Please come visit this exhibition at Langgeng Art Foundation if you are in Yogyakarta for the Jogja Biennale!

[SEA] TERRITORIES OF THE REAL AND UNREAL:
Photographic practices in contemporary Southeast Asian Art
Curated by Adeline Ooi and Beverly Yong

OPENING
Sunday, 27 November, 7.30 PM
Exhibition continues until 21 January 2012.

ARTISTS
Amanda Heng (SG), Angki Purbandono (ID)
Davy Linggar (ID), Gina Osterloh (PH/US)
Isa Lorenzo (PH), Ismail Hashim (MY)
Julia Sarisetiati (ID), Kornkrit Jianpinidnan (TH)
Lena Cobangbang (PH), Manit Sriwanichpoom (TH)
Paul Kadarisman (ID), Poklong Anading (PH)
Steve Tirona (PH), Wimo Ambala Bayang (ID)
Yee I-Lann (MY), Zhao Renhui (SG)

[SEA] TALKS SERIES
A day of talks will be held on
Saturday, 10 December 2011, 10AM – 5.30PM
Guided tour: Adeline Ooi, Beverly Yong;
Speakers: Patricia Levasseur de la Motte, Zhuang Wubin
[for registered participants]

For more info, or to register for the guided tour and talks,
 please contact Ms. Mala at +6281215500083 or info[at]langgengfoundation.org

SUPPORTED BY

RogueArt

WITH THANKS TO
Muzium & Galeri Tuanku Fauziah, Universiti Sains Malaysia
Silverlens Foundation, Philippines

Mr Hermanto, Garis Art Space, Indonesia
Pakhruddin & Fatimah Sulaiman

LANGGENG ART FOUNDATION
Jl. Suryodiningratan 37, 
Yogyakarta 55131, 
Indonesia

Open daily 11:00 AM – 07:00 PM

Click here for more information, or visit Langgeng Art Foundation’s website.

The Singaporeans have certainly been laying the art on. Just two months on from Art Stage, we tramped down for the year’s second art blockbuster event, the slightly delayed Singapore Biennale, and a good seven or eight shows on the side.

By all accounts, SB2011 is less of a spectacle than its predecessors – no art statements running across City Hall in bright lights, no colourful containers brightening the urban shoreline. It shies well away from big beautiful themes like 2006’s Belief, and 2008’s Wonder. This year’s Biennale, themed “Open House”, is decidedly interior in its conceptual and physical architecture.

(Broadsheet’s 40th anniversary edition gives a good preview, including a lengthy interview with Artistic Director Matthew Ngui and Curators Russell Storer and Trevor Smith: http://www.cacsa.org.au.)

Less can be more, though, and, not expecting wow (there was simply not very much build-up to the event), I really enjoyed the Biennale as an experience. I found myself getting into works I didn’t expect to like, and that there was just about enough time to cover the 63 works over a day and a bit (ideally two though) without reeling over from too much information. The curatorial emphasis on process over subject, object and in a number of cases, presentation, I think worked on me, ranging through sometimes vastly different approaches from space to space, room to room, dark corner to dark corner (of the National Museum) – the question marks and surprises, as much as the resonances did force you to engage and explore. I particularly liked the Old Kallang Airport site – moving through the succession of rooms in the East and West blocks like changing levels of a video game, or the hide-and-seek of the main building. There was an Alice-in-Wonderland effect, you were tiny among the giant rolls of Michael Beutler’s Pipeline Field, or in Sheela Gowda’s magnified bathroom of horror, but god-like peering into the unrealised utopias of Michael Lee’s Office Architect. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Frequency and Volume: Relational Architecture 9 was a big hit with visitors as our bodies tuned into radio channels tracking the large shadows we cast on the wall.

Michael Beutler, Pipeline Field

Sheela Gowda

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Frequency and Volume: Relational Architecture 9

There was a definite sense of nakedness and exposure, sometimes as a challenge, sometimes as an act of trust or intimacy, sometimes conspiratorial. There were relatively few works that were all dressed up and ready to go for the ball. For Rumah Sulaiman Belakang Kedai Ah Guat, Shooshie Sulaiman relocated the structures of two sites of personal significance– in Titiwangsa KL and Malacca, to SAM’s 8Q building, and they contextualise a video of a conversation with Ah Guat, and drawings and collages from over the span of her practice, creating a layered reading of artistic process, space, and memory through an excavation of the personal.

Shooshie Sulaiman, Rumah Sulaiman Belakang Kedai Ah Guat

Confession, identity-construction and voyeurism seemed to play a big part in the curatorial conversation, from Ruang Rupa’s hilarious and touching fantasy lives of Singaporeans to Ise’s grocery-shopping adventures with local families to Jill Magid’s Evidence Locker to the poster-child of the Biennale, Candice Breitz’s Factum which compares interviews with identical twins and a set of triplets. I particularly enjoyed Tala Mandani’s tiny animated vignettes of clumsy men doing violence to themselves, and Simon Fujiwara’s extraordinary manifold reconstruction of Hotel Mumber using eroticism as an intriguing entry-point.

Ruang Rupa, Singapura Fiction

I was surprised by the amount of sex (as parody: Tracy Moffat, Ming Wong) and violence (to inanimate structures – Lisi Raskin’s muscled reconfiguration of the mezzanine floor of Kallang West Block, Mike Nelson tearing up walls and pedestals, Superflex drowning McDonalds). I found I quite liked the violence bit.

Mike Nelson

Other personal favourites which linger in my mind are Tiffany Chung’s poetic landscape installation Floating into the Future from a Distant Past, and earlier mappings of Vietnam, and Phil Collins’ wonderful music video The Meaning of Style, carving new spaces for imagining our third-world realities.

Tiffany Chung, Floating into the Future from a Distant Past

It’s worth catching the Biennale (to 15 May 2011) if you’re in this part of the world – not so much as a great new album of contemporary art, but certainly an inspiring and interesting playlist which can help to make us think more deeply about what some artists today are trying to get at.

For a “greatest hits” of Southeast Asian contemporary art, you can also catch Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, 1991 – 2010 at SAM (to 26 June 2011). Do also make an effort to visit Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya at NUS Museum, a wonderful exploration, both as an exhibition and a publication, or what curator Shabbir Hussain Mustafa describes as an “exhibitionary complex”, of the evolution of the museum in Malaya. Tap into some fantastic archival material including letters and recorded conversations on Malayan exhibitions in London in the 1920s, the genesis of the Raffles Museum, and the Asian Art Museum at University Malaya and their collections, Asian art objects from the NUS Museum and Asian Civilisations Museum collections, natural history artefacts from the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research (NUS) Collection, Dr Ivan Polunin’s remarkable Singapore film archive and the eclectic collection and paintings of artist and healer Mohammad din Mohammad, for new ways of seeing old ways of seeing.

Mella Jaarsma at SAM

Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya

Bernando Pacquing, Untitled at ICA’s “Roberto Chabet : Complete & Unabridged”

I hit Manila with my skates on and headed straight to silverlens gallery for back-to-back openings last night. Who’s showing? Three of Manila’s hottest 30-something boys: Poklong Anading + Gary-Ross Pastrana at silverlens and Mariano Ching across the bridge at SLab.

2011 marks my 10th anniversary with Manila. I first set foot in this city in January 2001 and didn’t think I would survive my first 24 hours! Well here I am 10 years on and grateful for the experiences this city has given me. What is even more special is the people I’ve gotten to know along the way, friends and collaborators in the art community who make Manila feel very much like my second home.

Over the past 10 years, Poklong, Gary and Mariano have emerged from the black hole that is DIY territory and have become stars in their own right. As their art practice continue to mature, each artist has stayed true to his own path of interests and concerns and consistently challenged audience with works that are thought-provoking, witty and often humourous. Between Signs is a two-man show for Poklong and Gary, two old friends who have exhibited together in group shows across Manila and beyond. Sparse, minimal and slightly off-kilter – particularly in the Pinoy context where more is always more, this show may come across as “nothing much is happening” to those who are unaccustomed to the artists’ unique brand of aesthetics. Works in this exhibition feel as though “they just happen to be there”, featuring objects such as clear tape, breadcrumbs, a folio of dust, a ball of chocolate and a green tea and ube (purple yam) cake and a slab of concrete, literally, among others. The point of the exhibition is to blur the distinction between “who made what” and highlight the dialogue between works made by two friends who share similar concerns or “maps” but are moving along different journeys.

Fallen Map (by Poklong Anading) in the picture below is the kindred spirit of the First Attempt at Social Sculpture or Breaking the Fourth Wall (by Gary-Ross Pastrana) in that they both represent fragments from the urban landscape. For Fallen Map, Poklong went around the Metro and collected pieces of broken pavement and painted the flat side with colorful patterns derived from rags. Meanwhile, Gary’s edible concrete cake is made to look like a part of the gallery floor.

Image below :The concrete cake is actually a green tea ube cake, delicious despite its unappetizing appearance.

Across the bridge at SLab, Mariano Ching’s  Even Bad Days Are Good tells us that beauty can be found in the grotesque, the ugly and the details. The show presents a series of portraits of Chewbacca-meets-Elephant Man type characters on canvas and a set of miniature landscapes etched and carved onto shaped wooden blocks. Mariano’s touch on wood is exquisite, combining intricately detailed rendering of fantastical seascapes and junkyard scenes with carved textures on the wood’s surface. This series of work shows off the artist’s fine draftsmanship and keen understanding and appreciation for wood gained from his Japanese training in printmaking during his year in Kyoto in 2004.

Opening night at SLab. The happy couple, Yasmin Sison (left) and Mariano Ching (right) with Isa Lorenzo (centre),  co-owner of silverlens gallery.

For more information and images of Poklong, Gary and Mariano’s work, please visit silverlens gallery’s website here and SLab’s website here (AO)

The launch of WORKING and Tara Sosrowardoyo’s exhibition was a success!  A BIG THANK YOU to everyone who made it to Zinc Art Space last Saturday evening! Tara’s works look fantastic in the space, we love it so much we thought we’d share images of the exhibition with you.

Click here for more pictures of the opening event. And here to read a short article about the project in New Straits Times Life & Style section on Sunday, 10.10.10

Join on us on the 2nd of October to celebrate the launch of the publication WORKING, an artists initiated project in association with RogueArt. Spearheaded by Ahmad Zakii Anwar and Jalaini Abu Hassan, WORKING is the principal outcome of the WORK project which began in 2009. Some of you may recall attending the WORK exhibition held earlier in January 2010 at No. 19 Jalan Berangan? (For those who would like to find out more about the exhibition, click here if you are curious)

WORKING focuses on the creative processes of 10 leading Malaysian artists and their relationship with their respective working environments through a series of interviews and photographic documentation. The publication is a modest attempt to uncover each artist’s methodology, to try to make sense of what is often considered a wordless and emotional creative process.

An exhibition entitled 10 Malaysian Artists: Portraits from the WORK Project by Tara Sosrowardoyo will also be presented in conjunction with the book launch. Tara was invited to be the “eyes” of the project, to capture each artist’s portraits which will form the key entries of WORKING. Over a period of two months in 2009, this regionally acclaimed photographer travelled around the Klang Valley, up north to Kuala Kangsar, down south to Melaka and Johor Bahru, spending time with the artists and familiarising himself with their environments.

The exhibition is the result of this two-month shoot. A number of images from this exhibition can be found in WORKING while others are the photographer’s own selection of unpublished images from his sessions with the artists.

The artists for the WORK project are: Ahmad Fuad Osman, Ahmad Shukri Mohamed, Ahmad Zakii Anwar, Chong Siew Ying, Hamir Soib, Jalaini Abu Hassan, Kow Leong Kiang, Raja Shahriman Raja Aziddin, Ramlan Abdullah and Yee I-Lann.

WORKING launch + 10 Malaysian Artists: Portraits from the WORK Project by Tara Sosrowardoyo

will be held at Zinc Art Space
Lot 61, Jalan Maarof, Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur

on 2nd October at 8pm

The exhibition will run from 2 to 12 October 2010
RSVP contact@rogueart.asia +60 16 266 7413 www.rogueart.asia

With thanks to ZINC

Opening hours Monday – Saturday 12pm – 7pm Sundays & Public Holidays open by appointment info@zinc.com.my +6 03 22825388 www.zinc.com.my

The Orang Besar Series: Empires of Privateers and their Glorious Ventures

The exhibition we’ve all been waiting for is now around the corner! RogueArt are very excited to be a part of Yee I-Lann: Boogeyman, in collaboration with Valentine Willie Fine Art. The exhibition opens at MAP. KL this Thursday 16th September – Malaysia Day. It’s been a glorious venture working with Yee I-Lann on this show, which brings together new works in batik, photomedia and pewter as well as key works from the past three years. See our Exhibitions page for more details.

Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri to all our Muslim friends, and Selamat Hari Malaysia to all Malaysians!

(BY)

Colour, Shape, Quantity, Scale at 15 Jln Mesui

A little late, and we’re rather sad the show is already down, but we’d like to give our 3 thumbs up to Liew Kwai Fei’s exhibition at 15 Jalan Mesui. A sharp clean breath of air, and we loved the way it worked in the unapologetically gritty space. Read more on arteri.

If in Singapore this week, we strongly recommend you try to catch the last few days of FX Harsono: Testimonies at Singapore Art Museum, which ends 9 May.  If you can’t, download the exhibition catalogue from the SAM website.

While at SAM do also go see Ming Wong, Life of Imitation, which runs to 22 August – well worth the price of the tickets!

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We were recently in Taipei and have concluded that despite the four-and-half hour flight time, grim weather and so-so food, the trip to Taiwan was definitely worth the time (and money) in order to catch Cai Guo-Qiang’s solo ‘Hanging Out in the Museum’ at the Taipei Fine Art Museum. As photography was strictly not allowed, it is quite impossible to describe the power and epic scale of the artist’s elaborate installations and gunpowder projects presented in this retrospective exhibition. Nevertheless, Rachel managed to sneak a few shots when the guard was not looking. (Please see below for scenes from the show, and apologies to TFAM for breaking rules!) The artist’s attention to detail, precision and the power of his underlying messages are literally mind blowing! The exhibition was divided into two parts: “Dramatic Time Condensed” on the first floor explores Mr. Cai’s tendency to “counteract time, so that movement and dramatic movement –which are only possible in time– are condensed into still objects”, while the second floor, titled “Contradictory, Changeable Gunpowder”, traces the development of Mr. Cai’s gunpowder exploits from early paintings with gunpowder to the blowing up of his ‘sketches’. A comprehensive collection of video documentation also provide further understanding to Mr. Cai’s pyromaniacal ‘drawing’ process and gunpowder performances , and these range from earlier works such as the “Project for Extraterrestials” series (made during the 1990s) to the recent opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

“Head On“, an installation with 99 life-sized wolves, fabricated from sheepskins and stuffed with hay and metal wires, barreling in a continuous stream towards (and into) a glass wall, is definitely a Rogue favourite. Loaned from Deutsche Bank’s collection, this work is a critique of the German reunification. We found the artist’s statement “invisible walls are the hardest to dismantle” –describing the German condition – very apt for Malaysia too. All in all, we spent between three to five hours at the museum (twice!) and found ourselves quite reluctant to leave. To quote our travel companion Mr. Lau,  “Cai Guo-Qiang has single-handedly beat 5000 years of Chinese history” as he held our attention far longer than the National Palace Museum exhibition –5 hours as compared to 1 hour– displaying treasures from the Chinese world. We heart Cai Guo-Qiang : )

Please don’t miss out on this show if you are in Taipei, the show closes on 21 February 2010 (closed on Mondays and CNY).

The Taipei Fine Art Museum

Cultural Melting Bath : Project for the 20th Century

Rent Collection Courtyard

Rent Collection Courtyard

Head On

Inopportune : Stage One

Reflection - A Gift from Iwaki

Lucky Draw Prizes

Rachel was particularly excited about the Lucky Draw at TFAM. The prizes are: (Week #1) A pair of return tickets to Hong Kong; ( Week #2) Tea with Cai Guo-Qiang and a signed exhibition catalogue; (Week #3) TWD $ 20,000 (approx RM 2,200) Voucher from Eslite Bookshop; (Week #4) 1 iphone 3GS; (Week #5) A pair of return tickets to New York to visit Cai Guo-Qiang’s Studio and tea with the artist at the Empire State Building. WOW!!!

To make the trip even more worthwhile, we also caught Takashi Murakami’s print show at Arki Gallery near the Taipei Main Station, which will run until April 2010. We were impressed by the Taiwanese audience’s enthusiasm for art! There were at least 3 rows of people in front of any artwork at any one time when we visited Van Gogh’s exhibition at The National Museum of History. We also had to return to MOCA Taipei twice before we had the opportunity to enter the museum as we could not bear the 2-hour ticket queue outside the museum on our first visit. Rachel managed to squeeze in time to catch the ‘Visual Attract and Attack’ at MOCA Taipei (after the 2nd attempt) and here are pictures of some of the works on show.

The 2-hour queue outside MOCA

The Queen of Hearts in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Yang Moa-lin

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Yang Moa-lin

PixCell-Elk by Japanese artist Kohei Nawa

A sculpture by Takashi Murakami

Movement Age by Chen Zhiguang

Superheroes in fetus stage by Alexandre Nicolas

Baby Hulk

Baby Wonderwoman

Malaysia Boleh! It was a lovely surprise to see Chan Kok Hooi artworks here too!

(RN & AO)

The “WORK” exhibition was launched last saturday to a large crowd. Many thanks to all the participating artists who came early and all the guests that came to support this project!

Please visit the WORK exhibition page for more details on the project.

View of Zakii's and Kow's artwork

View of I-Lann's and Fuad's artwork

View of Siew Ying's and Jai's artwork

View of Hamir's, Fuad's artwork and Ramlan's sculpture

View of Ramlan's sculpture

View of I-Lann's and Fuad's artwork

Portraits of the artists by Tara

The participating artists, Tara Sosrowardoyo and RogueArt

The early birds...

Boss #1 & Boss #1 giving speeches

Raja Shahriman's sculpture and Tara's little room of portraits

The peak of the opening with crowds even on the 1st floor

The crowd spilling out of the house to the street...