FUTURE of IMAGINATION International Performance Art Event, Singapore, 2008

www.foi.sg Future of Imagination 5

Future of Imagination 5 1 Contents

Prognosis: Comparative Indicators for Future Actions 4 Lee Wen

Time and Again: 8 Present-ing the Future in the Public of Performance Art Adele Tan

Resonant Relationships: 14 The One-to-One performance Lynn Lu

Document & Performance or 20 How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Lens Bruce Quek

Artists’ Biographies Adina Bar-On (Israel) 30 Angie Seah (Singapore) 31 Cai Qing (Germany/China) 32 Cheng Guang Feng (China) 33 Chia Chu Yia (Singapore/Malaysia) 24 Dariusz Fodczuk (Poland) 35 Duan Ying Mei (Germany/China) 36 Fabien Montmartin (France) 37 Gwendoline Robin (Belgium) 38 Helmut Lemke (Germany/UK) 39 Jason Lim (Singapore) 40 Kai Lam (Singapore) 41 Lee Wen (Singapore) 42 Lynn Lu (Singapore) 43 Melati Suryodarmo (Germany/Indonesia) 44 Mongkol Plienbangchang (Thailand) 45 Myriam Laplante (Canada/Italy) 46 Ronaldo Ruiz (The Philippines) 47 Sabrina Koh (Singapore) 48 Yuenjie Maru (Hong Kong) 49 Zai Kuning (Singapore) 50

Forum Speakers 51

Cover photo: ‘Past Now Present’, Kenny McBride, Future of Imagination 4, 72-13, theatreWorks, Singapore Photo by Urich Lau

2 Future of Imagination 5 Essays

Future of Imagination 5 3 Prognosis: Comparative Indicators for Future Actions

Lee Wen

4 Future of Imagination 5 In August 2001, I participated in the 2nd Open Art Festival in Sichuan, China organised by Chen Jin, Shu Yang and Zhu Ming.1 This was my first visit to the Chinese mainland. On arrival we were told that the venue would have to be changed from the Beijing suburbs (as was originally planned) to undisclosed venues in Chengdu, Sichuan, because the organisers feared that the police might have caught wind of the event and was preparing to shut it down. We took a 36-hour train journey to Chengdu and sought out a rustic unused brick factory near Pengshan, a small town outside Chengdu. We also performed on an island in the midstream of a river facing the Giant Buddha monument in Leshan and eventually ended in Chengdu on the last day.

The situation in China had changed tremendously over the years and by the time I returned again in 2004 (and later in 2006), performance festivals were becoming more openly held in Beijing. This October I participated in the ‘UP-ON First International Live Art Festival’ in Chengdu. I had helped organise and curate the foreign artists while Chengdu-based artists, Zhou Bin, Liu Cheng Yin and Yan Cheng were the artist-organisers curating the artists from China.2 UP-ON in Chengdu was followed up by two smaller events in Chongqing and Xi-An as the foreign artists split into two groups to go to the two different cities.3 The events were reported favourably in the local newspapers as well as on broadcast television. What a contrast from my first encounter in 2001 when we practically felt like fugitive artists on the run from the authorities and the law. At the same time, the audiences have grown to include not only artists and friends but also dedicated students and an enthusiastic public.

Chia Chu Yia, Sleeping with the ignorance, UP-ON First International Live Art Festival, Chengdu, China, 2008

Future of Imagination 5 5 Huang Ling, “KVCIO 症 / The Illness of KVCIO”, 2008’Vital-Chongqing International Live Art Festival, 2008

Despite various organisational problems and frictions one cannot but feel positive about contributions which helped bring about transformations in society via artistic processes. However, at the end of the performances and discussions with the audiences, some prevailing and recurrent questions gnawingly remain concerning the reception and continuation of performance art or even contemporary art practices in reality. If we comparatively examine the situation in China with Singapore some telltale signs show up glaringly the characteristics of how our society functions and perhaps also point towards future actions for facilitating desired changes and development.

Authorities in both countries responded to performance art with severe censure at the outset but this was later followed by acceptance. Since 1991, the National Arts Council has funded the development of the arts and culture in Singapore. The controversial performances in 1994 by Josef Ng and Shannon Tham, during an event co-organised by The Artists’ Village, alternative art group and 5th Passage, an artists-run space, however, resulted in a 10-year funding ban on performance art and sanctions on exhibitions for Ng and Tham.4 In the same year, Zhu Ming and Ma Liuming were arrested and imprisoned after police interrupted a performance event at the East Village, an informal artists’ colony in Beijing.5

6 Future of Imagination 5 Josef Ng relocated to Bangkok and is now a respected curator of a major art gallery in Bangkok, while Shannon Tham is an art director with a successful career in advertising and design. Zhu Ming and Ma Liuming who once underwent distressing arraignment for performance art have now gained fame and are today sought after in the international art market.6 After facing censure from the authorities or even legal action, artists in China could still re-establish themselves as artists, albeit of the money-spinning entrepreneurial kind, whereas Ng and Tham have had to give up their artistic ambitions and find new directions elsewhere.

Contemporary art has gained increased media attention with international biennales set up in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing; more new art magazines have been initiated and writing on art has acquired sophistication and depth in China. Even after the second edition of our international biennale, Singapore’s media are still looking for verification as if the claim of cultural and art renaissance pertains only to the ages of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Any new art magazine that is able to last for more than three issues or exist past half a year can therefore pat themselves on their back for trying.

Performance art in China was chastised in the past on the grounds of obscenity and nudity. Although still frowned upon by the more conservative sections of society, there is enough tolerance and sophistication today for nudity to be accepted as art rather than as an indecent or morally offensive act. Such performances found their way into newspaper and television reports although one hastens to detect the proclivity for prospective sensationalism.

The greater ease of use and proliferation of mobile phone cameras, cheaper video and digital cameras has become an irritating and distracting feature during every performance art event. Stern announcements and signs to restrict the use of mobile phones or requests to switch them to silent mode or prohibiting their use often end in failure. At a most tense moment, an excited photographer will be closing in on a view, obscuring that of others; someone’s phone will ring, breaking the concentration of both the artist and the audience. Despite the newfound embrace of performance, there is now a need for more sensitivity and self-discipline amongst the audience.

Art students in China till today are not taught performance art in schools – although they are allowed to perform, they will not be assessed for those works done – but performance art has begun to be introduced into the Singapore schools’ curriculum. That said, young artists in Singapore schools have strongly tended towards reproducing Western models or methods seen in art books and magazines without much regard for our own local contemporary history and performance artists. Young students in China are getting increasingly interested in performance art but the education system there responds not to the demands of the students but has accommodated more the inclinations of a rigid hierarchy.

One of the two festival venues in Chengdu had to be changed just three days before the festival began. The management of the intended venue abruptly decided for us to be part of another Festival of Flowers beginning more than a week later than originally planned despite having been agreed upon the terms of the sponsorship months before. Zhou Bin and his co-organisers were fortunate to able to find an alternative venue and sponsor but they had to re-print all posters and re-send invitations. In Singapore, venues have to be booked months if not a year ahead. Our strict

Future of Imagination 5 7 2) Duan Ying Mei, “忧郁”----段英梅2015 年重庆现代艺术中心 / “Melancholy “ - Duan Yingmei, 2015 Chongqing Contemporary Art Center, 2008’Vital-Chongqing International Live Art Festival, 2008 Photo: Lee Wen licensing requirements for public performances simply make this an impossible-to-imagine worst- case scenario.

“Performance” has become a key word in not only the study of art but also a wide variety of activities ranging from religious rituals, trading markets, to the Olympics, and performance as a field has been described as an anti-disciplinary discipline resisting conclusions.7 The negotiating, organising and enacting of live performance art programmes could also be seen as a larger collective performance. Based on the comparative observations of these experiences above, one can discern distinct differences and characteristics between the state of affairs in Singapore and China or elsewhere. And in order to rationally consider what needs to be changed or even have the confidence in our own capacity to make these transformations depends on our disposition to either yield to the status quo or renew and fortify our commitment towards a higher life ideal.

8 Future of Imagination 5 (Endnotes)

1 2nd Open Art Festival, Pengshan, Leshan and Chengdu, Sichuan, 8 to 17 August 2001: http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~ee1s-ari/sichuan.html

2 Zhou Bin and I started discussions more than a year ago when I was on a site research visit for my own project in June 2007. Zhou Bin and Liu Chengyin had just initiated UP-ON Live Art Space in an old factory building dedicated to performance art practice. Unfortunately the building was demolished 5 months after. http://www.up-onspace.com/

3 2008’Vital-Chongqing International Live Art Festival organised by Yan Yan, 501 Contemporary Art Centre and 2008 Xian International Live Art Festival organised by Xiang Xishi, Fang Yan Contemporary Art Space, 16 to 17 October.

4 Ray Langenbach, “Looking Back at Brother Cane: Performance Art and State Performance”, 1995 Space, Spaces and Spacing, The Substation Conference1995.The Substation Singapore 1996. P.132-147 Ray Langenbach, Performing the Singapore State 1988 – 1995, PhD thesis, Center for Cultural Research, University of Sydney. August 2003, Ch.7, p. 207-239 http://library.uws.edu.au/adt-NUWS/uploads/approved/adt-NUWS20041027.174118/public/08Chapter7.pdf

5 Thomas J Berghuis, Performance Art in China, Timezone 8, Hong Kong, 2006

6 Detractors have even questioned the integrity of recent works by Chinese artists including performance artists who now employ capitalist production means to meet the frenzied demands of the booming art market. Zhu Qi, ‘Experimenting with Art Capitalism in China’, trans Modi , Art Map, December 2007, issue 7, Beijing, China, pp 16-36; Zhu Qi, ‘Art Capitalism in China (Part I & II)’, http://www.artzinechina.com/display.php?a=602 http://www.artzinechina.com/display_vol_aid603_en.html

7 Marvin A Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, New York and London, 199, pp 188-9

Future of Imagination 5 9 Time and Again: Present-ing the Future in the Public of Performance Art

Adele Tan

They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

-- The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)

10 Future of Imagination 5 I have been thinking about time. This should come as no real surprise given that this event is titled “Future of Imagination” (FOI) and the term “time-based art” is repeated no less than three times in the first two paragraphs of the FOI press statement for 2008. Time is a formal, ontological element in any performance or theatrical event and as such looks almost too self- evident and easily taken for granted. Yet should the “time-basedness” of performance practice hold more promise than an emphatic rhetorical gesture?

Here, I want to take the term more seriously than when it was summarily dispensed as a neutered description, to allow me to ponder how performance works to make us think about time politically and philosophically. As much as the culture industry is now built on identity and memory, we have not got to the task of asking what time and history has got to do with this, and how power, violence and capital are embroiled within the thinking and working through of time-based art.

To prescribe an event title such as “Future of Imagination” immediately puts into play the past, present and future. These categories are however not locked in a rigid linear progression but are to be set about with a dialectical disposition, embodied succinctly in the French artist Orlan’s arched motto “Remember the Future”.1 This emphasis on the dimension of the future is a hopeful gambit that poses to us the imperative of transformation in time. This turn of the gaze and imagination toward the future is a typical modernist and avant-gardist standpoint, a belief in a succession of technological and theoretical triumphs. Or in a postmodern twist, the future beckons the deferral of closures, the welcoming embrace of the yet-to-come and the yet-to-be. FOI could technically also be an infinite series of events, coming one after another, year after year, until of course it runs up against the limits of state funding and forbearance.

Yet abutting this futural logic is another question: “If not now, when?”2 Could our ability to act be sundered by the habitual postponement of change, thereby making us peremptorily rush to the conclusion that “the future is now”? Or to phrase this counter-question more generously, in what ways are directives toward the future aids to helping us grapple with the now? Contemporary life has been perceived as condensed into a perpetual, ever-lasting present, an all-at-once, and it is now the present that proves intractable to comprehension but amenable to consumption. Can performance be one of the many instruments to dialecticize and deconstruct the mythic meanings of the present and find out what constitutes it? I say this because performance art is unusually well-placed due to its constitutive ties to ephemerality (an elusive ever-shifting present) and to the mediated document, and hence is a connective tissue between ways of being and seeing.3

To be sure, discursive strategies in art and performance studies have capitalized and elaborated upon the paradoxes of time and the futural flux. Chief among such disquisition is the psychoanalytic conception of time, Sigmund Freud’s nachträglichkeit or what we now translate as “afterwardness” or deferred action. This implies a complex reciprocal relationship between an earlier significant event and its later reactivation (seen as a repeat or re-enactment of the original event), causing a reinvestment with renewed meaning and psychic efficacy. This means that there is a vital gap between the immediate experience and receptive understanding.

Future of Imagination 5 11 And not only is there a movement from the past to the future, but also in the retroactivity, a movement from the future toward the past. The former is deterministic whereby a past governs the present, whilst the latter is hermeneutic where the past is read from the vantage point of the present but for which the past is never wholly factual or fully decipherable.4 Therefore in performance, its forcefulness derives from working through a distance and temporal delay that enables a spatio-temporal significance to be grasped as representation at one remove from the actual event. The foregrounding of duration in performance, especially when linked in with materially lived experiences, consecrates a dialogical encounter with and witnessing of shared and anticipated histories or fantasies.

It may well be true that performance art runs its integrity through the horizon of oppositional resistances it mounts against other steadfastly crude modes of socio-historical perception. But as “indeterminacy” has perforce been poached to become part of the rubric of capitalist spectacle, we are compelled to now examine how our time-based art slips quietly into a discomfiting partnership with a globalised imaginary that has eviscerated real conflict and contagion, a “present” made compliant to media images of reality. In a highly prescient essay, Fredric Jameson had already called us out as an era that imbibes this “nostalgia for the present”, whereby our perception of our present is as a literal past of a constructed, determinately fantasized future.5 We have been therefore living an historical timeline fully created by period film set in Hollywood or the dull hygienised network television. The future challenge for time-based art is thus to resuscitate a proper contemporaneous frame for historical inquiry without history being reduced to a cultural style. Art as a performative testimony then serves to mend that disconnect between events and experiences.

The case for critically engaging with the “now” has been made incumbent upon us as citizens of an emerging world order that is fashioned by “atavism” and “new-fangledness”, all shoehorned into a nightmarish eternal present.6 The best and excoriating summation of our current particular consumer temporality is given by the group of critics who call themselves RETORT in their provocative volume Afflicted Powers:

Modernity, particularly in its consumer society manifestation, is less and less able to offer its subjects ways to live in the present, and to have the flow of time be accepted and inhabited as it happens. And this is precisely because it stakes everything on celebrating – perpetuating – the here and now. Lately it has built an extraordinary apparatus to enable individuals to image, archive, digitalize, objectify, and take ownership of the passing moment. The here and now is not endurable, it seems (or at least, not fully real), unless it is told or shown, immediately and continuously, to others – or to oneself. The cellphone, the digital replay, instant messaging, “real time” connectivity, the video loop. Far be it from us – image-lovers to a fault – to say that giving an experience visual form means not living it. It depends on what the imaging is for. But there is a kind of visualization, we all know in our bones (and common parlance is often scathing on the subject), that is essentially a mechanism of defense

12 Future of Imagination 5 – a way of deliberately alienating the moment, and putting the non-lived, the non-significant, at a distance. …

Consumer culture is many faceted. For example, the gadgetry of instant objectification is nowadays accompanied by a wider realm of commodity appearance – in advertising, design, the whole staging of commodity life in commercials and info-tainment—more and more oriented to the past. Once upon a time what commodities promised was the future, above all. Now a whole (dominant) class of them exists to invent a history, a lost time of togetherness and stability, that everyone claims to remember but no one quite had.7

All this should not be lost on the participants and viewers at FOI, for it is but a short step to go from a “future of imagination” to a “future of an illusion”, as was forewarned by RETORT. Their comments are all the more pertinent for FOI because the time-based art it stages is dependent on the portable, pseudo-memory devices that are our digital cameras and videos, a barrage of these almost guaranteed at any performance event. Will it be increasingly true that a recording of an event will no longer be an aide-memoire but an unlooked-at, invisible document that allows us to disavow and displace a present actuality from consciousness?8

*********** It has been said that one can never step into the same river twice and as FOI gets into its fifth year, it has returned to a place which briefly hosted it in 2004 – the Sculpture Square. This cannot be the same place as it was before, and indeed its management has shifted hands to be now overseen by the people running our veritable Arts House. But I want to take this return to Sculpture Square as an opportunity to think and reiterate the conjunction of place, public and the time of performance.

By placing performance art within the arena of the Sculpture Square, not only is performance brought back into contiguity with the plastic arts, (think Joseph Beuys’s “social sculpture” and Gilbert and George’s The Singing Sculpture), it also gives us the occasion to yoke performance to and against “Public Art”, most often seen as sculptural installations in plazas and squares and as tokenistic surpluses for the accrual of value to public spaces.9 But what if the performances at FOI aspire to a different condition of ‘Public Art’, that is with a new envisioning of the “public”, a kind that seeks to mobilize the public in both conscious knowledge and unconscious desires? Could the Sculpture Square be akin to Jurgen Habermas’s albeit idealist conception of a public sphere where “private people come together as a public”10, to freely and reasonably associate, think and discuss in order to keep in check the domination of state powers and mass media?9

If FOI has a vested interest in time and the future, it is in the public that it has placed its hopes for time’s amplification and expatiation. FOI is a temporal imagination that requires us the Singaporean public to be recovered as “adult”people, with with developed political, intellectual and ethical agency, with an expanded time sense to be cognizant of historical specificities as

Future of Imagination 5 13 well as consequences of our decision-making. That said, the lack of consciousness of time and our surrender to its micromanagement has led to weakened citizenship. The modus operandi of governance here has in ways removed the meaningful distinctions to be made between country, government and political party, assisted in no small way by the rise of media technologies that collapse truth into news live-feeds and melodramatic spectacles.

Hence, I will argue that to consider the performance art that FOI presents as public art is to see the sympathies in argument that both realms bring to the table. Both are immersed in the techniques of visibility, to the extent of revealing to all what had hitherto been invisible, expunged or repressed. My evocation of a public art is far from the static monumental “turd on the plaza” ilk, or the showpiece of democracy for cozy community and consensus building. Performance as public art will be a sort of gash or gaping wound moving through time and space, to critically and accurately register, describe and interpret the forgotten, out-of-sight violence (symbolic or actual).11 It will behove us to resituate our lives within controversy, conflict and contradiction, but also with openings toward provisional resolutions and healing. Between the soma, the mental and the psychic is not a pacified sphere of disinterested deliberation but a space where our placement in time is replete with contentious decisions. This is perhaps what motivates the slew of historical reconstructions as performances, from Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave that references the 1984 UK miners’ strike, to the street theatre of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) that stages in various American cities a simulation of the sniper fire and mass arrests typifying the Iraqi occupation in the midst of an unsuspecting public.12 And there is a self-reflexivity in the awareness of the media components that make such verisimilitude achievable, paying heed to WJT Mitchell’s caution that “our interpretation of the present is always in danger of replicating previous narratives with their nostalgia for a lost authenticity understood as responsible representation”.13 That FOI is billed as an international event is also one way of indicating that our sense of time is braided with other historical narratives and occurrences, and that the political strife in Israel, Thailand, Burma and China is closer to home than we deem them to be. But our interest in their issues should not blind us to our own a historicity going on in our backyards.

And so, what faith might FOI then engender amongst a public that has at times lost faith in itself? With the attenuation of attention spans, FOI in its fifth edition runs into the frustration of being given short shrift, the novelty of its inauguration to mark the end of performance art funding embargo being all but spent. Perhaps faith is restored because of FOI’s continual capacious ambition to address and involve the public and then to invigorate it with sheer bloody-mindedness against those who expect to be given an easy ride. Let it be said, therefore, that the future of the public begins with upending the now.

14 Future of Imagination 5 (Endnotes)

1 In an interview, Orlan has opined: “You have to project yourself into the future. We have to keep our distances with the here and now. Our prejudices and our decisions are linked to the past. Most young people need to get younger. They are repeating what their parents thought when they were 30 or 40; they are already old, not only because they absorbed their parents’ experience, but also because of the way they’ve been educated. In the future, our way of thinking will be different.” However, what I want to get across is that despite an orientation toward the to-come, much more critical engagement with the here and now is needed than the convenient sidestepping or distanciation of the issue.

2 If Not Now, When? is the title of a novel woven around Jewish partisans and resistance fighters in World War II by the Italian author and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi. It was first published in 1982 under the titleSe non ora, quando?

3 See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: the Politics of Performance, Routledge, New York and London, 1993

4 This understanding of nachträglichkeit has been mined by Hal Foster in his argument in The Return of the Real that the traumatic effect of avant-garde activity is only fully registered in subsequent workings out through the neo-avant-garde activities of the late 1950s and 60s. See also Peggy Phelan, ‘Introduction’, in Phelan and Jill Lane, eds, The Ends of Performance, New York University Press, New York and London, 1998

5 Fredric Jameson, ‘Nostalgia for the Present’, South Atlantic Quarterly, Spring 1989, vol 88, no 2, pp 517-537

6 See Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of Spectacle, trans Malcolm Imrie, London, 1998 [1988], as he distils the political consequences of such inhabiting of time.

7 RETORT (Iain Boal, TJ Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, Verso, London and New York, 2005, pp 181-2

8 Ibid, p 183

9 I am here playing on the semantics of “Sculpture Square” even though it is apparent that it is not by conventional definition a square (its main building being a former Methodist chapel) and does not restrict itself to the display of sculptural work.

10 Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformation in the Public Sphere, trans Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, MIT Press, Cam- bridge, MA, 1989, p 27

11 My thinking on this is indebted to Rosalyn Deutsche’s Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998 and WJT Mitchell’s Picture Theory, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1994, in particular Section V, on pictures and the public sphere.

12 See

13 Mitchell, op cit, p 423

Future of Imagination 5 15 Resonant Relationships: The One-to-One Performance

Lynn Lu

16 Future of Imagination 5 At the Sensitive Skin Festival in Nottingham in 2005, Juliet Ellis invited one person at a time into a private space for an audience-of-one performance entitled Silent Sermon. Each participant was asked to “think of a moment when you wanted to cry and didn’t”, and then was invited to join her in a one- minute grating of an onion. With humour, generosity, and gentle irony, Ellis offered – with the help of a raw onion – to share empathically in an unspoken memory and the release of a repressed trauma.1

Performances designed for an audience of one grew out of the legacy of 1960s and 70s performance art in which artists extracted their audiences from invisible spectatorship and into active collaboration. Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964) and Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 (1974), in particular, relied crucially upon the physical, psychological and mental engagement of their audiences for the making of their work.2 By granting power and freedom to their spectators to do as they wished, the artists radically redefined the concept of audience participation. Building upon this genre of performance art, artists of this generation such as Juliet Ellis, Kira O’Reilly, and Random Scream, have upped the interactivity to a most intimate level: One on one.

Ellis asks for no narrative, nor does she offer one; we do not need the details of anyone’s private sob stories to know vividly from our own experiences the ache and isolation of wanting to cry and not being able to. Based on what we know of psychological distress through our own experiences, we involuntarily identify with others who appear to occupy the same position as we had or still do. Roland Barthes intuited what neurologists of our time would discover: Our minds mirror another’s in a situation we are personally familiar with. He writes of Werther (Goethe, 1774):

Werther identifies himself with every lost lover: he is the madman who loved Charlotte and goes out picking flowers in midwinter; he is the young footman in love with a widow, who has just killed his rival – indeed, Werther wants to intercede for this youth, whom he cannot rescue from the law: “Nothing can save you, poor wretch! Indeed, I see that nothing can save us.”3 [Italics mine]

Barthes reflects that “identification...is a pure structural operation:I am the one who has the same place I have”. He adds wryly that it is because of this homology – or empathetic resonance – that the love story sells.4 [Italics mine]

Empathy is defined as a “feeling-into”5 or having objective knowledge of another person’s internal state.6 Not to be confused with sympathy, which is an altruistic concern for another’s well-being combined with a desire to alleviate their suffering, empathy is a primitive and pre-reflexive capacity to connect with others psychologically. Gaining access into another’s inner life depends on our innate ability to be aware of the feelings of others through observing their situation and other perceptible indications such as body language. If we recognize the other’s condition as one familiar to us, we unconsciously slip right into their skin.

Resonance refers to the “intensification and enrichment of sound by sympathetic vibration”.7 As with musical instruments, resonant relationships also occur between humans who inhabit a shared state. Barthes compares friendship to “a space with total sonority”, where “the friend – the perfect interlocutor – constructs around us the greatest possible resonance”.8

In the privacy of a space for two, eyes stinging from the fumes of cut raw onions, each pulls up a poignant memory, and knows, in that moment that they share the same position. By mutually acknowledging “I know, I’ve been there too”, Silent Sermon constructs a sonorous space in which empathic understanding

Future of Imagination 5 17 reverberates between the artist and participant. Misery does love company, although here it is not taking mean-spirited pleasure in the suffering of others. Rather, it is an unsentimental recognition that our various trials and tribulations are not unique to us even if they seem to be. This is the human condition. (The kind of realization worth celebrating by tearfully grating a raw onion, then extracting the juice for a fortifying and nutritious tonic – we need it.)

* * * Where Ellis sought, through an intimate one-to-one encounter, to articulate an unspoken shared experience with a gesture, I attempted to draw words from a silent social ritual in my performance piece a(t)tribute. This was a durational work first enacted at the 9th International Art Action Festival: Interakcje, in Piotrkow Trybunalski in 2007. Designed for one participant at a time, a(t)tribute was made for a context in which most of the audience would be strangers or acquaintances I did not know well. I waited for visitors in a small room, which was empty save for two chairs, two blank notebooks, and pens for writing. Entering the room, the visitor was invited to sit and was given written directions:

Please write a description of who / what you think I am. What do you imagine my likes, dislikes, work, temperament, temper, concerns, friends, family, desires, interests, beliefs, strengths and weaknesses, etc., are? And I will do the same for you.

Scrutinizing one another, the participant and I formulated a candid description of who or what we imagined the other person to be, based on what we saw and sensed. Our trappings are the result of fairly conscious decisions, and certainly give away a good amount of information about who and what we are. A young girl’s ferocious haircut, complicated outfit, and impractical shoes speak for her as cogently as a middle-aged man’s ruddy complexion, strong hands, faded overalls and crucifix do for him. Our physical features and apparel reflect our tastes, lifestyle, and affiliation to particular ethnic and social groups.

Figure 1. Lynn Lu, a(t)tribute, 2007, “9th International Art Action Festival: Interakcje”; Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland. Duration: 8 hours. © Lynn Lu

18 Future of Imagination 5 In any face-to-face meeting, however, we actually disclose far more than we are perhaps aware of, or mean to. If our external costume moderately makes evident who or what we are, our body language reveals rather more intimate information about our internal life, or how we are.

Our body speaks with other bodies and, for the most part, without our awareness and/or permission. In fact, so eloquent is our nonlinguistic behavior that it often indiscreetly and indiscriminately divulges our private feelings, even against our wills. As Sigmund Freud observed in 1905:

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.9

And of his own involuntary non-verbal disclosures, Barthes – with some regret – wrote:

...I can do everything with my language, but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it says, the other will recognize “that something is wrong with me”. I am a liar (by preterition), not an actor. My body is a stubborn child, my language is a very civilized adult...10

As soon as a visitor entered the room – even before we sat down to consciously study each other – our bodies began a wordless conversation. The way we greeted each other and negotiated the space between us as we settled into our chairs began to tell us some basic things about the other person. Then, sitting knee-to-knee, our bodies continued chattering and revealing our psychological state even as we kept our lips silent. The way we maintained eye contact (or not), fidgeted in our seats (or not), coolly assessed the other from head to toe (or not), responded to the other’s body language (or not), etc. gave away vital information regarding our inner condition.

Figure 2. Lynn Lu, a(t)tribute, 2007, “9th International Art Action Festival: Interakcje”; Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland. Duration: 8 hours. © Lynn Lu

Future of Imagination 5 19 In order to function in society, we rely on our ability to read such external indicators as physical appearance and body language with a certain degree of accuracy. Having said that, what we observe about another is of course not purely objective: It is also coloured by our own subjective interpretations and subsequent projections based on the associations they evoke. As a result, each person‘s reading and description of the other person perhaps disclosed as much about the “reader” as the “read”. Some of what we attribute to the other necessarily stems from our own minds.

At the end of the day, all the descriptions written by the (unnamed) participants, as well as the ones by me, were put up on the walls of the room. The written descriptions focused on themes as varied as the interests of the writers: love life, taste in movies, family, sports, social life, food, fashion, pets, sex, art, and spirituality, among others. Visitors could read them in their entirety and try to match them up with their own unarticulated mental renderings of people they know.

Figure 3. Lynn Lu, a(t)tribute, 2007, “9th International Art Action Festival: Interakcje”; Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland. Duration: 8 hours. © Lynn Lu

20 Future of Imagination 5 It is an important part of our everyday survival skills that, in any encounter between strangers, we are able to automatically and almost instantaneously size each other up. When in physical proximity to each other, our means of communication with, and perception of, the other extends far beyond the reaches of the linguistic and into the realm of body language.

Although we routinely and intuitively engage in a mutual reading of the other, our appraisals are rarely consciously expressed, even to ourselves. a(t)tribute was an effort to verbalize that which habitually remains tacit when people first meet.

* * * The artist and participant face one another in a private space. Having no prior knowledge of the other, they silently suss each other out. The sensory exchanges between the two strangers are of unprecedented intensity and immediacy.

In our everyday interactions with each other, it is the affective and cognitive processes of empathy that allow us to contact with another person psychologically. The affective processes refer to our mind mirroring another’s mind when we watch them experiencing something we are personally acquainted with. Using technology such as fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), neurologists have found that when a ballerina watches another ballerina dance, for instance, the neural activity in the watcher’s brain is identical to when she herself is dancing.11 Involuntarily and unconsciously, our minds echo each other. In the case of Silent Sermon, a double reflection occurs. The artist and participant watch each other as they jointly recall a painful memory, grate onions, and shed tears. The cognitive processes of empathy refer to our ability to – for the most part, unconsciously – be aware of and identify the feelings of others by their body language and subtle psycho-physiological signals such as pupil dilation.

Although this reciprocal and interactive “feeling-into” certainly does happen in group situations, it is most evident and potent in intimate one-to-one meetings. And when the two people happen to be strangers, mutual “person-reading” plays a most vital role in helping us figure out whom we are dealing with. Studies have shown that in any encounter up to ninety-three percent of what we communicate to each other remains wordless,12 as the series of mutual, relational, and complex exchanges takes place at a speed beyond our ability in speech.13 Nevertheless, the cognitive and affective processes of empathy allow us to pick up on implicit meanings, and to make contact with each other mentally as well as emotionally.

By inviting the conscious articulation of that which usually remains unspoken and unconscious, a(t)tribute brings awareness to our continuous yet unacknowledged psychological discourses with each other. Set in an intimate environment conducive to a focused reciprocal reading of each other’s tacit signals, these dialogues are an investigation of communication that takes place between the gaps of verbalization. The work exposes our sense of separateness from the other as two individuals scrutinize each other. At the same time, our act of giving voice to a shared silent ritual binds us intimately. A familiar and ordinary human activity is re-contextualized into an immersive interaction, to allow for new meanings and understanding to emerge from what Vivian Sobchack calls the collective embodied foundation of our subjective consciousness.14 Similarly, Silent Sermon draws from our

Future of Imagination 5 21 collective experience of subjective distress in order to ask, quite simply, “Do you feel this way too?” The audience is personally invested in the performance as it pertains to their private narrative.

In the one-to-one performance, the spectator is no longer part of the “invisible mass”, but the same individual proactive agent she is in her daily life. She joins the artist – on equal terms, as collaborator and discoverer – in an intense psychological conversation, from which an understanding emerges that is not only conceptual, but also perceptual and affective.

Perhaps, more than anything, the one-to-one format makes for resonant relationships between the artist and audience at an unparalleled level of intimacy. Through their reliance upon the cognitive and affective processes of empathy to involve us intellectually, emotionally, and even physiologically, the one-to-one performance has the exceptional ability to engage us deeply, remind us of our inherent interconnectedness with others, potentially nurturing our relation to each other.

22 Future of Imagination 5 (Endnotes)

1 See Rachel Zerihan, ‘Intimate Inter-actions: Returning to the Body in One to One Performance’, , accessed on 26 December 2006.

2 Cut Piece premiered in Kyoto in 1964 and Ono invited the audience to cut away her clothing as she knelt calmly onstage. The performance exerted great influence on subsequent generations of performance artists like Marina Abramovic, Ana Mendieta, Gina Pane, Barbara Smith, Vito Acconci, and Chris Burden. In Rhythm 0, Marina Abramovic stood by a table laid out with objects including a gun, a bullet, an axe, a whip, and knives, which spectators could use on her passive body as they liked. She was “cut and stripped, and when a loaded gun was pressed to her head, a fight broke out – between those who were pushing the boundaries of witnessed violence and those who had instinctively grouped around Abramovic to protect her – bringing the performance to an abrupt end.” Cited in Thomas McEvilley,The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism, McPherson and Company, New York, 2005, p 274

3 Cited in Roland Barthes. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans Richard Howard, Jonathan Cape, London, 1979, p 129 4 Ibid , italics mine

5 Theodore Lipps, ‘Einfühlung, innere Nachahmung und Organempfindung’,Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie, 1903, no 1, pp 465- 519, cited in Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York,1972.

6 Heinz Kohut, ‘Selected problems in self psychological theory’ [1980], in P.H. Ornstein, ed, The Search for the Self. Selected writings of Heinz Kohut: 1978-1982, vol. 4, International Universities Press, New York, 1991, pp 489-524

7 Encyclopedia Britannica, 2003.

8 Barthes, op cit, p 167.

9 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905), Collected Papers, Vol. 3, Basic Books, New York,1959, p 94

10 Barthes, op cit, p 41. Our inner state makes itself known to others not only through the inflection of our voice, the flush of our cheek, and the speed/depth of our breath, but also through the most liminal of affective responses: pupil dilation. In folk psychology of at least two cultures, it is widely known that pupil enlargement indicates a person’s positive interest in something. See Eckhard H Hess, ‘Pupillary Behavior in Communication’, in Aaron W. Siegman, Stanley Feldstein, eds, Nonverbal Behavior and Communication, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, New Jersey, 1978; and John Shlien, ‘Empathy in Psychotherapy: A vital mechanism? Yes. Therapist’s conceit? All too often. By itself enough? No’, in Arthur C. Bohart & Leslie S. Greenberg, eds, Empathy Reconsidered: New Directions in Psychotherapy, American Psychological Association, Washington DC and London, 1997

11 Richard Restak, The Naked Brain: How the emerging neurosociety is changing how we live, work and love, Harmony Books,New York, 2006, p 63.

12 Albert Mehrabian, a professor of psychology at UCLA and a pioneer in nonlinguistic communication research, has showed that in any face-to-face communication, we derive only seven percent of the meaning from spoken words. Voice tone accounts for thirty- eight percent, while body language is responsible for conveying fifty-five percent of the message. See Albert Mehrabian, Nonverbal Communication, Aldine-Atherton, Chicago, 1972

13 Shlien, op cit, p 77

14 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London, 2004, p 2

Future of Imagination 5 23 Document & Performance or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Lens

Bruce Quek

24 Future of Imagination 5 The first performance I ever photographed would probably be Kai Lam’s Prop-Agenda Blab: Green Fingers on Furious Electric Zit No. 031, at Studio 19, on 28 February 2006. At the time, however, I was not so much concerned with creating a documentary record of the performance as with locating unusual situations from which I could extract images of interest — an excursion into portrait photography, paired with the secondary function of it as a kind of personal record of places I had seen.

Eventually, I took a greater interest in documentation proper, acquiring a concern for the accuracy of reportage; a sense of the necessity for a faithful document to preserve that which was ephemeral through a thorough record of the overall performance, to be achieved through a photojournalistic or naturalistic approach. Taking this approach, though, led to a number of turning points, incidents which raised serious questions about the perspective I had adopted.

One of these would have been my attempt to document a performance by Throwing Stones (a group comprising Australian artists Alicia Jones, Rebecca Cunningham and Richelle Spence) during the 2007 instalment of the performance art festival, Fetter Field. There had been three performances, each by a different artist, occurring simultaneously at different points in a large, open air courtyard. Selectiveness on the part of the documenter became inescapable as I jogged from one performance to another, assessing the urgency and/or necessity of taking a photograph at that specific moment, relative to the urgency of taking one at either one of the other two performances within the next thirty seconds or so.

It became apparent that regardless of any logistical difficulties, the documenter would inevitably exercise a certain amount of discretion over the creation of a so-called “documentary record”, a conflict of intention placing documentary material at the beginning of a trajectory different from that of the performance. Furthermore, this record would inescapably point to its own incompleteness, each frame implying a multitude of others not taken, to the extent that it seemed increasingly untenable as such to think of it as a record.

Other recent performances by artists such as (but not limited to) Tang Da Wu, Jeremy Hiah, Muhammad Lugas Syllabus and Juliana Yasin served to highlight the problematic validity of the “documentary trace” and simultaneously casting doubt on the primacy of photography and videography as documentary media, insofar as their performances incorporated relational and interactive elements, which operate in fields inaccessible to visual or aural media – the result being that the media artefact of the performance would occupy a tangential or even wholly disconnected trajectory. This gives rise to the question: what actions could be constituted as documentary, giving rise to documents? Would a pervasive yet unrecorded oral history surrounding a performance qualify as a document, a derivative performance as documentary?

If there were details, situations and nuances not recordable in the medium of choice, were we to take refuge in the magical translation of these variables into the terms dictated by the specific medium; a transubstantiation of, say, a moment in the performance decisive in emotive terms rendered in the document as a decisive image? Such alchemy would seem to suggest the creation of something new, not the representation of something that had existed.

Future of Imagination 5 25 As these difficulties mounted, threatening the validity of a documentary practice, it occurred to me that such a practice implied a privileged division, in which performance art held pride of place as some ephemeral communion or authentic experience, whereas documentation was only supplemental, the secondary residue or trace of a transitory performance, which held or was derived from (however infinitesimally) a value of truth, or the possibility of such.

In opposition to this privileged division, the art historian Amelia Jones has argued that “there is no possibility of an unmediated relationship to any kind of cultural product”, characterising the relationships offered by the live experience and documentary experience of performance art as “equally intersubjective”, comprising different elements, each mutually supplementary to the other. The performance’s presence is confirmed in retrospect by the existence of its documentation, facilitating its inclusion in the broader narratives of art history and practice, whilst the document, anchored in its representation of the significant yet ephemeral performance, thus derives its legitimacy.

But here, though the question of privilege has been resolved through the establishment of the mutual supplementarity of the separate terms, thus levelling their respective privileges, this interdependence would seem itself dependent on an increase of the terms’ specificity, in their irrevocable differences. It is a situation uncomfortably reminiscent of segregationist notions of ‘separate but equal’ divisions in society; an apparent resolution of apparent antagonisms in a hallucinatory armistice.

What if we were to dispense with this separation, to sidestep the truce by rendering it irrelevant? The writer and critic Philip Auslander has suggested that these recordings of performance art are “no longer documents of ephemeral performances, but often constitute virtual performances in themselves” – I would go a little further to suggest that all these supposed documents, in their circulation, preservation and distribution, in being referenced for the further generation of cultural products, constitute a multiplicity of performances on a tremendous scale; informational, contextual performances, a stochastic succession of narrative permutation and recombination.

This would be most similar, perhaps, to a model of contagion; performative spores or narrative viruses, capable of anything from gradual genetic drift to instantaneous speciation, occurring every time a spore was accessed, every time it was referenced or cited in the generation of some configuration of information or action – an infinitely malleable lifecycle, since these viral configurations could be referenced the very next day, or lie dormant for centuries.

What this exploration leaves out, however, is a treatment of the act of documentation, in the context of its immediate situation, of the performance ostensibly documented. In photographic terms, we would have to consider what, exactly, happens at the moment the shutter blinks, as well as the role and significance of the photographer’s movement through the space defined by the performance. There is a reciprocity between these variables of the photographer’s movement and posture in relation to the photograph, to the extent that the photograph is as much a record of the photographer as it is of his supposed subject.

The father of modern photojournalism, the late Henri Cartier-Bresson, put forward the notion of the decisive moment – “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of

26 Future of Imagination 5 an event as well as of a precise organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression”. Coupled, however, with an almost ritualised, monastic discipline, as well as eerily predatory qualities – velvet hand and hawk’s eye - which he deems necessary for such recognition, it seems possible that there is another transaction that takes place here, either consubstantial with this capture of reality, or masked by it.

Michel Tournier’s fictional Abel Tiffauges initially adopts this velvet hand and hawk’s eye, an invisible hunter operating covertly with a telephoto lens, rapacious in his accumulation of images; an ogrish voracity lending a more sinister aspect to Cartier-Bresson’s perspective on the photographer’s vocation. However, Tiffauges soon loses his taste for such a sterile method, adopting a confrontational strategy of photography, seeking a union in suffering between the photographer and the photographed, between “the person who knows he is being photographed and by the person who knows he is known to be committing a predatory act, to be hi-jacking an image”. He likens this to surgery without anaesthesia, whereby anaesthesia would reduce surgery to the level of “dissecting corpses”. Perhaps the photographer is a vivisectionist.

The photographer, I would assert, is no neutral agency or incidental cog in the process of image creation. Along with other documenters, with their multitude of tools and methods, he is an active agent – potentially complicit, possibly belligerent. To assume otherwise, to efface the act of documentation by the documenter entails a certain amount of risk, like deciding a cracked wall isn’t by painting over it.

Relevant to this is an incident during FOI4 in 2007 where one of the artists, Ferial Affif, asked me to perform the role of a photographer during her performance; to be specifically, the crass, brash photographer who would push people out of the way and use flash photography at inappropriate moments, one element in a performance of confrontation and disruption.

Thus, in performing this role, the resultant images and documents were of secondary importance, almost entirely incidental; the important thing was being a photographer, photographing an event, to the extent that the only thing which could have distinguished my role from that of the “actual” photographers who sought to document the performance would have been the artist’s intentionality, accessible only in retrospect or through prior communication with the artist.

If the act of documentation could be performed, indistinguishable from an “actual” documentation, does each position then suffer a loss of stability, each becoming interchangeable with the other? The position, posture, actions and movements of a documenter within the performance space change according to a cryptic collusion with those of the performer, to be modulated or filtered according to various drives, conditions and objectives. It could be likened to a mirror or a shadow of sorts, but such things beg the question: who is it that is reflected and whose shadow is cast?

Is it entirely unreasonable to suggest that performers completely immersed in a wholly mediatized, mediated world for decades would, unconsciously or otherwise, anticipate in every action, posture and movement their own representation, reducing the actual act of recording to a mere formality, an acting out? Perhaps, complementary to Auslander’s assertion, the physical performance itself is

Future of Imagination 5 27 already irredeemably virtualised, mediated in advance – the physical presence of recording media being only a disguise which would allow us to believe otherwise.

If we accept that the documenter is part of the performance, or at least in collusion, would the documenter, no longer naïve, have to re-evaluate his practice in some way? Even the fact of persisting in a “conventional” practice of documentation, situated in a new context of performative dialogue, could acquire a newfound significance, a heightened sense of itself. A field of possibilities unfold from this germinal point, varying degrees of integration, collaboration, conflict and dialogue between “documenter” and “performer”, further differentiated and nuanced by the application of any number of strategies and perspectives – as far flung, perhaps, as a deliberate effort by both parties to achieve a specific effect in the performance to be enacted by the document itself, or secret rituals from which all forms of recording devices would be prohibited; adversarial strategies of photography, or the enactment of its disappearance through its diffusion into dozens of hidden surveillance cameras.

In closing, if you observe the reaction of a given audience to the commencement of a performance, more often than not they reach for their point-and-shoot digital cameras or camera-equipped cellphones in an almost instinctive reaction. They are amorphous, performance-tropic mycelium, sprouting sporocarps of lenses in response to the stimuli of a work of performance art. Short of a radical secrecy or occlusion, a direct engagement with such ubiquitous media would seem advisable.

Additionally, much as the author J.G. Ballard predicted that only intelligent machines could one day appreciate space flight in terms of motion sculpture, or “immense geometric symphonies”, perhaps only semantic web-crawling or data-mining software agents could fully appreciate the rhizomal traceries and traversals of these semi-aleatory, almost atemporal informational performances. Conversely, perhaps there are performative-documentary strategies to be articulated which could yet allow us to direct and appreciate such performances, spanning communities, continents, decades and disciplines.

Bibliography

1) Philip Auslander, ‘Going with the Flow: Performance Art and Mass Culture’, TDR, vol. 33, no. 2 (Summer, 1989), pp. 119-136

2) James Graham Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, Harper Perennial, London, 2006

3) Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1952

4) Amelia Jones, ‘“Presence” in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation’, Art Journal, vol. 56, no. 4 (Winter, 1997), pp. 11-18

5) Michel Tournier, The Ogre, Penguin Classics, London, 2000

28 Future of Imagination 5 Artists’ Biographies

Future of Imagination 5 29 Adina Bar-On (Israel)

Adina Bar-On, Sentenced for Life, USA, 2008, performance still. Photo: Natalie Loveless

Adina Bar-On’s work discourses on conflicts of identity and conflicting identifications. Her work as a performance artist creates moments of emotion and states of behaviour that her audience might share in empathy or criticism. Adina has been an active performer since 1973, when she was a third year student at the Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Over the years, she has presented her work in Israel`s major art museums and galleries and performed insistently at social and political events, making it her business to emphasise her socio-political stance.

In recent years, she has been travelling abroad, 5 months of the year, to present her own performance work and conduct workshops on visual communication in countries such as Canada, USA, Hong Kong, Japan, Germany, N. Ireland, Thailand, Poland, Russia and France. In 2001, Adina was awarded a major prize for her contribution to Israeli art by the American Israel Cultural Foundation. A biographical book, Adina Bar-On, Performance Artist, has also been published.

30 Future of Imagination 5 Angie Seah (Singapore) www.angiesimplicity.com

Born in 1979, Angie Seah is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Singapore. Since 1997, she has been making drawings, performance art, installations and clay sculptures. Art making is a tool for Angie to understand the social environment and respond to everyday human conditions in the con- text of her personal situations. Cutting through the white noise of daily lives, the depths of mind, the unconscious, she attempts to connect with the basic emotions that make her human. In 2000, she was awarded an education bursary from the National Arts Council and graduated with a BA from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology where she majored in painting. She was also a recipi- ent of a 3-month culture/language scholarship to Berlin awarded by the Goethe Institut in 2005.

Angie has since travelled and participated in several performance art festivals in Singapore and internationally in Poland, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Romania, Germany, Italy, Korea and Japan. She has also exhibited her works in Southeast Asia and completed artist residencies in Switzerland, Romania and Indonesia.

Angie Seah, Fool on the hill, Switzerland, 2008, performance still. Photo: Angie Seah

Future of Imagination 5 31 Cai Qing (Germany/China) www.caiqingart.com Cai Qing, Worship New York, one day durational performance, 2007. © Cai Qing

Cai Qing (Qing Sonnenberg) has been living and working as an independent artist in Europe and New York City since 1989. In September 2007 he relocated his family to Singapore after accepting a teaching post at the Nanyang Technological University. As a contemporary artist, he uses performance, installation, video and pictures to reveal his feelings and explain his ideas. The concept in most of his art is the “observer” and the “observed”, focusing on people of various backgrounds in different societies. He enjoys the interaction with different people and his works find inspiration in many of their real life stories.

With advances in technology, his way of communicating with people has also shifted from the real world to cyberspace. Some of these the projects utilised internet chats as platforms to establish connections without identity. Cai Qing has also curated several important art shows with the same degree of novelty. In 1998 he has co-curated China’s first contemporary art exhibition in a private space, “Trace of Existence”, and recently, in 2008, he curated “Construction before Destruction”, the last performance show in Sifo Art Village, Henan province, before its modernisation by local officials.

32 Future of Imagination 5 Cheng Guang Feng (China)

Cheng Guang Feng was born in Shenyang, China, in 1982. He has continually been exploring socio-political issues, but for this exhibition, Guang Feng will be tapping into his personal feelings to surface aspects of self- discovery since his move to Singapore to continue his art education. He will be exhibiting his recent paintings, sculpture and video works, most of them the result of his practice during the last year. He is also a member of The Artists Village in Singapore.

Cheng Guang Feng, Silent Examination 2, Beijing China, 2007, performance still. © Cheng Guang Feng

Future of Imagination 5 33 Chia Chu Yia (Singapore/Malaysia)

Chia Chu Yia (with Tang Dawu), Untitled, 2007, performance still. Photo: Dan Yeo

Chia Chuyia obtained her diploma at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, and her BA from Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia. Her major was painting but to satisfy her innate curiosity, she has always explored other media from time to time. Her paintings and installation art have earned her awards and residencies overseas but has recently turned her focus towards performance art

Her work is concerned with the structuring of identities in relation to the changes in different environments, building on our sense of direction and placement. She uses her body and mirrors as a metaphor in her search for the reflexivity in self-structure. She has collaborated with Tang Dawu and participated in the performance festivals Fetter Field and Maju Jaya in 2007. Her works have been exhibited locally and in other countries such as Malaysia, China, Peru, Australia, USA, and Indonesia.

34 Future of Imagination 5 Dariusz Fodzcuk, The Shoeblack (a two-day diptych performance), Poland, 2004, performance still. Photo: Marcin Bobrowicz

Dariusz Fodczuk (Poland)

Dariusz Fodczuk’s early performances were based on simple symmetrical compositions that gave audiences an impression of a meditative trance. He was glad to discover that repeated actions were able to neutralize the dynamic of a singular movement and progress into monotonous repetition. His recent actions focus on audience participation and interaction, and actions made through the processes of repetition and appropriation. Dariusz is interested in inventing structures that encourage audiences to participate. Constantly engaging the audience and using their energy and attitude to make powerful actions, he motivates audiences into doing things which then becomes a performative and collective act. Despite his leaving a strong impression through his performances, Dariusz however has refused to reveal the ‘true’ message of his art but instead leads us to the issues arising from the fundamental assumptions of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity in our society.

Future of Imagination 5 35 Duan Ying Mei (Germany/China)

Born in 1969 in China, Duan Ying Mei has worked in performance, installation and video and is now based in Braunschweig, Germany. Yingmei was part of the Chinese avant-garde who in the 1990s formed the artist colony, East Village, in Beijing. In 1995, she participated in the by now iconic performance To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain.

She left China for Germany in 1998 to further pursue her studies in art and in 2006 finished her postgraduate studies with Marina Abramovic, Birgit Hein and Christoph Schlingensief at the Hochschule fuer Bildende Kuenste Braunschweig. Yingmei’s performances, installations and videos deal with aspects of daily life: memories, fears, longings and dreams. Since 1993 she has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, festivals and workshops, e.g. Braziers International Artists Workshop in England 2003, 1st Performance festival in Salzau 2005, etc. She has also taken part in the IPG (Independent Performance Group) exhibitions curated by Marina Abramovic at the PAC Milan (2003), Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (2005), and the Venice Biennale (2007).

Duan Ying Mei, In Between, performance still, Hochschule fuer Bildende Kuenste Braunschweig, Germany, 2004. Photo: Chengwu Luo

36 Future of Imagination 5 Fabien Montmartin (France)

Born on 4 April 1974 in France, Fabien Montmartin attained his BA in fine art in 1994 and after He had studied in different fine art schools in Europe and graduated with a Master Degree in Marseille in 2003. Since 2001, Fabien has practiced a new style of poetry language called Slam. His first performances were about making short live-poetry in public spaces (the square, shop, bar and hall). During one of the performances he presented in a festival, Fabien discovered that words could also be silent, i.e., the language of things, objects and movements, which speak for themselves. He asks: “How to manage time and space in the composition of a piece of poetry, a land where usual things disappear only to re-compose?”

Fabien Montmartin, Fishermen without fishook, Poland, 2007, performance still. © Fabien Montmartin

Future of Imagination 5 37 Gwendoline Robin, Self-portrait, Brussels, 2007, performance still, Photo: S. Noël

Gwendoline Robin (Belgium) www.gwendolinerobin.be

Fire, explosions and her body are the main media used by the trans-disciplinary performer Gwendoline Robin. Her street fire actions, movement performances and burning mobile tools are usually site or occasion-specific. Focusing on the body as her working material – as an instrument used to measure space, time, intimacy, resistance and fear – Gwendoline draws her inspiration from performances of the 1970s. As to exactly how and where in the Short Story performance this diligent pyromaniac will set off some unconventional fireworks – a clothes-hanger, maybe a tube, or out of her fingers – let this remain a surprise! Rather than relating her projects to the spectacular tradition of fire art, she introduces the elements of conceptualism. Thus, in accepting an invitation for a presentation of her poetry, she responds with a performance in which she explodes her book into a thousand pieces. Even during her studies – and in particular when she was studying in Valencia, a city with long tradition of bonfires and fireworks – she dedicated herself to performing flaming social sculptures in public spaces.

Gwendoline studied urban and rural space at the Brussels’ La Cambre – École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels. She has participated in various festivals and performed at several venues, including the De Singel, Factor 44 arts centres in Antwerp, as well as the CCNOA and the Maïs Festival in Brussels.

38 Future of Imagination 5 Helmut Lemke (Germany/UK) www.sound-art.de

Sound, the audible, the inaudible and the imaginable, is the basis of Helmut Lemke’s work. Born in 1953 in northwest Germany, he has presented for over 30 years process-based results of his investigations into site-specific sound, frequently collaborating internationally with musicians, visual artists, poets, dancers, scientists, performers and filmmakers. He has held concerts and performances and exhibited his installations all over Europe, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore. His other activities include organising and managing projects, symposiums and festivals.

Since 1995 he has taught at art academies and universities in Germany, France, England, Finland and Thailand. He was Research Fellow in Interactive Arts (Media Events) at Manchester Metropolitan University (1997) and AHRC-Fellow at the University of Salford where he researched the mutual dependency of sites and sounds. During his research he visited Iceland, Lapland, Greenland, Switzerland and the North of Scotland. Helmut now lives in Todmorden/Lancashire, England.

Helmut Lemke, Sulaminen, Helsinki, Finland, 2003, performance still. © Helmut Lemke

Future of Imagination 5 39 Jason Lim (Singapore)

Jason Lim, Duet, durational performance, France, 2008 performance still. Photo: Sylvette Babin

Jason Lim’s practice traverses ceramics, sculpture and performance art and is regarded as a maverick in the ceramics field. He has radically shifted assumptions about ceramics as a discipline, pushing its potential as a medium in installation and performance art. Jason’s performances often play on the boundaries of risky precarious situations, teasing the audiences with a cheeky use of materials and spaces. He has participated in various international performance festivals and took up residency programmes in Japan, The Netherlands, Australia and U.S.A. In 2006, he was awarded the Freeman Fellowship artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Vermont, U.S.A. He was involved in initiating UTOPIA, an alternative art gallery in 1996 and was co-Artistic Director of Future of Imagination 2 in 2004. In 2005, he organized StopOver, a Singapore/Japan performance art meeting in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. He was one of four artists in the Singapore Pavilion for the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. In the same year, he represented Singapore at the 4th World Ceramics Biennale in Korea and was awarded the Juror’s Prize.

40 Future of Imagination 5 Kai Lam (Singapore) www.geocities.com/op_out74

Kai Lam is based in Singapore and has proved to be an active innovator in his artistic involvements since his studies in sculpture at the Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts in 1995. In 2001, he was awarded a study grant from the Lee Foundation and an education bursary from the National Arts Council to complete his Bachelor of Arts (Sculpture) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Versatile and prolific, Kai has used his skills in drawing, painting, sculpture, mixed-media installation and performance to collaborate in theatre productions and the organisation of art events since 1999.

As President of the alternative art group, The Artists Village, he had helped to initiate “Artists Investigating Monuments” (2000), a presentation of installations and performances at various public sites. This was later presented again at the Singapore Art Museum (2004), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and House of World Culture, Berlin, (2005). In 2003, as co-organiser of Future Of Imagination, an annual international performance art festival in Singapore, he displayed initiative in the hosting of events that involve other local constituents as well as the international arts community. Since 1999, Kai has travelled to different countries in Asia and Europe to present his art projects. Art-making to Kai Lam is a tool towards a better understanding of the environment in which he lives and is an exploration of life and social human conditions. His artworks are created as social commentary and are a creative response to the urban pluralistic society.

Kai Lam, Variation #2: Sex, Rock n’ Roll Without the Drugs, 2008 performance still. Photo: Lee Wen

Future of Imagination 5 41 Lee Wen, Almost Untitled: Stagger Lee # 3, 2008, performance still. Photo: Kai Lam

Lee Wen (Singapore) www.artsingapore.org/leewen/

Lee Wen’s performances and installations often expose and question the ideologies and value systems of individuals as well as social structures. His work attempts to combine Southeast Asian contexts with international currents in contemporary art. His early practice was associated with The Artists Village, an alternative art group in Singapore and later forged a more individuated artistic career. Lee Wen’s work has been presented at the Busan Biennale (2004), the 3rd Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane (1999), the Sexta Bienal de La Habana, (1997), the Kwang Ju Biennial (1995), the 4th Asian Art Show, Fukuoka (1994) Sea Art Festival, Busan Biennale (S.Korea, 2004), and the National Review of Live Art (Scotland, 2004 & 2005). In 2003, Lee initiated, with the support of The Artists Village, “Future of Imagination”, an international performance art event that includes forum, documentation and presentation of performance art in Singapore. Since 1999, Lee has also worked with Black Market International, an innovative, groundbreaking, utopian performance art collective comprising artists from various countries and cultural backgrounds. Lee Wen was awarded Singapore’s Cultural Medallion in 2005.

42 Future of Imagination 5 Lynn Lu (Singapore) www.lynnlu.info/

Lynn Lu is an installation/performance artist from Singapore. She received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is currently a Ph.D candidate at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, on a scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Lynn has received numerous grants, awards and commissions from the Singapore National Arts Council, Lee Foundation, Ucross Foundation, and Carnegie Mellon University. Since 1997, Lynn has exhibited and performed extensively in Singapore, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, the United States, Argentina, UK, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Estonia, Denmark, Poland, Belarus, and Canada.

Lynn Lu, An idealized moment when everything is simple and secure, GFAL, Tokyo; 2008, performance still. Photo: Koike Hirohisa

Future of Imagination 5 43 Melati Suryodarmo (Germany/Indonesia) www.melatisuryodarmo.com

Melati Suryodarmo, Memorabilia, Indonesia, 2008 Photo: Rama Surya ©melatisuryodarmo2008

Melati Suryodarmo´s performances are concerned with cultural, social and political aspects which she articulates psychologically and physically through her body. Her performances speak about identity, energy, politics and relationships between the body and the environments surrounding it. The arrangements of her performances are simple but each maintains an edgy closeness to the audience. In her performances, she uses specific objects which concretises her conceptual thoughts but at the same time bring the public into the daily facts of life. Melati’s performance works have tended to be long durational events with the exception of a few short, punchy ones like Exergie-butter dance. As a spin-off, she has also transformed some of her performances by presenting them through photography and digital video.

Melati was born in 1969 in Surakarta, Indonesia but has been living and working since 1994 in Braunschweig, Germany. She earned her degree in International Relations and Political Sciences in Bandung, Indonesia before beginning her study at the Hochschule fuer Bildende Kuenste Braunschweig with Anzu Furukawa (Butoh and choreography), Mara Mattuschka (time-based art) and Marina Abramovic (performance art and Raum Konzept). She is graduated with an MFA in Performance Art in 2002.

44 Future of Imagination 5 Mongkol Plienbangchang (Thailand)

Mongkol Plienbangchang is a painter, poet and performance artist from Thailand. He started making performances since 1995. Mongkol is part of ASIATOPIA’s organizing committee and has always been involved in art and social movement groups. His performances are usually very intense, mostly dealing with the political issues of Thailand. He has published two books of his drawings and poems Inner & Outer and The Man Number Zero. He recently travelled to Indonesia to participate in the 2nd Jatiwangi Arts Festival 2008 at Jatiwangi Art Factory, West Java and also PERFURBANCE #4, an international performance art festival that took place at ‘Krinjing village in Java, Indonesia. He also was in a short residency performance event at Rosid Studio in Bandung, Indonesia.

Mongkol Plienbangchang, Crashing Horizon, Poland, 2007, performance still. Photo: Nopawan Sirivejkul

Future of Imagination 5 45 Myriam Laplante (Canada/Italy) www.myriamlaplante.net/

Myriam Laplante, Disaster (with tea), performance still. Photo Roberto Vaccai

Myriam Laplante is a Canadian artist living in Italy and started performing while she was a student at Ottawa University in the early seventies. She had concentrated on painting, installations and photography and started performing again in 1991 while continuing her “gallery” work. Her early performances were essentially self-portraits. By putting herself in the skin of circus side-shows (bearded lady, dancing monkey), a crying ghost or a mutant mermaid, she deals with alienation and the difficulty of communicating, the refusal to adapt to society and the cynicism of the dominant sects. She re-stages the internal tension between desire and memory, power and submission. Her more recent installation and performance works are cynical replies triggered by the absurdities of contemporary society and power-dealing politics on every level. Her work is in the public collections of the Galleria Nazionale d’arte moderna (Rome) and the Museo di Arte Contemporanea (Rome), the Musée du Québec (Québec) and the National Museum of Photography (Ottawa).

46 Future of Imagination 5 Ronaldo Ruiz (The Philippines) www.ronaldoruiz.multiply.com

Ronaldo Ruiz studied fine arts at the University of the East, Philippines. He was recognised by the Cultural Center of the Philippines as one of its thirteen artist awardees of 2003 for his significant contribution to the dynamic expansion of Filipino contemporary art. He was also named Distinguished Alumnus (2007) and Achiever (2006) by the University of the East. A two-time winner of the Philip Morris Philippines Art Awards in 2000 and 1997, Ronaldo was also an artist-in- residence at Artspace, Sydney Australia in 1999 and has presented his artworks in 17 one-man exhibitions, often incorporating painting, installation and performance into his shows. He has also participated in group exhibitions and action art events in the Philippines and abroad, including Australia, Canada, China, Dubai, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan, Kingdom of Bahrain, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Macao, Myanmar, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Yugoslavia, amongst others. Ronaldo is also artistic director of Tupada Action and Media Art (TAMA).

Ronaldo Ruiz, Camouflage Project, Biri Island, The Philippines, performance still. Photo: Ma. Paulette Tan-Rui

Future of Imagination 5 47 Sabrina Koh (Singapore)

Sabrina Koh is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer. Graduating with a Diploma in Interior Design from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 2002, she crossed over to pursue a BA (Hons) Fine Art with Contemporary Writing. On this programme, Sabrina consistently outshined her peers in her critical exploration of issues relating body and sexuality, through writing, performance and installation art. She emerged the top scorer in the final assessment, eventually attaining 2nd Class Upper Honours.

Sabrina Koh, People are always afraid of the unknown, not realizing that progress and creativity in society can only come from breaking boundaries, Singapore, 2006 Photo: Genevieve Chua.

48 Future of Imagination 5 Yuenjie Maru (Hong Kong)

Yuenjie Maru is based in Hong Kong and began working with installation art in 1995. From then on, he has been exploring various different art media such as writing, theatre, dance, happenings and performance. He has been very actively involved in art workshops and is a jammer in contact improvisation and environmental improvisation dance. He started his solo performance work in 1999 and now calls them “MARULIVEART”. His works revolve around love, the human condition, social issues, environment and so on. He has performed in Mainland China, Macau, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and UK.

Yuenjie Maru, So far, so close, performance still. © Yuenjie Maru

Future of Imagination 5 49 Zai Kuning (Singapore) http://www.onisstudio.blogspot.com

As an artist, Zai Kuning deliberately complicates convenient categorization, employing a wide range of practices from video to poetry to theatre, dance, performance art, music and installation art. In 1996, during his residency with The Substation, he formed Metabolic Theatre Laboratory (MTL), a dance theatre group led by Zai as director, performer and trainer. Its main objective is to search for a physical language and movement deeply rooted in Southeast Asian rituals. Among MTL’s most memorable productions are Prodigal Songs, Remnant 2000, Bluemonkish and No Alibi which toured Hong Kong and Korea in 2000. MTL was disbanded in 2001.

Zai has spent the last few years researching the lives of the orang laut (sea gypsies) in the Riau Archipelago which began under the auspices of a Theatreworks residency project in 2000. In 2003, he completed his short film entitled RIAU which was widely screened at many international film festivals like Rotterdam Film Festival and Busan Film Festival. RIAU is now in the permanent collection of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Zai also initiated Onistudio in 2003, a small flexible space (opposite The Substation and is supported by a Chinese karaoke bar) for performances, talks, exhibitions and dialogues. The Onistudio motto is to “think small” and lasted about 8 months. However, Zai has recently revived Onistudio as an events organizer, focusing mainly on sound art, musical experimentation and punk culture.

Zai Kuning, A Bowl of Rice, Singapore, 2008, installation view. Photo: Vivien Lee

50 Future of Imagination 5 Forum Speakers

Future of Imagination 5 51 FUTURE OF IMAGINATION 5: FORUM DISCUSSION

The forum on 15 November 2008 will mark the close of FOI 5 by bringing together six respondents who will be sharing their critical observations of the scheduled performances and opening up the debate on the practice of performance art. Selected video recordings of the performances during the three-day event will be made available for viewing before the start of the forum. We welcome all to participate in the discussion either at the forum or online at www.foi.sg

Panel of Discussants:

Adele Tan (FOI forum facilitator and moderator) is a writer and critic. She is completing her doctoral dissertation at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and is Assistant Editor at the London-based journal Third Text. Her interests include discourses on the body, psychoanalysis and feminist practices. She has published widely in international journals and magazines on performance and contemporary art.

Bruce Quek is a young practicing artist, making largely conceptual works concerned with the distribution, contexts and relations of information. He also collaborates with Woon Tien Wei on Danger Museum’s cultural podcast, The Wire, takes photographs and writes occasionally.

Jeremy Chu is a Singapore-based visual artist and cultural worker. His recent interactive installations and collaborative projects in Boston, USA and Manchester, UK, examine the framework of cultural space production, representation and hybridism of form in contemporary landscape urbanism. His research interests include vernacular architecture, cultural theory, sociology, philosophy and Chinese relational history in Nanyang.

52 Future of Imagination 5 Lim Qinyi is Assistant Curator at the NUS Museum. She graduated with honours in art history from University of Queensland and is currently pursuing her masters in Southeast Asian studies. She has worked on exhibitions such as “Telah Terbit (Out Now)” and “Bound for Glory: Wong Hoy Cheong”.

Dr Susie Lingham is currently Senior Lecturer and Course Leader of the Contemporary Art Degree Programmes (BA & MA) at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore. She has recently completed her DPhil (PhD) in Literature, Religion and Philosophy at the University of Sussex, U.K. Her interdisciplinary work – text, image, performance and sound – synthesizes ideas and research across various fields relating to the nature of mind.

Wang Zineng is based in Singapore and researches on modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia.

Future of Imagination 5 53 Programme

Day 1 - Live performances 12th November 2008 - 7p.m onwards

Day 2 -13th November 2008 Workshop with Zai Kuning - 2.00 to 4.00pm (Registration required) For registration please contact Annabelle, [email protected]

Live performances 13th November 2008 - 7p.m onwards

Day 3 - Live performances 14th November 2008 - 7p.m onwards

Day 4 - Video Screening/Forum Discussion 15th November 2008 Video Screening - 11a.m to 2p.m Forum Discussion - 2.30p.m onwards

Venue: Sculpture Square 155, Middle Road. Singapore 188977

54 Future of Imagination 5 Notes

Future of Imagination 5 55 Future of Imagination 5 International Performance Art Event, Singapore, 2008 ISBN: 978-981-08-1956-9 Credits

Festival Artistic Directors: Jason Lim and Lee Wen

Forum Facilitator/ Moderator and Catalogue Editor: Adele Tan

Publicity: Annabelle Aw

Website Design: Sharon Tan

Catalogue and Flyer Design: Ken Yeo

Logistics/ Technical: Angie Seah

Official photographer: Urich Lau

Official Videographer: Ghazi Alqudcy

Funded By:

Supporters:

ISRAEL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS DIVISION FOR CULTURAL & SCIENTIFIC RELATIONS

56 Future of Imagination 5