Dear Friends near and far,

Eko’s book is finally ready!

Please join us at 6pm on Friday, 29th July 2011 to celebrate Eko’s book launch at ARK Galerie if you are around the neighbourhood.

Looking forward to seeing you soon!

Special edition copies will be available for sale at the launch. Please email Putri Adju (putri(AT)arkgalerie.com) at ARK for further details.

WORK II : 10 Malaysian Artists in Singapore with photographs by Tara Sosrowardoyo, presented by Andrewshire Gallery at ION Orchard, Singapore. WORK is an artist-initiated project in collaboration with RogueArt.

TALKING SHOP is an artists’ dialogue open to the public, bringing together current practitioners from Singapore and Malaysia to exchange knowledge and experiences about their working lives. Ian Woo, Salleh Japar, Susie Wong and Ye Shufang will be speaking to Ahmad Zakii Anwar, Jalaini Abu Hassan, Ramlan Abdullah and Yee I-Lann.

We would like to thank all the artists and Tara who has made the effort to come to Singapore for the talk and opening with their friends and families. We would like to thank Andrewshire Gallery for arranging this exhibition and ION Orchard for the cool space. Also, a special thank you to Henri Chen for hosting dinner.

Exhibition space images courtesy of Tara Sosrowardoyo.

TALKING SHOP

Ian Woo, Salleh Japar, Susie Wong, Ye Shufang and Beverly.

Adeline with Ahmad Zakii Anwar, Ramlan Abdullah, Yee I-Lann and Jalaini Abu Hassan

The crowd that attended the dialogue session.

Salleh Japar, Kow Leong Kiang, Ahmad Zakii Anwar, Yee I-Lann, Susie Wong, Ye Shufang, Ramlah Abdullah, Ian Woo, Jalaini Abu Hassan

OPENING OF WORK II

Steven Yip of Andrewshire Gallery with High Commissioner of Malaysia to Singapore Dato' Md Hussin

Tara Sosrowardoyo, Yee I-Lann, Ramlan Abdullah, Kow Leong Kiang, Jalaini Abu Hassan, Ahmad Zakii Anwar.

The crowd at the Opening

We hope to see you in Singapore!

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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 Sime Darby Epic Painting is now complete!

Over the past 18 months, Ahmad Fuad Osman, Anurendra Jegadeva, and Chuah Chong Yong have been working on an 8 by 50 foot opus about the history and development of the Sime Darby Group. The painting is currently on exhibit at Wisma Sime Darby on Jalan Raja Laut as part of the Group’s Centennial Exhibition until 28 February, and can be visited during weekday working hours.

This Saturday 19 February, Sime Darby are opening the exhibition to the public from 10am to 4pm for a special weekend viewing. Please do take the opportunity to visit this landmark historical painting.

We attended the recent award announcement for the Young Contemporaries 2010 at the National Art Gallery and would like to congratulate the winners again! BIG CONGRATULATIONS to Haslin Ismail, Tan Nan See, Diana Ibrahim & Helmi Azam!

Tan Nan See, Rupa Malaysia : Jewellery

Haslin Ismail, The Way It All Works

We’ve just returned from a whirlwind trip in Singapore to join the frenzy of Art Stage 2011.

The Singaporeans and their consultants certainly pulled out all the stops, and pretty much pulled off a very ambitious plan in 8 months. What the fair lacked in punch, it made up for in range – there was a lot to take in and there was a nice safe balance of works from East/West/big-time/emerging. We thought a lot more could have been done about the project booths and the vernissage could have been more wow but as Asian art fairs go, it was pretty alright.

We were more impressed by the island-wide effort to make an art weekend of it. Visitors we met in the elevator said they were having “a great party”.

For drama, there was the entry to Collectors’ Stage at ArtSpace@HeluTrans. The show was an important effort, but as patriotic Southeast Asians we really thought a lot of super pieces (and collections) had been missed.

‘Desperately Seeking Paradise’ by Rashid Rana
in the ‘Collector’s Stage’ at ArtSpace@HeluTrans

‘Sofa’ & ‘Pose No. 1, 2 & 3’ by Handiwirman Saputra
in the ‘Collector’s Stage’ at Singapore Art Museum

Roberto Chabet : To be continued
at Institute of Contemporary Art (at LaSalle College of the Arts)

Manuel Ocampo : The Painter’s Equipment
at VWFA @ ArtSpace@HeluTrans

The Pinoys were also out in full force – one-man shows by Roberto Chabet, Ben Cabrera and Manuel Ocampo punctuated the weekend. “Roberto Chabet: To be continued…” at the ICA kicked off a year of exhibitions and projects to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of this seminal conceptual artist’s first show – if you’re going down to Singapore this is the one exhibition you must go and see. Bad boy Ocampo’s “The Painter’s Equipment” at VWFA Singapore was also a refreshing surprise. We didn’t manage much else, popped into Tokyo Cool at 8Q, missed all the talks and the Open House Marine Parade art tour which just looked too frighteningly popular.

Of Art Stage itself, our votes went to (in no particular order):

Best-looking booths:

12 (Malaysia)
Platform 3 (Indonesia)
Chan Hampe Gallery (Singapore)
Mori Yu Gallery (Japan)
Gallery Tagboat (Japan)

Project Booth by 12 (Malaysia)

Platform 3 (Indonesia)

Where we would shop:

Arario Gallery
ARK Galerie
Art-U Room and Numthong Gallery
Collectors Contemporary
ftc. Berlin
Nadi Gallery
Mam Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art
Shrine Empire Gallery

ARK Galerie (Indonesia)

Art-U Room (Japan) and Numthong Gallery (Thailand)

If money was no object, we would buy:

Wim Delvoye, D11 Scale Mode at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin
Natee Utarit, The Birth of Tragedy at Richard Koh Fine Art
Marc Quinn’s Angkor Windfarm at Bartha & Senarclens Partners

Wim Delvoye, D11 Scale Mode

If we had any money at all we would buy:

Handiwirman’s sculpture at Gajah Gallery
Thukral & Tagra prints at STPI
Lego sculptures by John Cake & Darren Neave (The Little Artists)
Anish Kapoor’s untitled gourd sculptures at Art U-Room and Numthong Gallery
Tintin Wulia’s video installation, Neous ne notons pas les fleurs -Jakarta at ARK Galerie
Chen Yujun, Asian Circumscription –5.2 Square Meters No. 20100415 at Boers-Li Gallery
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Van Gogh’s The Midday Sleep 1889-90 at the Thai Villagers, at 100 Tonson Gallery

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Van Gogh’s The Midday Sleep 1889-90 at the Thai Villagers

A collage by Thukral + Tagra