A Reflection on Two Exhibitions at the Singapore Art Museum

Chang Tan What Asia? Whose Art? A Reflection on Two Exhibitions at the Singapore Art Museum hat is “Asian art”? Wasn’t this a concept conjured up by the first generation of modern connoisseurs and collectors who were Winvariably Orientalists looking for an antithesis to the West?1 Why, then, do we cling to such a troubled discourse and keep on renewing it? In each display of “Asian Art,” who is chosen, and who is left behind? Aren’t these selections always based more on sociopolitical rather than aesthetic criteria? To what extent, then, should curators lay bare their criteria and agenda—or must they remain hidden and unspoken? Finally, what kind of “Asia” is being presented, when a museum—and the state apparatus behind it—is committed to collect, display, and interpret “Asian art”? The above questions haunted me during my visits to the two exhibitions at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM)—Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991–2011 (March 12–June 26, 2011) and Panorama: Recent Art from Contemporary Asia (April 20, 2012–April 14, 2013), the latter presented in two segments, and installed, respectively, in the main building of SAM and at its 8Q branch across the street. Both exhibitions were excellent, yet the art they choose to display leads to radically different impressions that, in combination, may help us understand the agenda and vision of the museum, the first institution of modern art in Singapore and, in its own words, “the first international standard art museum in Southeast Asia.”2 The earlier exhibition, which featured fifty-four artists from Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, is scrupulously scoped to achieve a dynamic balance between diversity and coherence. As “the first such large-scale Asian-made institutional presentation of contemporary Southeast Asian art,”3 it also firmly places Singapore at the centre of modern Southeastern Asian art, despite its own limited representation in the show.4 What matters, the exhibition seems to argue, is the museum’s capacity to rescue those artworks from politically tumultuous societies, to display them in a state-of-the-art facility, and to interpret them in a vocabulary that stays at the frontline of the global art world today. Beneath it all—or, perhaps, above it all—is the new initiative of the Singaporean government, which has decided that its manicured city-state will harbour creative industries and become the cultural hub of Southeast Asia—or even entire Asia—in the twenty-first century.5 The curatorial conceit behind Negotiating Home, History and Nation is well articulated, if not unproblematic. The six nations, the guest curator Iola Lenzi explains (Lenzi worked with two co-curators, Tan Boon Hui Vol. 12 No. 2 35 and Khairuddin Hori), share a regional network of maritime migration Sutee Kunavichayanont, History Class, 2001, mixed and trade, a dynamic “syncretism” of religions and spirituality, and a media. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. more recent history of colonization, independence, and nation building.6 Individual nations within this ensemble, of course, had different historical trajectories, demographics, and societal structures, but such details get lost to those unfamiliar with the historical and geographic diversities of the region, since the exhibition galleries provide little context for each work. Even the works that aim to investigate specific historical facts can be read as abstract and “contentless.” Sutee Kunavichayanont’s History Class (2000), for example, features fourteen school desks with texts and images carved on each desktop in low relief. As the title suggests, these carved images outline the history of Thailand from 1884 to 1992 through quotes from a range of documents as well as photos of historical figures and illustrations of events. Pencils, crayons, and paper were provided so that the visitors could make their own rubbings of the desktop renderings. The narrative of History Class is one of bitter irony and somber reflection: The country fought to turn absolute monarchy into constitutional monarchy and democracy but acquired a “modern” government of military dictators in the process. The texts, however, were written in Thai, and no translation was provided in the exhibition venue.7 Such a lack of explanation posed few problems when the work was first installed in 2000—in the open air, at the foot of Bangkok’s Democracy Monument, again with pencils and papers provided. Since much of the carving is too shallow to be directly legible, the lack of explanatory texts compels viewers to replicate and “make seen” the artist’s compositions, therefore creating a much stronger sense of involvement. But in its current setting, the vast majority of visitors, the present author included, understood next to nothing when sitting down at the desks to dutifully duplicate the artist’s vision. The “class,” in other words, can no longer be taught due to transcultural illiteracy. The work evolved into a clever yet inconsequential specimen of relational art. On the other hand, a powerful yet carefully mediated sense of communal trauma—and, to a degree, communal resilience and revival—pervades much of the work in this exhibition. One of the most eye-catching works, encountered immediately upon entry, is the Filipino artists Alfredo and 36 Vol. 12 No. 2 Alfredo and Isobel Aquilizan, Isabel Aquilizan’s Wings (2009), Wings, 2009, used rubber thongs, fibreglass armature a large installation consisting of with metal internal structure, metal plate base and tubing, four thousand pairs of rubber stainless steel bolts. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. flip-flops assembled into three pairs of gigantic, angelic wings. The shoes are semi-transparent in varying shades of ivory and yellow, and when lit properly—as they were in the SAM gallery—they glow and sparkle beautifully. This Bayu Utomo Radjikin, Lang congregation of the mundane Kacang, 1991, metal and cement, 141 x 104 x 120 cm. acquires an aura of the ethereal, but Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. when one learns that all the shoes are collected from a “correctional facility” in Singapore—as I found out during the curatorial tour I took of the exhibition—the piece becomes at once ironic and moving: for those who cannot even walk freely, the fantasy of flying with slippers must have brought a sense of bitterness as well as comfort. Ascending to the third floor, the visitor was greeted by Bayu Utomo Radjikin’s Lang Kacang (1991), a human-sized sculpture of an armless warrior, squatting, head thrown back, howling into the void. Rustic scrap metal constitutes his armour— underneath which no body exists—and the elaborate headgear and the jeweled breastplates hint at his Javanese origin. While only 1.41 metres in height, the statue nevertheless appears monumental: desperate yet ferocious, defeated yet proud, the warrior is the epitome of tragic heroism. Many other pieces, such as Vasan Sitthiket’s Committing Suicide Culture: The Only Way Thai Farmers Escape Debt (1995), F. X. Harsono’s Burned Victims (1998), Manit Sriwanichpoom’s Horror in Pink (2001), and Din Q Lê’s The Farmers & The Helicopters (2006) also point at traumatic events in recent history, with varying degree of explicitness. As the curator points out, social problems that ravaged Southeast Asia in the past decades—“ inequality, corruption, environmental rape, authoritarianism”—are common themes for the artists of this generation,8 yet the very fact that they can now address those problems freely speaks to optimism and hope. Left: Vasan Sitthiket, Committing Suicide Culture: The Only Way Thai Farmers Escape Debt, 1995, mixed media, 250 x 400 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. Right: F. X. Harsono, Burned Victims, 1998, installation and performance video. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. Vol. 12 No. 2 37 Din Q Le, The Farmers and The Helicopters, 2006, 3-channel video installation, 15 mins. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. Again, while the audience can become mesmerized by the visually captivating presentations, one continues to desire historical specificities that may throw more light on and contexualize these conceptually intriguing pieces. The viewer would have had a broader understanding, for example, of the pink-suited man who pushes a shopping cart through the black- and-white scenes of torture in the photographic series Horror in Pink by Manit Sriwanichpoom, if she knew that the work was provoked by the artist’s shock at hearing that Samak Sundaravej, who publicly urged the use of brutal force on Thai democratic protesters in 1976, won more than a million votes in his campaign for mayor of Bangkok in 2000. The economic boom and the pleasure of consumerism, the artist concludes, erases memory of injustice and trauma among the Thai populace, and the “pink man” stands for present day Thailand—“a soulless man without a conscience to trouble him.”9 The de-contextualized images of violence, suffering, and resistance, on the other hand, convey a larger sense of an inexplicable yet inescapable victimhood that reminds one of what Paul Kagawa described twenty years ago—all “Third World Artists” (T.W.A.) are, “by our (e.g. American) definition, a voice of the oppressed.”10 Many works also feature troubled representations of individual as well as national identities—another theme that is routinely associated with “T.W.A.” The Singaporean artist Lee Wen’s Strange Fruit (2004), in which he douses himself in bright yellow paint and walks through the streets of London with his upper half covered in a balloon of red lantern, is a blatant and confrontational appropriation of racial stereotypes. Thailand’s Navin Rawanchaikul, in Where’s Navin? (2007), on the other hand, is at once more light-spirited and 38 Vol.

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