a man-bird, Hawk, and the
irrepressible figure of the man-dog, Andy, inspired by the artist's own mongrel pet. Leow's sculptures are based on two paintings
(Bombs Away; Andy's Addiction,) in the Flying Circus series executed by Leow in 1996. Leow's menagerie of phantasmogoric animals was
prompted by the idea of 'the-marvelous-in-the-every-day', and that are engaged in activities of delire lucide (lucid delirium) -
notions influenced by the tradition of surrealists and its variants including the writings of Czech poet Petr Kral.
A remarkable imagist and absorbing visual story-teller, Leow is noted for 'trafficking in images' and in mixing tropes - cross-dipping
into kitsch, film, literature and pop culture sources to produce images that span sexual, social and cultural politics. His sources
span the works of filmmakers Tarkovsky, to Greenaway and Tarantino, to the folk art of Indian and Chinese prints to the street kitsch
of shops that peddle religious icons and statuaries, to the over-the-top styling of Vegas casino strips.
For the Singapore Pavilion, Leow has invoked the language of the mise-en-scène for each of his 5 rooms. A suburban zinc hut, a padded
asylum, a glass hot-house, a wrought-iron fence surrounding a mound of human hair, form the terrain of the Wonder Land of its title.
Its protagonist Andy - with his inimitable grin - reigns in this domain, despite apparent containment and confinement. . Deftly juggling
different genres and cross-breeding different aesthetic styles, Leow suggests how Andy the mongrel counteracts systems of 'Dogmatism'
and does what writer Rushdie calls the rejoicing in 'Mongrelisation', and 'our mongrel selves' (through which 'new-ness enters the world'
- Imaginary Homelands: Essays & Criticism 1981-1991, S. Rushdie, Penguin/Granta, UK 1991/92).
About the Artist
Vincent Leow (b. 1961) stakes a long, prolific and alternative art practice in Singapore's contemporary art development. Celebrated as
one of the art community's enfant terrible, Leow has since come to represent one of the most sustained alternative practices and
affirmed as a remarkable imagist in Singapore contemporary art.
Co-founder of the now defunct UTOPIA and a founder of the artist-managed space Plastique Kinetic Worms (PKW), Leow was first
initiated into the culture of the collective at The Artists Village (TAV), founded in 1988 by the iconic Da Wu Tang (b 1943). He
has been integral to the development of 'the art collective' as an alternative form of social organization in Singapore's art history.
The significance of Leow's early paintings is made more apparent in the context of the dominant modes of painting in Singapore during
the 1980s - where lyrical and formalistic abstraction held centre-stage with realist and naturalistic genres. His raw and visceral
canvases bore the influence of German painters such as Georg Baselitz and A.R. Penck. These gestural paintings formed the emergence of
unapologetic aggression, blatant sexuality and emotional temperament in the field of painting in Singapore. Leow's later paintings
assumed several shifts, particularly during and after his art studies in the USA (1991) on several art scholarships.
Some of Leow's works in the 1990s were marked by an 'urban street style', others by a Pop-art sensibility, yet others evolving a highly
individual visual vocabulary - prompting art writers to describe his practice as epitomizing 'post-modern strategies'. Leow continues to
incorporate a spectrum of iconography from visual culture - from MTV to Chinese classics to political propaganda. Engaging a range of
media that has manifested in performances, installations, sculptures, digital and mixed-media works, Leow's practice has maintained the
element of anarchy and rebellion.
In 1992, Leow's performance of drinking his own urine, later elaborated upon through the packing and sale of bottles of urine,
epitomized Leow's artful handling of 'underground, subversive' practices with a savvy understanding of the mechanics of market
consumption and its desire for and absorption of infamy, scandal and controversy.
JUST DHARMA, 2007
Installation with unglazed porcelain and light bulbs & fabric
LIGHT WEIGHT, 2007
Installation with found objects
About the Work
The debut of a ceramicist at the Singapore Pavilion, Jason Lim's participation testifies to the kind of multi-genre, multi-disciplinary
forms of visual art engagements that have characterized Singapore contemporary art. A 'maverick' ceramicist, Lim is also at the
forefront of current performance art practices in Singapore - a field that has been marked by its tumultuous relationship with the
State and its regulations from 1994-2003.
A Muslim convert, raised in a Buddhist household and educated in a Catholic mission school, Lim's engagement with the art forms
(ceramics and performance art) that conventionally straddle two poles in the spectrum of practices has led to personal and professional
interest in the idea and metaphor of hybridity - that infamous condition of post-modernity with its suggestions of
'cross-breeding, impurity and intermingling'.
The most conscientiously site-specific pieces for this project, Jason Lim's two works for the Singapore Pavilion respond explicitly to
the vintage Murano chandeliers in the Palazzo Franchetti. Just Dharma, is a 'hybrid-chandelier' form composed from almost
2000 pieces of egg-shell porcelain and fitted with light bulbs. Based on the shape of the lotus - that emblem of Asian Buddhist cultures
-, the installation suggests an 'architectural cluster of prayers', recalling Thai-Buddhist Loy Krathong rituals where 'lotus structures'
are floated as prayers in the river. His reference to dharma as a philosophy of the Natural Law or Order of Things or a higher truth is
further underscored by his planned act that alludes to iconoclasm - the act of smashing of images in certain religions. Lim's work is
slated to be dropped and 'smashed' at the launch of the Pavilion.
Lim's other work continues the idea of hope and aspirations in an installation that adopts the shape of the 'shadow of the chandelier'
- its shadow-form fashioned from junk and detritus collected over a decade. As with many writers including Walter Benjamin who probe
how life histories attach to objects, the artist's proposition lies in how hopes and dreams are lived out in these objects and
how over time these junk objects out-live their owner's dreams. For Lim, these objects (comprising junk, kitsch items, mementoes)
are resurrected and redeemed items from the 'urban nomad' - a figure at once familiar to city-dwellers accustomed to intra-city
migrations and displacements.
About the Artist
Jason Lim (b. 1966) is Singapore's leading contemporary ceramics sculptor and performance artist. Regarded as a maverick in the
ceramics field, Lim has radically shifted assumptions about ceramics as a discipline, pushing its potential as a media in installation
and performance art pieces.
A graduate of St. Martins College of Art & Design (Ceramics), London in 1992, and later of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
University, Lim has undertaken numerous artistic residencies and exhibitions overseas including UK, the USA, Australia Southeast Asia
and Japan. He has also been at the forefront of performance art practices, and has been co-Artistic Director of the performance event
series Future of Imagination.
Dubbed by the Business Times as 'Singapore's most exciting ceramicist' in 2004, Lim has stretched the predictable uses of clay,
thwarting conventional definitions of a 'ceramicist'. Moving beyond pots and vessels, Lim's series of non-functional creations have
often formed sculptural installations and assemblages. His 1995 exhibition, Three Tonnes of Clay, featured clay and grog
(fired clay) flung and smeared on gallery walls and himself - marking his practice with an improvisational and provocative quality not
previously registered in the history of modern ceramics in Singapore.
Frequently self-reflexive, Lim has written and spoken extensively about the crisis and predicament of working within a craft tradition
that has been shaped by notions of the 'master and apprentice' and which has emphasized the discipline and technical proficiency of the
craft. In response to addressing such dilemmas, Lim has perversely developed detailed clay recipes of 'errors, weaknesses and flaws'
such as the common defects of 'crazing' and 'shivering' in clay work.
In this respect, Lim's exploration of the concept of hybridity - running through so much of his work -has particular resonance.
The concept of hybridity, with its celebration of 'intermingling and impurity' (terms made famous by Salman Rushdie) functions
as a strategy of resistance against of a guarded, absolutist tradition in which the fiction of 'absolute purity' is maintained as a
cardinal ideal.
SONIC DOME: AN EMPIRE OF THOUGHT, 2007
Sound Installation with fibre-glass, metal, wood, sound tweeters
About the Work
Marking the first time that a sound artist is represented at the Singapore Pavilion, Zulkifle Mahmod's (Zul) sound
installation, 'Sonic Dome - An Empire of Thoughts' evokes a repertoire of ideas and ideologies relating to the notion of
Empire. These include references to the legendary Venetian Empire during the 13th to 17th centuries when it was a
thriving mercantile and maritime republic. The Venetian Empire has since been invoked as a complex construct by social and cultural
theorists in their study of the myths of Exploration and Discovery, and of Venice's subsequent re-invention as the City of Dreams and a
tourist destination.
It is difficult to ignore the implicit references to more contemporary forms of 'imperialism' occurring in present day contexts when
examining the artist's larger body of work. Earlier works have addressed new forms of urban migration and the expanding empires of
technology. The artist has challenged the notion of 'freedoms' pledged through increasingly 'borderless' interactions - preferring to
view such freedoms as 'fictions' along with the myths of free speech and the free market in light of the corresponding growth of
systems of surveillance and control.
One of a fistful of sound artists in Singapore, Zul considers 'sound or utterance, a political act' that can empower through its
capacity to mobilize the imagination. With influences that span Indonesian folk-rock activist Iwan Falz (1961-) to UK theorist Michael
Bull's writings on aural culture in metropolitan cities, Zul's works, like the other artists in the Singapore Pavilion, discloses
evidence of borrowing and 'quotations' from diverse sources.
Zul's 30-minute sonic composition emitting from a 4 metre dome, begins innocuously and acquires a hypnotic, seductive quality but
amplifies and intensifies to a volume that thrusts the listener out of their comfort zone. Zul's composition features recordings of
sounds in Venice and Singapore. These include taped ambient sounds of vaporetto engines and canal-water lapping against jetty platforms,
the strains of jazz music from a piazza and a dense archive of sounds taken at different times and locations in Singapore. The artist
also taped 'created' sounds made from the electrical circuits of over 20 electronic toys retrieved from the Salvation Army and local
stores in Singapore. The circuit boards of these toys (including a talking parrot and miniature keyboard set) were dis-assembled,
re-wired and reconfigured to manufacture tones totally different from their original sounds.
The Sonic Dome bears the marks of Retro-Futuristic aesthetics, and carries motifs and symbols such as the ubiquitous quatrefoil
design found in the façade of the neo-Gothic Palazzo. It also features the Lion's head, in its allusion to Singapore ('Singa': Lion)
as the Lion City as well as to popular references to Venice as the Lion city.
About the Artist
Zulkifle Mahmod (b. 1975) is at the forefront of a generation of sound-media artists in Singapore's contemporary art development.
An Associate Artist at the alternative art space The Substation, Zul's practice signals a more encompassing and expanded visual
arts sensory experience.
Zul has frequently worked in the context of the artist collective - being the co-founder of Studio 19 and Pink Ark.
Studio 19 has hosted a number of art initiatives including the successful Live Art series featuring performance and video art,
with a range of established and emerging performance artists in Singapore. Pink Ark, formed with fellow artist Kai Lam, in 2004 to
pursue 'experimental sound art', marked a milestone as the first sound collective in Singapore. It subsequently organised Singapore's
first 24-hour Sound Art Festival (Una Voce, 2005).
Adopting a multi-disciplinary/multi-genre approach, that also include drawings, prints, sculptures and ready-mades, Zul has exhibited
in Singapore, Thailand, Germany, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Norway and Finland. His notable initiatives include an
industrial-sound inspired soundtrack in conjunction with an Antoni Tapies exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum and a series of 5
sound performances (False Securities, 2005) using binaural field recordings and digitally processed sounds. He was an invited
artist for the Ogaki Biennale 2006 in Japan organized by the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) and collaborated
with Singapore collective Kill Your Television (KYTV) for "Asia Arts Live!" presented by Guling St. Avant-Garde Theatre in Taipei,
Taiwan.
 Lindy POH is a professional curator, writer and lawyer specializing in intellectual property, entertainment and media law. She is an advocate and solicitor and legal partner in a Singapore-USA law firm, Balkenende Chew & Chia, (in association with Samuel Seow Law Corporation) with a background in Construction Law and Intellectual Property. In the legal field, she works primarily with architects, artists, developers, writers, entertainers, playwrights, filmmakers, publishers, agents and photographers.
She is a founder of Silver Rue, a Singapore-based art consultancy (Reg in 1998) that provides visual culture consultancy. Formerly a curator at the Singapore Art Museum (1996-2000), she curates, produces and manages projects in the visual arts, culture and heritage for local and overseas exhibitions and events, including Hong Kong, Japan, and Italy. Her special interests include photography, film, printmaking, Southeast Asian art, contemporary art and art education.
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