3 things from October (an exhibition, a movie, an album)

1. An exhibition 

Swallow & Spit: Part 1 at A+ Works of Art. Curated by Denise Lai. 

It’s ostensibly a contemporary landscape show, with a curatorial statement that draws deep from the wells of art history, but, really, it’s another A+ roster show all over again. I sincerely marvel at how many of these Lai is capable of curating.

At the entrance of the exhibition (the one through the office), there’s Indonesian artist Danot’s series of wall-mounted trophy fish that are imprinted with different forms of trash found in the ocean, which I found a little too on-the-nose, like a campaign for an environmental NGO. Singaporean artist/poet Bani Haykal presented a series of flash fictions and abstract MS Paint-ish line drawings in toy slide viewers, a nod to the sort of gimmicky childhood toys that would nevertheless hold a sort of charm over millennial kids for their almost-technology, cute and charming but like the toys themselves, ultimately useless, to be stuffed at the back of some closet somewhere. There was this incessant AI voice looping throughout the show, coming from Jao San Pedro’s work, projected onto the opposite wall of the entrance. There wasn’t much in visuals but the whiny AI voice (which kept repeating phrases like “I am eternal, I am eternal” and felt like a strange Remilia Co. or Based Retard Gang clip) kept up an annoying barrage throughout the section. Really not sure what that was supposed to be doing for the exhibition. Thankfully, there were paintings—yes, real paintings!—by PaKa that lifted some weight off this burdened section, something easy on the eyes and nice to look at, soft blues and soft pinks and soft oranges, floating fish filets, disco balls, sunset colours. Small drawings of clouds and skies by Kentaro Hiroki made you squint to see them up close under the minimal light and revealed, well, not much. I guess they’re meant to be taken on a conceptual level, or as a joke - they’re drawings of clouds above Google Data centres. And maybe you’re meant to ponder on the ephemerality of it all in contrast to the permanency of data, the irony in calling two sorts of things by the same name. But the drawings themselves were boring. I guess in this sense they resonate with my own feelings towards contemporary AI-assisted art - all this technological stuff is just meaningless ephemera, just a wispy cloud crossing a still blue eternal sky.  

A noticeable model is developing among contemporary regional galleries, wherein shows are expected to feature at least one moving image or new media element, regardless of how superficial it is, just to break up the monotony or perhaps cater to a viewership that no longer has the attention span and capacity for grasping single, still, solitary works of art. As usual, my eyes glazed over any artwork in this show that involved artificial intelligence or machine-generated images. Technically speaking, yes, they’re “novel” images, but they’re not lasting ones nor are they novel in the true sense of showing you something new. The AI-generated work in this one, Đang Thùy Anh’s series of screens, looked like all other AI works I’ve seen, i.e. like regurgitated sludge or like iPhone pictures if the camera lens is a lil greasy. Each of the video works were accompanied by the list of written prompts used to generate the exhibited image, which made it even worse. I guess you can probably tell that I’m getting really tired of galleries courting AI-generated images. This might actually be worse than the phase of the Covid-19 lockdown when everyone was trying to curate “virtual exhibitions”.

The starting point from the show is taken from a line by Karel van Mander, something about Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s capacities of swallowing a landscape and spitting it out, something about capturing landscape’s “epiphanic qualities” and translating them into a still image — this is a rather nice and interesting place to start, but the show does a hard swerve on this and instead zeroes in on swallowing and spitting as a metaphor for consumption, extending it to a meditation on human’s relationship to the natural world and their ravenous appetite for destruction, etc. It’s extended further as a metaphor for the digestive activity of machine learning, how artificial intelligences are programmed to consume everything there is out there and “spit” it out for us in some gross mucoid form. And indeed there were the requisite nods to artificial intelligence, machines, technology, etc. etc. (as if we’d just discovered the Internet all over again) with the aforementioned works by Jao San Pedro, Bani Haykal, and Đang Thùy Anh. In a funny twist, the city’s favourite digital artist Chong Yan Chuah presented a painting this time, draped from floor to ceiling like a gigantic hammock, burdened, weighted down, heavy with meaningless ephemera. 

Round the back, the feature wall that faces the street was hung with a work by Yee I-Lann and a series of new monochromatic photographs by Alvin Lau. Yee I-Lann’s work was a bit random—oddly placed in the show, it seems to be there simply because the legs in the work resonate with the pillars of Lau’s work. It’s nice to see old works from Yee appear occasionally in A+ shows, because I was never around to experience the era of her practice where she did more photo-media stuff and it fascinates me, but I reckon she should have a word with A+ and tell them to stop placing her works out of context in random places. As expected, Lau’s work was my favourite, and I loved how the cheap quality of the printing seemed to diminish a lot of the details in the background of these photos, so they just appear to be structures in a blank white expanse. I liked how the arrangement of the photos up the wall also seemed to mimic the criss-crossing, ascending structure of the highways pictured in the photographs. 

Despite the show’s alluringly vulgar title and regional line-up, it’s not a particularly remarkable or memorable show, and most of the weight here is being pulled by curator Denise Lai. Lai’s ability to think visually and apprehend the perfect placement for chosen artworks in order that they may enhance your appreciation of the individual artworks and bring out the “meaning” of each artwork by being placed in proximity to another will never cease to amaze me. Such gestures as placing Condro Priyoaji’s painting of sunlight through breeze blocks by the gallery’s street-facing back entrance, where it meets natural sunlight, and pairing Amin Taasha’s waterfall-scape with Chuah’s floating drawing, and the mucoidal splotch in the centre of Chuah’s painting with the blobby sludgy generated imagery of Đang Thùy Anh’s work—such gestures touch me because they reflect her insistence on presenting a nice show despite the mediocrity of the works available to her. The show had nice visual flourishes that leave you with a pleasant impression of your overall visit, even if not of the individual works themselves.

2. A movie 

Reptile (2023) dir. Grant Singer. Netflix. 

Mild spoilers ahead 

It’s a conventionally well-made and predictable movie about a murder, involving the predictable elements of suspicious lovers, police collusion, and a hapless wife-guy in dogged pursuit of the truth. Or so it seems, once you close the Netflix window before they roll on the next movie, but once you’re lying in bed about to go to sleep and you think back on the movie, you realise, hey wait, they never actually revealed who did it. And hey wait, that’s not the only detail that never got resolved nor fully fleshed-out, and a whole slew of things that never got sorted about the mystery start to occur to you, despite the “case-closed” impression of the ending. 

Many intentions remain unexplained by the end of the film; the creepy thing perhaps about the whole thing is that the players are all drawn towards the crime evidently, simply, because it seems like the logical next step in their respective careers. There’s a frosty indifference that blankets all of the actions taken, as if all the players had simply grown up in life and decided to shed their skin and slither into a new one (as foreshadowed by a scene early in the film that involves the discovery of a shed snake skin behind a potted house plant.) Benicio del Toro then becomes just the perfect man to play the naive cop way out of his depth, who’s now questioning whether he wouldn’t prefer to just turn away and pretend he didn’t catch a glimpse of what lurked in those depths, his pudgy, sagging face and drooping brown eyes conveying the right degree of wounded overgrown boyish innocence. And Justin Timberlake, his boyish looks grown thick and hard, plays the perfect murder suspect, makes you think that that youthful glint we once thought we saw in his eyes had perhaps never existed. 

A well-selected cast of ageing actors for the police force creates just the right flavour of familiarity and warmth that a small-town police force should emanate, making the whole thing believable, and maybe one of the few (that I’m aware of) contemporary police-collusion Neo-noir films that doesn’t conclude on a necessarily ACAB note. In fact, it doesn’t end on any shoehorned political note that I could pick up, which is refreshing and commendable for a movie made in this era, and a Netflix one no less. There’s one black junior detective, yes, but aside from that the film is devoid of the token mixed-race girl or funny black guy or resting-bitch-faced ginger/asian/lesbian chick that we’ve by now come to expect awkwardly shoved into most movies. It just has a bunch of fat, ageing white actors playing a community of policemen and police-wives in suburban America, and that’s all it needs.

Don’t let the awfully generic Netflix title put you off (why do they give their productions such unremarkable names anyway? Do they want views or not?). Reptile may only be a minor success and hardly award-worthy, but it’s still a welcome addition to the contemporary era of the hard-boiled genre.

3. An album 

Rahill, Flowers at Your Feet (2023) 

I don’t like a lot of new music these days, but I like this. I don’t like a lot of female self-care and/or diaspora child sifting through generational pain type of stuff, but I like this. I don’t like baby photos as album covers, but I like this. All of the things that I might find trite and unimaginative in other musical artists, I like here, maybe because she sounds actually sincere in it or maybe that’s just a testament to how good she is as a musician. A lot of stuff like this doesn’t sound refreshing or listenable anymore, but hers is compulsively so.