we who saw signs Contents
02 Preface Dr Charles Merewether
06 We are going to tell lies Guo-Liang Tan
16 Plates
33 Arcadian Tomb, Silently Speaking Kevin Chua
38 Biographies
40 Acknowledgements/ Credits Preface
I am delighted to be able to introduce explored by a group of major writers in Latin America, notably Jorges Luis We Who Saw Signs to the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, (ICAS). There is considerable pleasure in presenting an exhibition that is Mario Vargas Llosa and Juan Rulfo. In their own distinct manners, devoted to not simply contemporary art practices but, more specifically, to they each used the fable as a means to reflect on our conception and those practices that consider the importance of the sign embedded within understanding of the real. Theatre and the visual arts too, explored this the body of the work or that the work of art is itself a sign. The exhibition terrain as in the case of some of the Surrealists and its inheritors amongst is guest curated by the artist and writer Guo-Liang Tan, who is presenting others. There was an artifice to their practice, opening its audiences up a group of eight artists whose works may be viewed in this light. to new perspectives, to differing points of view and the unimaginable or inconceivable in order to shift conventional habits of mind and the The sign is traditionally understood as a momentary, epiphenomenal familiar or commonplace. and transitory occurrence. And yet, it became inscribed as an image to be remembered and more than that, served as both a form of aide-memoire A counterpoint to this line of thought is to be found in the companion and a point around which the originating event could be re-enacted. essay by Kevin Chua. Chua opens up another dimension to the sign that is This is, one could argue, a seminal point to the concept of a building driven more by a reading of what he associates with on the one hand, the that provides a defined space for or houses the devoted whether they be formation of the natural sciences and on the other, of the inscriptional as shrines, churches or sanctuaries. itself a trace of something that has occurred and is now past. As with the essay of Tan, both writers discuss concrete instances of how art engaged This tradition is deeply informed if not shaped by religious beliefs as much with the speculative, opening up a line of reflection and meditation about as the stuff of mythology. In this context, the artist becomes a medium of life and about events. These things had passed into history and yet their such visions, and who makes manifest and transmits this by virtue of his or occurrence signalled a moment of change, an occurrence that had had her skills. And yet from the late eighteenth century and the period of the bearing on the future and therefore on our lives. Enlightenment, the value given to art practice progressively expanded and changed. It became more secular, more grounded in the life and reflection As a companion to the exhibition We Who Saw Signs, this catalogue and of the ‘humanness’ and the mundane of everyday life without a religious its two essays provide a critical and thought-provoking terrain across or mythological underpinning. The possibility of a broader interpretation which the works by the artists may be explored and understood better. became more democratic, more open to a differentiated public sphere and We can only hope that this catalogue provides the space for the viewer of the differences between genders and across class and race became more the exhibition to pause and reflect on the works exhibited and value to ambiguous as regards a reading of signs. contemporary life today.
Amongst other forms, we may mention also that the notion of the fable has been a key literary device of storytelling that, while not necessarily true, Dr Charles Merewether offered a form of moral tale about life, a space for reflection on oneself Director and life around us. Writers such as Jonathan Swift, amongst others, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore were marvellous inventors of such tales. The fable and the fabulous were secular versions of mythology. The concept of the fable was also
We Who Saw Signs Preface 2 3
We are going to tell lies Guo-Liang Tan
For on the wall there appeared a hand Nothing else, there was no man And but, the hand began to write And Belshazzar couldn’t hide his fright
Well no one around could understand What was written by the mystic hand Belshazzar tried but couldn’t find A man who could give him piece of mind
Belshazzar lyrics by Johnny Cash
Rembrandt van Rijn Heavenly mysteries are often enshrouded Belshazzar’s Feast 1636 –– 38 Oil on canvas in apocalyptic visions. In Rembrandt’s depiction of the The National Gallery, London, UK story of Belshazzar, we bear witness the moment in Photo: National Gallery Picture Library which the Babylonian King encounters a cryptic message written seemingly out of darkness by a disembodied hand. Alas, this supernatural revelation is indecipherable to the king and the text remains as sign. The gap between what is seen and what could be read is acknowledged by Rembrandt’s pictorial discolation of the hand and text from the rest of the painting. The secret code occupies an ambiguous space—not close enough to be here nor is it far enough to be elsewhere. It is here and nowhere.
Visions, like magic, seek to suspend our sense of disbelief. This is perhaps why we often associate a sense of wonderment when a vision is recounted and why we feel that some illusions may possibly entail hidden truths. Magic works on the premise of acknowledging without making visible its own artifice. It does not speak. Vision works on the promise of revelation. It speaks and is spoken to. A vision without interpretation fails to be a prophecy. It remains as sight, not foresight.
We Who Saw Signs We are going to tell lies 6 7 –– Tell me a secret. –– If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret. –– If you don’t, there will be none. –– Show me the future.
–– The future is where we meet. It is its secret. ‘All Cretans are liars.’ –– Now, look away. – Epimenides
‘A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else… Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If
something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it 2 cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: used “to tell” at all.’ Indiana University Press, – Umberto Eco 2 1979), p. 7.
Caravaggio The Incredulity of Saint Thomas c. 1601–– 02 Oil on canvas In the first line of the Odyssey, we are told Sanssouci, Potsdam, Brandenburg that Odysseus is a polytropic man (the term meaning Photo: bpk/Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin- ‘much-travelled’, or used metaphorically as ‘turning many Brandenburg/Gerhard Murza ways’). Throughout the Homeric hymn, we witness the master shape-shifter slipping past his opponents and Like the foretelling of Tiresias, the blind prophet of being freed from tricky predicament. Quite literally, Thebres, the real lies somewhere between seeing and he thinks on his feet and his mind is constantly on the blindness, knowing and ignorance. In his Memoirs of the move, creating duplicity and ambiguity by displacing Blind, Jacques Derrida writes on the relationship between meaning through the use of language and symbols. In sight and doubt, ‘the difference between believing and his attempt to trick Polyphemus, Odysseus deceives the seeing, between believing one sees [croire voir] and seeing one eyed Cyclops by telling him that his name is Ουτις between, catching a glimpse [entrevoir]—or not … Skepsis (translated as ‘nobody’ or ‘no man’). In a turn of event, has to do with the eyes.’ 1 With Saint Thomas’s intense gaze Odysseus escapes death by blinding his opponent with a in the direction of Christ’s open wound, Caravaggio’s flaming stick into his only eye. When Polyphemus yells version of Doubting Thomas brings us to this precise that he is hurt by ‘nobody’, his fellow Cyclopes ignore his threshold of seeing. The wound opens the internal to the cry for help. It is perhaps not by chance that Odysseus
1 eye, providing a glimpse beyond the corporeal and into the was able to escape from the Cyclops, whose name means Jacques Derrida, Memoirs abyss. Here, the mysterious and the divine presents itself as ‘very famous’, by momentarily giving up his own. A of the Blind: The Self- Portrait and Other Ruins, a rapture in the visible, a black hole which cannot be fully name is what separates a ‘somebody’ from a ‘nobody’. trans. by Pascale-Anne acknowledged by sight but must instead, be experienced Brault and Michael Nass (Chicago: University of first hand. The gaze transverses from the optical to the To be famous is to be known by everyone. Chicago Press, 1993), p. 1. haptic, turning sign into a space for transfiguration. To be ‘no one’ is to be invisible.
We Who Saw Signs We are going to tell lies 8 9 The act of calling upon one’s name is an attempt to take hold of whom is not yet within grasp, to give shape and weight to the fleeting presence of the other. HEY YOU! YES, YOU! Across many primitive cultures and often in mythologies, names are not arbitrary symbols but an important aspect of what they help define. Jacques Vandier writes, ‘It is enough to know the name of a god or of a divine creature in order to have it in one’s power.’ 3 To refuse naming is to deny identification and to remain anonymous. WHO? ME? Without a name, one is free to be anyone
and no one. Odysseus did not fool the giant by Nicolas Poussin simple falsehood but through a radical negation. Et in Arcadia Ego c. 1638 –– 40 I AM NOT! In so doing, he foreshadows the fall Oil on canvas of his opponent by creating a fatal ‘blind spot’. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France Photo: Erich Lessing/ Art Resource 3 Jacques Vandier, La Religion Égyptienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949). Referenced by Jorge Luis Borges in –– Tell me a story. his essay ‘A History of the Echoes of a Name’. –– It is being written as we speak. –– How does it begin? –– It already has. You were there. –– How does it end? –– It all depends on how you read the signs. If visions are meant to be prophetic of what is to come, then tombs are reminders of what once was. Engraved on the tomb of Poussin’s Like tombs, museums exist for many as a kind neoclassical painting is Virgil’s Latin phrase ‘Et in of resting place for the dead. Images, objects Arcadia ego’ which may be interpreted as ‘even in and words come together to give a sense of Arcadia I exist’ or ‘I too once lived in Arcadia’. In objectivity to the past and offer certainty to the the former, ‘I’ refers to the personified Death who present. This objectivity seeks to reposition the waits in the mythological garden paradise while the eye and seemingly reconstructs our perspective subject in the latter refers to the buried who has once from a critical distance. Yet, there is nothing walked upon the idyllic pastures. The shift in the ‘objective’ about museums, or ‘natural’ in subject turns Death into the dead, Eden into earth. the way their collections are presented. For Poussin’s tomb can be read as a contemplation of museums are always fictional in that they are mortality, a memento mori in which the mythological always mediated under a particular set of social now becomes historical. The historical subject and historical circumstances. Beyond simply bears weight for his name is written in stone. gatekeeping, they negotiate and narrate realities.
We Who Saw Signs We are going to tell lies 10 11 Often considered as a predecessor of the natural Caspar David Friedrich Wanderer above the Sea of Fog history museum, Wunderkammer (German for 1818, Oil on canvas ‘wonder-chamber’, also known as the ‘cabinet of Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany Photo: bpk / Hamburger curiosities’) refers to an encyclopaedic collection Kunsthalle / Elke Walford in Renaissance Europe consisting of various unclassified and uncategorised objects. These unidentified objects, often a mixture of genuine and fake articles, are strangely familiar but not always fully recognisable. By bringing these seemingly disparate fragments together, the mysterious and the unknown are somehow contained and possessed. The ‘cabinet of curiosities’ becomes a theatrical space in which objectivity is channelled inwards, where the fictitious and the real play off each other in the private world. These nameless artefacts and alien specimens offer not knowledge but tales of exotic origins and encounters with the occult. Their opacity fascinates us because they offer more science fiction than science.
‘Aleph’, is a point in space through which one is 4 ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, able to observe the world in its entirety with a William Blake, The Marriage everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. single glance. Here, vision occupies an ideal locus of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, For man has closed himself up, till he sees all in which the world presents itself to the viewer 1975), plate 14. Cited things through narrow chinks of his cavern.’ as in an infinite painting. The ‘Zahir’, while by Aldous Huxley in the 4 epigraph to his 1949 book – William Blake seemingly impossible in reality, is nonetheless The Doors of Perception. still conceivable in terms of the symbolic. If one
5 Zahir: One of the ninety-nine names of God, reads the two-sided coin as the coming together Elif Shafak, The Gaze means ‘He who doesn’t hide from sight’. of thesis and antithesis in traditional dialecticism, (London: Marion Boyars 5 Publishers, 2006), p. 76. – Dictionary of Gaze then the ‘Zahir’ embodies the illusion of absolute knowledge. It is the perfect sign. Representation, in the case of ‘Aleph’, proves to be far trickier as the Jorge Luis Borges presents us with narrator admits, ‘I arrive now at the ineffable core two hypothetical encounters in his short stories of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. The Zahir and The Aleph. The first with ‘Zahir’, All language is a set of symbols whose use among
an object that is seen by the beholder from all its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can 6 angles and at all times: in this case, a coin that can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other be viewed simultaneously from both sides as if it floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, Stories (New York: resides in the core of one’s visuality. The second, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols…’ 6 Plume, 1979), p. 26.
We Who Saw Signs We are going to tell lies 12 13 Accessing totality requires one to be distanced from William Blake A Vision: The Inspiration of the Poet the world, to step outside time and occupy a godly (Elisha in the Chamber on view. Translating the sublime forces one to face the the Wall) c.1819 –– 20 Pencil and watercolour on paper impossible task of containing the infinite within the Tate Gallery, London, UK frame of representation. In place of the ideal and the Photo: Tate Images absolute, the gap between vision and signification presents a possibility for the poetic. Wherein direct substitution is no longer adequate, one conceives language anew, ‘I invented colors for the vowels! – A 7 black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. – I made rules Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Alchemy of the Word’, in Season for the form and movement of every consonant, and I in Hell, trans. by Paul boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a Schmidt (New York: Harper Perennial Modern kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would Classics, 2008), p. 232. recognize. And I alone would be its translator.’ 7
Liking his role as the poet to that of Elisha the prophet, William Blake’s drawing A Vision: The Inspiration of the Poet describes an ambiguous third space between wall and chamber, where it is simultaneously inward and outward looking. Akin to Christ’s open wound in Caravaggio’s painting, this in-between space is both window and room, a ‘narrow chink’ through which one can choose to catch a glimpse beyond, but also a ‘cavern’ from which to retreat. Blake’s immensely private and strange vision of divine inspiration is one that is spatially incongruous and perhaps even paradoxical –– Speak to me tales of distant stars. as the chamber slips precariously between the –– To that which is unknowable is deceitful. imagined and the real. –– Sing to me songs of distant pasts. –– To that which has been half forgotten can only be half true.
By manipulating signs into visions, words into thoughts, the artist, the poet, the prophet find themselves wandering along the threshold of representation and curiously thread the boundary between meaning and signification. Intermittently, they make visible its artifice and in these brief moments, our gaze shifts towards the liminal, seized by what is possibly hidden hitherto. Somewhere between half-truths and missed encounters, between the gapped and the oblique lie the promise and the doubt.
We Who Saw Signs We are going to tell lies 14 15 Adad Hannah Grieve Perspective Ho Tzu Nyen Institute of Critical Zoologists Nipan Oranniwesna Ola Vasiljeva Tan Wee Lit p. 17, 22 p. 28 Grieve Perspective The Institute of Critical Yoca Muta The Heavens Belong To Zoologists (ICZ) Everyone But The View Winner from the series, Above Is Ours Alone The Great Pretenders 2010 2011 Video installation Archival Piezographic Dimensions variable print 121 x 84 cm p. 18, 25 Adad Hannah p. 29 Video stills from Yoca Muta All Is Vanity Video stills from (Mirrorless Version) Mountain 2009 2008 HD video, 11 mins 46 secs 5 mins
p. 19, 20 –– 21 p. 30 –– 31 Ho Tzu Nyen Nipan Oranniwesna Video stills from Earth Silence Voice 2009 2010 Single channel video, Paper, wood construction 42 mins 480 x 320 x 40 cm
p. 23 p. 32 Tan Wee Lit The Institute of Critical The ‘Missed’ Series Zoologists (ICZ) (Chicago) Nymph from the series, 2008 The Great Pretenders White porcelain, 2011 engraved white marble, Archival Piezographic wood print Dimensions variable 84 x 121 cm
p. 24, 26 –– 27 Ola Vasiljeva Alchimie du Verbe 2009 Analogue slides
We Who Saw Signs The Heavens Belong To Everyone But The View Above Is Ours Alone 16 17 All Is Vanity (Mirrorless Version) Earth 18 19 Earth Earth 20 21 The Heavens Belong To Everyone But The View Above Is Ours Alone The ‘Missed’ Series (Chicago) 22 23 Alchimie du Verbe All Is Vanity (Mirrorless Version) 24 25 Alchimie du Verbe Alchimie du Verbe 26 27 Winner Mountain 28 29 Silence Voice Silence Voice 30 31 Arcadian Tomb, Silently Speaking Kevin Chua
We find the following description in Charles Burton Buckley’s An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore:
[The Hikyat Abdullah] tells us of the rock at the mouth of the river, about which much has been said by all the writers about Singapore. The following is Abdullah’s account of the discovery of it. ‘At the end of the point there was another rock found among the brushwood; it was smooth, of square form, covered with a chiselled inscription which no one could read, as it had been worn away by water for how many thousands of years who can tell. As soon as it was discovered people of all races crowded round it. The Hindoos said it was Hindoo writing, the Chinese that it was Chinese. I went among others with Mr. Raffles and the Rev. Mr. Thompson. I thought from the appearance of the raised parts of the letters that it was Arabic, but I could not read it, as the stone had been subject to the rising and falling tides for such a long time. [...] Ingenuity was exhausted in trying to decipher the inscription. [...] Mr. Raffles said the inscription was Hindoo, because the Hindoo race was the earliest that came to the Archipelago, first to Java and then to Bali and Siam, the inhabitants of which [...] are all descended from the Hindoos. But not a soul in Singapore could say what the inscription was.’ 1
I couldn’t help but think of the above episode passage the first 1 time I saw Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego (c. 1638 – 40). It was Charles Burton Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old a late fall afternoon in Paris, and I unexpectedly came upon the Times in Singapore, 1819 – 1867 painting after turning a corner in the Louvre. The gathering of a (Oxford and New York: Oxford few shepherds around a tomb in the painting somehow seemed to University Press, 1984), pp. speak to the discovery of another inscription, one that happened 89 – 90 (first published 1902). close to two centuries later, on the opposite side of the world. 2 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Poussin had done a first version of the ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ theme Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac (around 1630, now in the Devonshire collection in Chatsworth), Tradition’, in Meaning and in which three shepherds are shown coming upon a solitary the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago tomb. Erwin Panofsky famously argued that Poussin’s second Press, 1982), pp. 295 – 320 version of the theme—the painting in the Louvre—weakened the (first published 1955). fearful memento mori theme of the first, wherein, against the enjoyment of worldly pleasures in the present, we are warned of our impending death. 2 The decline of this pictorial genre meant that we were blind to our mortality, took steps away from our finitude. If the earlier painting had surprise and urgency, the
Nymph Arcadian Tomb, Silently Speaking 32 33 later painting was more placid and calm, and fit the changing 3 Marin’s first move is to see the speaker’s confusion in the Latin tenor of the times – Counter-Reformation anxiety had eased Louis Marin, To Destroy phrase (dead person or Death, tomb or painting?) as a real Painting, trans. by Mette into the mildness of seventeenth-century classical art theory. Hjort (Chicago: University of ambiguity, rather than a mere mistake on the part of the artist. Panofsky’s magisterial reading turned on a careful explication Chicago Press, 1995). If the verb is what makes a story visible to a given subject, there of the Latin phrase ‘et in Arcadia ego’ central to Poussin’s two is a notable absence of the verb in the phrase ‘et in Arcadia ego’. paintings: what had once meant ‘death is even in Arcadia’ was, 4 We are led to impute a verb (‘sum’ or ‘I am’) when we read—view— over time, translated as ‘I too was born in Arcadia’. The former But by ‘metapictorial sign’, the painting. Marin calls this the painting’s ‘secret fissure’. It is Marin implies that there is translation was more forceful because in it a present happiness always a tension between the not a coincidence that the kneeling shepherd—the figure who was menaced by death. In the latter translation, it is the dead visual and the verbal. There most approximates the viewer, by his active attempt to decipher person in the tomb, not allegorical Death, who is speaking, and is never full convertibility the inscription—points precisely to the last word in the phrase: by turning impersonal Death into an individualised ‘I’, Poussin between the two. ‘ego’. It is as though he is stumbling over that very word. Bent diminished the force and charge of his earlier painting. Ironically, over in thought, he cannot (yet) impute the verb. He cannot yet personalisation meant a diminishment of the implication of understand the word’s self-implication. (At this same moment, death for the reading/viewing subject. ‘We are confronted with the rightmost shepherd looks to the woman, as though asking a change from thinly veiled moralism to undisguised elegiac her—asking us—of the meaning of the cautionary phrase.) sentiment’, Panofsky wrote. His interpretation was in tune with histories of death, which became more secularised—modernised— A shift also takes place when we turn what we see into language, towards the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe. when we verbalise all the semi-conscious thoughts and fleeting Death was gradually separated from society; and as medicine sensations that occur when we look at the painting. A ‘cut’ gained its healing powers, we feared death not more but less. happens, when we move from what Marin calls a ‘perceptual continuum’ into a ‘figurative discontinuum’, when seeing turns Yet Panofsky’s conclusion retreats from the significance of into reading. (Verbal language will, perhaps, always be a reduction Poussin’s second painting. Ironically, he avoids the picture’s of the visual.) Marin regards the painting, in effect, as giving us warning of death. There is, for instance, a way in which the second clues, telling us how to look. Our reading of the painting converts painting confronts and implicates its viewer in a stronger manner depth into breadth – the four figures are arrayed into a frieze. than the first. In the second version, there is a more complicated, It is as though we need to rotate the picture plane ninety degrees if not complex, luring-in of the beholder: the painting almost ‘forward’ to understand the painting, or look at it ‘sideways’, taunts us not to come forward. (Poussin might have wanted to trick from the right (notice how this recalls the work of anamorphosis the viewer, drawing him in via the picture’s serene calmness, in in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533): only by moving order to bring him to a stronger consciousness of death.) The later to the right of the painting do we glimpse the striking death’s painting also seems more confident of its ability to understand and head). Lateralisation is also literalisation: we read the figures picture the world: it is an ambitious statement—a philosophy— in a progression, moving from left (unconsciousness, lack of of some sort. Reading and deciphering are deeply at issue. knowledge) to right (consciousness of death). The painting moves us from Ignorance to Wisdom, represented by the poised woman This is where Louis Marin comes in.3 For Marin, the second who looks down in quiet contemplation. Now she is closest to us painting functions as a ‘metapictorial sign’, making a larger – but the painting holds out the possibility that we might never statement about pictures in general.4 Poussin’s painting understand that last word, occupy her position. Our inability to tells us something about the language of painting as such, read and understand the painting is our possible misconstrual of representation tout court. Marin begins by positing a series of death, its meaning for us. equivalences between verbal and visual language. He follows Roman Jakobson’s distinction between histoire—a kind of Now that first consciousness of death also constitutes the 5 writing that takes place without a narrator, and consists of beginning of human history. (It is similar to a child’s first Marin, p. 69. events that simply happen—and discours, that which is spoken, acquaintance with death, as an existential phenomenon.) Poussin’s 6 enunciatory enunciated. By revealing the process by which painting thus rests on that threshold, when humankind departed Jacques Derrida, paintings, like verbal language, efface their own subject position from myth, ‘The Arcadian Shepherds recounts, in what is at once Of Grammatology (like the move from first to third person discourse, or the a musical and plastic manner, the moment when the song of the (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins way we don’t notice the material support when we look at the origin is interrupted, the spent moment when history intrudes University Press, 1998). content of a painting), Marin reveals Poussin’s painting as a upon the scene.’ 5 Understanding death in and through the painting form of address. Recovering the picture’s mode of address is like has us tunnelling back to the shadowy beginnings of our past. digging up a grave, rescuing speech from its death in language. (Marin’s positing of a shift from the oral to the written also brings to mind Derrida’s reading of Lévi-Strauss and the Nambikwara. 6
We Who Saw Signs Arcadian Tomb, Silently Speaking 34 35 (Derrida brilliantly argued that the Brazilian tribe already had then threw it out into the divination occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth 8 11 ‘writing’ before European discovery, thereby undermining mouth of the river, and this centuries in Europe, as the natural sciences, under the ‘Resorting to the Malay To be sure, art history as it is is the rock which is at this Annals, which, clouded currently practiced in North European cultural superiority and Western modernity as such.) day visible at the point influence of Galileo, moved away from particularistic, as they undoubtedly are America and Europe shies 7 of Singhapura [...] After conjectural knowledge, towards a more general, yet by fable and allegory, yet away from straightforward What of the Singapore stone, then, that indecipherable fragment ‘The third [...] I have some other recitals, the comprehensive, understanding of the workings of contain many a valuable semiotic analysis — if by that seems to stand for the promise and loss of an entire reserved for the last Annals state that “after nature. Art split off from science, as the human sciences piece of information, we ‘straightforward’ we refer to a civilisation? Buckley provided several possible explanations because I am inclined to a long time, Badang also broke away from disciplines like physics and biology. find therein mention made kind of one-way deciphering think that the evidence is died, and was buried at of three remarkable stones of signs in works of art, of the inscription: most convincing for him was one from the fully presumptive in favour the point of the straits of at Singhapura. The first that often presumes full Malay Annals that explained the inscription as having been of its being the stone now Singhapura; and, when Yet we see those early divinatory methods reappearing that I shall mention is that translatability from visual to authored by the Rajah of Kling, around 1228 AD. The Rajah visible in Singapore; it is to the tidings of his death in the late-nineteenth century, in figures like Freud and recorded at page 82 of verbal. More critical analyses had staged a contest between the reigning Kling champion be met with at pages 62 reached the land of Kling, the art historian Giovanni Morelli (who discerned the Leyden’s Malay Annals, tend to multiply modes of and 63 of the Annals. The the Rajah sent two stone in which the translator, investigation—using semiotics and an outsider named Badang. Both were given the challenge preceding pages inform pillars, to be raised over true identity of works of art through ‘unconsciously’ following its author, tells to augment a historicised of lifting up a huge stone: the Kling champion wavered, while us that in the reign of Sir his grave as a monument, depicted identifying marks like fingernails or earlobes). us “that there was a man analysis of medium and Badang was able to lift it over his head. Badang then threw Rajah Vicrama, there was and these are the pillars Conjectural semiotics returned with a vengeance, but of Pasei, named Tun format, for example—and the stone into the mouth of the river, which is the stone we a redoubtable champion which are still at the point it was not necessarily false nor naïvely speculative. ‘In Jana Khateb, who went especially examines the see today. 7 Yet I am more intrigued by another explanation of the name of Badang. of the Bay.”’ (Around 1228 a social structure of ever-increasing complexity like to Singhapura with two frame of semiotic analysis. Several remarkable feats AD, the Kling Rajah had companions, named Tuan In other words, looking at that Buckley provides, one that involves a forbidden love. of strength are recorded the inscription written that of advanced capitalism’, Ginzburg writes, ‘any de Bongoran, and Tuan de the historical context and One Tun Jana Khateb was spying (or simply looking) at one of of him, but I will merely of Badang’s exploits, in claim to systematic knowledge appears as a flight of Salangor. One day Tun Jana conditions that called for an the Rajah of Singapura’s beautiful women, when a betel tree select the one in point. something close to the foolish fancy. [...] Reality is opaque; but there are certain Khateb was walking in the extant semiotic analysis. See broke. Suspecting the man of causing this ecological mishap to The fame of Badang having Malabar language, an points—clues, signs—which allow us to decipher it.’ 10 market place of Singhapura, for example, Eve Meltzer’s reached the land of Kling obsolete Tamil dialect.) and drew near to the palace excellent ‘The Dream of attract the woman’s attention, the Rajah had him put to death. (Coromandel) the Rajah ‘If the story of Mr Badang In many ways, contemporary art historians like of the Rajah, where one of the Information World’, His dead body lay near a seller of sweetmeat, and his blood soon of that country dispatched is true’, Buckley concludes, Marin are the hunters of today, following tracks and the Rajah’s women observed Oxford Art Journal, vol. 29, turned into stone.8 What is interesting about the story is that it a champion, named Nadi ‘[this explains why] pictorial signs, building conclusions from a welter of him. He was looking at a no. 1 (March 2006), 115 – 35, says something more telling, I think, about a society’s origins. Vijaya Vicrama, to try his there were sports on small inferences. 11 Artists too, of course; the works betel tree, when it suddenly which — to put it simply The thwarted love, the betel tree, the sweetmeat seller, all strength with him, staking the Esplanade about six in this exhibition testify to an unabated interest broke. This was observed — unpacks the linguistic seven ships on the issue hundred and fifty years by the Rajah, who was unconscious of a wide body strangely have a part to play in the way the stone gets encoded, of the contest. After a ago, which is the time in the relationship between history and myth, the enraged at it, conceiving it of art practices of the 1960s becomes a pregnant sign. (It recalls the second version of few trials of their relative when Badang is said to errances of meaning, and the paradoxes of the sign. to have been done solely and 70s. It would also be Poussin’s Et In Arcadia Ego, in the way that the painting made powers, Badang pointed have lived.’ Buckley, p. 94. for the purpose of attracting useful to remember that the consideration of origins our own deathly encounter.) Or one to a huge stone lying the lady’s attention. [...] societies tend to alternately before the Rajah’s hall, He accordingly ordered favour ‘synchronic’ (over could say that all good myths involve transformation, both moral and asked his opponent him to be put to death. space) and ‘diachronic’ and material. In this foundational myth, Tun Jana Khateb needed to lift it, and to allow their The executioners seized (over time) investigations: to die, for Singapore society to begin. Sacrifice, under a betel tree. claims to be decided by him, and carried him to the the emergence of various the greatest strength place of execution and relativising structuralisms of The historian Carlo Ginzburg once described the evolution displayed by this feat. The stabbed him near the house the 1910s and 20s, such as Kling champion assented, of a seller of sweetmeats. the theories of Saussure and 9 of signs. For thousands of years mankind lived by hunting. and, after several failures, His blood flowed on the Wittgenstein, was a result of Hunters learned to construct the appearance and movements of succeeded in raising it ground, but his body the failure of evolutionary an unseen quarry through prints in soft ground, snapped twigs, as high as his knee, after vanished from their ken, modes of explanation of smells, and threads of saliva. They learnt to sniff and observe, which he immediately let and his blood was covered socio-historical change it fall. The story then says up by the sweetmeat seller, in the 1870s –1900s. See and gave meaning and context to the slightest trace. This process that Badang, having taken and was changed into Ronald Bush, ‘The Presence of deciphering animal tracks led to the invention of writing. up the stone, poised it stone and still remains at of the Past: Ethnographic Footprints evolved into pictograms, and pictograms developed easily several times, and Singhapura.”’ Buckley, p. 90. Thinking/Literary Politics’, into phonetic script. If early civilisations saw knowledge as a in Prehistories of the Future: process of divination and prophecy, it was the Greek city-states 9 the Primitivist Project and Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Morelli, the Culture of Modernism, that pioneered dispassionate investigation as the true form of Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: ed. by Elazar Barkan and knowledge. Though Hippocratic medicine played an important Clues and Scientific Method’, Ronald Bush (Stanford: part in this change—as a model that was based on symptoms History Workshop Journal, Stanford University Press, and signs, and conjecturally built up knowledge from parts to 9, Spring (1980), 5 – 36. 1995), pp. 23 – 41. wholes—it was soon eclipsed by Plato’s more idealised theory 10 of knowledge. A similar shift away from ‘false’ methods of Ginzburg, 27.
We Who Saw Signs Arcadian Tomb, Silently Speaking 36 37 Biographies
Adad Hannah / b. 1971 Grieve Perspective Ho Tzu Nyen / b.1976 Nipan Oranniwesna / b.1962 Ola Vasiljeva / b.1981 Tan Wee Lit / b.1978 Yoca Muta / b.1981 Zhao Renhui / b.1979 Lives and works in Formed 2009 Lives and works Lives and works in Lives and works in Lives and works Lives and works Lives and works in Montreal, Canada Based in Singapore in Singapore Bangkok, Thailand Netherlands in Singapore in Japan Singapore and London, UK
Adad Hannah is best Grieve Perspective is an art Ho Tzu Nyen makes art Nipan Oranniwesna’s work Working in a wide range The autobiographical Using moving images and Zhao Renhui’s work is based known for his video- collective based in Singapore. projects that have been explores the fragile state of of media and drawing her snippets of his life, identity as sculpture installations, Yoca on the concept of doubt and recorded tableaux vivants Working primarily with presented in cinemas, galleries contemporary societies in the inspiration from classical an artist and the social issues Muta’s works delve into uncertainty and in his project, of models holding poses for high-end motion compositing and theatres, as well as on age of globalisation. This can literature, historical figures that surfaces in everyday the idea of the fetishistic The Institute of Critical extended periods in order software, much of its works television. His past works have be seen in the installation, and events, pop- and sub- life are all skillfully weaved relationship humans Zoologists (ICZ), he tests to undermine the verity of delve into the maintained in common the investigation City of Ghost, in which the cultures, Ola Vasiljeva into the works of Tan Wee have with nature and the to the limit the principles the photographic image. By perversities that are a root and incorporation of artist uses talcum powder to creates an ambiguous, Lit. Each social and personal incumbent need to devour behind the dissemination of drawing our attention to the staple of Singapore life. More important cultural create a sprawling cityscape absurd scenography, which aspect is implicitly layered or become one with a wild knowledge and acceptance performance inherent within of a collective of ideas than moments; these are ideas and using a combination of she populates with objects, into what are deceivingly and untamed world. In of truths. A large part of his photography, he creates of a collective of individuals, expressions that have had meticulously cut-out maps videos; artworks by herself simple manifestations. A Tale of Two Suns, Muta practice tries to resists the a space for reflection that Grieve Perspective, as the significant impact beyond of ten different metropolitan and other artists. The Instigated from seemingly uses folklore to explore the false naturalisation of beliefs transforms passive viewers name obliquely implies, their individual cultural and cities. Its compelling visuality work often evokes an odd, nondescript trivialities, Tan’s human encounter with rural and circumstances. In The into self-conscious historical navigates through loss to geographical origin. His work is contrasted at same time by surreal situation; though objects intersect with larger landscape and the idea of Great Pretenders, ICZ looks at agents. His recent projects a point of critical distance, is characterised by three consciousness of its fragility, being hardly narrative, it events specific to a particular nature as a screen onto which systems of resemblances and include the Prado Stills series, mixing the everyday with themes: historiography — the highlighting the delicate and often focuses on the state period of his life and aim we project our desires and mimicry through the winners shot in the Museo del Prado the absurd, the macabre with production of new histories, fragile nature of our societies of fundamental loneliness to resonate with that of his longings. Though the use of the annual Phylliidae (Leaf in Madrid, Spain, and All Is the sentimental. Their video from pre-colonial founding and their interconnectedness and distancing from the real audiences. His ongoing The of artifice and theatrical Insects) Convention in Tokyo, Vanity (Mirrorless Version), installation, The Heavens myths (Utama – Every Name with each other. Notion of world. Vasiljeva’s aesthetic ‘Missed’ Series are private devices, Muta contructs her Japan where scientists breed an uncanny reconstruction Belong To Everyone But The in History is I, 2003) to art cultural identity, both within vocabulary draws from monuments of persons on apocalyptic dreamscape and compete their leaf insects of a nineteenth century View Above Is Ours Alone, histories (4 x 4: Episodes of the context of Thailand and popular imagery which she the ‘missing and wanted’ list. Mountain, in which we against one another. Through optical illusion by Charles makes use of a ‘time of flight’ Singapore Art, 2004); re- abroad, is another aspect of choreographs with witty Sculpted out of fine white appear to be viewing a hilly meticulous photographic Allan Gilbert using a camera to produce digital 3D interpretation —the reworking the artist’s work which can humour, poetry and a strong porcelain, the series of ghostly landscape from a distance, documentation and research pair of identical twins to sequences of card flourishing. of historical objects, ranging be observed in his series of uncanny touch. Inspired by figures carry with them an not unlike the lone figure journals, ICZ brings these render the appearance of With its allusive title from philosophical texts works on paper based on the a famous passage – ‘Alchemy air of poignancy and sterility in Caspar David Fredrich’s highly camouflaged insects a non-existent mirror. coincidentally bearing the (Zarathustra: A Film for lyrics of national anthems and of the Word’ from Arthur while also being accorded sublime landscape painting to intense scrutiny. same number of characters Everyone and No One, 2009), religious text. Reproduced Rimbaud’s Season In Hell, with a sense of the dignity Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Hannah earned a BFA from as the number of cards in a history painting (EARTH, with small holes to create Vasiljeva’s own Alchimie and respect akin to past Here, totality is suggested at Zhao has participated in Emily Carr Institute of Art pack, the work points to a 2009), and popular songs Braille-like versions of the du Verbe can be seen as a noblemen and dignitaries. the threshold of perception. numerous solo and group and Design in Vancouver perspective shift involving (The Bohemian Rhapsody original, these works are response to the poet’s cry As the camera zooms out, the exhibitions including at the (1998), and an MFA from an emotional transcendence. Project, 2008); and the compelling yet difficult for the absurd, the theatrical Tan graduated from the artist herself appears to reveal Singapore Art Museum, Concordia University analysis of the production of to read, questioning their and the mystical. Seemingly School of the Art Institute the mountain as a miniature Singapore; Fukuoka Asian in Montreal (2004). He Grieve Perspective have visual aesthetic and acoustic intent and effectiveness. hallucinatory and dream-like, of Chicago with an MFA and began devouring the Art Museum, Japan; Michel has recently exhibited shown their works in film deconstruction (NEWTON, Vasiljeva’s series of distorted in Sculpture and had his idyllic landscape, turning Foley Gallery, New York, at The Aldrich Museum, festivals and art exhibitions 2009 and EARTH, 2009). Nipan’s work has been widely black and white photographs first solo exhibition at the a scene of contemplation USA; Photo Levallois, Paris, Connecticut, USA (2010), at various locations in Asia exhibited internationally, hint at the performative invitation of the Museum of into absurd destruction. France; Seoul Arts Center, The Australian Centre for and Europe, including His first feature film HERE most notably at the Busan and the imaginative powers Contemporary Art, Chicago, Korea; PhotoIreland, Flash Photography, Sydney (2010), International Symposium on premiered at the 41st Biennale, Korea (2008), and of imagery and word. USA (2008). He was one Muta first received her Forward Festival, Toronto, Zendai MoMA, Shanghai, Computational Aesthetics in Director’s Fortnight, Cannes at the Thai Pavilion at the of five artists to represent formal training from Canada; and Flowers East China (2009), Musée d’art Graphics, Visualization, and Film Festival, France (2009) 52nd Venice Biennale, Italy Vasiljeva is one of the Singapore in the exhibition Tokyo Zokei University Gallery, London, UK. His contemporain de Montréal, Imaging, London, UK (2010), and his medium length film, (2007). His works were also founders of the Ocean Identities vs. Globalisation (2003) and subsequently, work has also been awarded Canada (2008, 2009), the Open Space / Singapore EARTH at the 66th Venice included in Monologue/ Academy of Arts (www. in Berlin, Germany, graduated from Goldsmiths the United Overseas Bank Galerie Thomas Schulte, / Southeast Asia Exhibition, International Film Festival, Dialogue II, BISCHOFF/ oaoasite.net) and the Chiangmai and Bangkok, College, University of Painting of the Year Award, Berlin, Germany (2008), Singapore (2010) and a Italy (2009). His art projects WIESS, London, UK (2008), publisher of the oaoa Thailand (2004). Recent London (2008) where she Singapore (2009), Conceptual Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, solo show at Grey Projects have been presented at the Coffee, Cigarettes and Pad magazine. Her work has exhibitions include the Fifth received the Nicholas and & Constructed Winner of UK (2006), the 4th Seoul Annex Space at Niven Liverpool Biennial, UK Thai: Contemporary Art in recently been shown at the Outdoor Sculpture Biennial, Andrei Tooth Travelling Sony World Photography International Media Art Road, Singapore (2010). (2010); the 6th Asia-Pacific Southeast Asia, Eslite Gallery, Witte de With in Rotterdam, Baltimore, USA (2008), Urban Scholarship for her research Awards at Cannes, France Biennale, Korea (2006), and Triennial, Brisbane, Australia Taipei, Taiwan (2008), Paper Netherlands, Ellen de Brujne Contemporary Art Trail, UK field trip to Borneo. She was (2010), honourable mentions Casa Encendida, Madrid, (2009); the 26th Sao Paulo Matters, BACC, Bangkok, Projects in Amsterdam, (2008), and Emerging Illinois commissioned by Iniva to in Photo Levallois, France Spain (2006). Hannah’s Biennale, Brazil (2004); Thailand (2009), Safe Place Netherlands, CAC in Vilnius, Artists, USA (2007). He was install a site-specific work (2008) and Prix Voies Off, works are in museums, the 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art The Future, VER Gallery, Lithuania, and Art Since the a recipient of the Graduate at Rivington Place, London, France (2010). In 2010, he private, and corporate Triennale, Japan (2005); Bangkok, Thailand (2009) and Summer of ‘69 in New York, Fellowship Award from the UK (2008) and her work was was awarded the Young collections around the world and the inaugural Singapore This Is Not A Fairy Tale, g23, USA. Vasiljeva is represented School of the Art, Institute of also included in Bloomberg Artist Award by the National and he is represented by Biennale (2006). He recently Bangkok, Thailand (2011). by Galerie van Gelder in Chicago and the Grand Prize New Contemporaries, Arts Council, Singapore. Pierre-François Ouellette represented Singapore at the Amsterdam, Netherlands. Winner for the Singapore London, UK (2008). art contemporain in 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Sculpture Award (2007). Montreal, Canada.
We Who Saw Signs Biographies 38 39 Published on the occasion We Who Saw Signs is a Contributors: Acknowledgements: of the exhibition publication of the Institute of Guo-Liang Tan is a visual The Institute of We Who Saw Signs Contemporary Arts Singapore artist based in Singapore. Contemporary Arts Singapore 3 Aug –– 4 Sept, 2011 at LASALLE College of Alongside his studio practice, would like to thank the Institute of Contemporary the Arts. The Institute he writes for and works with participating artists for their Arts Singapore of Contemporary Arts other artists in curatorial contributions, as well as Singapore imprint focuses and publication projects, the the generous support of the LASALLE College of the Arts on exhibition catalogues, most recent being Found & a.r.t.s. Fund and the National 1 McNally Street artists’ monographs, and Lost and Aversions (2009), Arts Council, Singapore. Singapore 187940 publications on art history an exhibition/publication t: +65 6496 5070 and critical theory. These on contemporary artists’ The curator would like to f: +65 6496 5065 publications complement the drawings at Osage Gallery. extend a special thanks to: e: [email protected] Institute of Contemporary w: www.lasalle.edu.sg Arts Singapore’s exhibition Kevin Chua teaches Dr Charles Merewether programme and other eighteenth and nineteenth Kevin Chua ISBN 978-981-08-9435-1 research initiatives, century European Art at Kimberly Shen which aim to promote the Texas Tech University, in Isrudy Shaik © 2011 Institute of discourses surrounding Lubbock, Texas, USA. He also Redzuan Zemmy Contemporary Arts contemporary art. writes on contemporary Asian Rofan Teo Singapore art, and has published in Art Khim Ong Journal, FOCAS: Forum on Milenko Prvacki © 2011 Individual Contemporary Art and Society, Ian Woo contributions: Broadsheet, and Third Text. the contributors Design by MAKE Dr Charles Merewether is Printed in Singapore All rights reserved; no the Director of the Institute First Edition (500 copies) part of this publication of Contemporary Arts may be reproduced, stored Singapore, a historian, Supported by: in a retrieval system, or writer and curator who transmitted in any form or has published books by any means, electronic, and articles and worked mechanical, photocopying, professionally in Europe, recording, or otherwise the Americas, Australia, without prior written Asia and the Middle East. permission of the publisher. He was Artistic Director of the Biennale of The publisher does not Sydney in 2006. warrant or assume any legal responsibility for the publication’s contents. All opinions expressed in the book are of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of LASALLE College of the Arts.
Acknowledments / Credits 40