Singapore Art Week 2024 Diary: Getting lost in the SAWce

Singapore Art Week is a yearly programme of events thrown at the beginning of the year, right before Chinese New Year, funded by the Singaporean government in order to promote Singapore as a destination for high-quality art within the region. Every year, galleries and project spaces, large and small, organise exhibitions and events around the tiny island city; there are some central nodes, like Tanjong Pagar Distripark (a district of warehouses housing Singapore Art Museum, S.E.A. Focus, and a few other private galleries and offices), Gilman Barracks (an old army barracks transformed into a compound housing various private galleries), and, since 2023, Marina Bay Sands, which Expo and Convention Centre is the venue for young regional art fair ART SG, now in its 2nd year running. This year, I visited as a full-time worker at ART SG and a part-time tourist. 

The art fairs are art fairs. The usual mixed bag of bad pop-art-ish painting, boring sculpture, pleasant textiles. The institutional shows this time round were surprisingly old-school and literal-minded, with two Third-Worldist shows happening simultaneously: Tropical at the National Gallery of Singapore and Translations organised by the Institutum across several locations in Gilman Barracks. Both shows attempt to draw out resonances between Southeast Asian art and history with other Third World regions, an intersectional internationalist attitude which I thought was last cool like five years ago at the latest. The institutional show at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), a survey show for Ho Tzu Nyen, was similarly backward-looking despite all its advanced technological engineering. 

It always strikes me how different the art market’s conception of art is from the institutional conception of it; it’s always striking to me the prices that some pieces go for within art fairs and the unlikelihood of those pieces ever entering a museum collection. If I were to judge by the institutional shows, it seems like they’re growing increasingly more inward-looking and unwilling to engage with ideas of aesthetics and style; they continue on with their mumblings about the colonial past and Malaya and the post-colonial identity. Otherwise, they make the most unoriginal statements about the rise of technology and artificial intelligence, dropping a lot of rhetorical questions without doing the work to pursue any answers to them. Sometimes it’s better just to stick to the thing you know, even if it’s only one thing, instead of constantly grabbing at the straws of fleeting new topics and trends that you hope will signal your relevance.

I wish I could have gone for all the non-institutional stuff as well, but I couldn’t find the time outside of work. A lot of them looked way more interesting and reflective of the actual state of Singaporean contemporary art, but it was these major blockbuster shows that were being promoted the  most and which people kept mentioning during the week’s endless drinks receptions. But I suppose I’m still being naive. The thing about these exhibitions, just like Singapore Art Week in general and anything that purports to connect art with mass engagement is that it’s not actually about the art. In fact, art is directly antithetical to the mission of obtaining mass engagement. Most of the things that happen in the art market and even in art institutions has nothing to do with the art at all, but rather with touting certain credentials to prove one’s trendiness and relevance. So, rejoice - the institutions that run the art world and the artists that make the most money are mostly pandering to some other vague thing (“market forces” I guess? I don’t know?) and are as convinced by what they’re talking about as you are (i.e. not very), so just go ahead and be your freaky weird self, make your freaky weird little paintings and pursue your freaky little obsessions; that is, if you still have it in you to be freaky, weird, and original. 

National Gallery of Singapore & The Institutum 

Tropical: Stories from Latin America and Southeast Asia, National Gallery Singapore  

Translation: Afro-Asian Poetics, The Institutum (five locations in Gilman Barracks) 

Imma be real with you chief, I’m a hard one to sell on identity-based exhibitions. These two exhibitions gave me weird flashbacks to when I was a teenaged Marxist at university. Which is to say: this stuff is for kids. This is entry-level thinking when you feel alienated by global art history, when you’re aware that your own art history is not sufficient to match European art history, and you want to antagonistically position yourself against the Western canon (or the New York art world) while masquerading that antagonism with the more positive-sounding “solidarity”. And yet when you combine two massive, disparate cultures in such a simplistic way, you mostly end up saying nothing about either of them. 

Caveat: At the National Gallery, I only managed to visit Galleries 1 and 2 and the Chamber Hall before the museum closed for the day. The exhibition display, inspired by Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi and executed by the architecture firm WOHA, was highly impressive and offered a pretty dynamic way to view the works (I am  a big fan of those free-standing glass and concrete panels), but the exhibition itself was a letdown. I don’t quite understand what this show is supposed to do within Southeast Asia. It’s not very interesting; many of the Southeast Asian paintings look like iterations of similar things that are on display in the collection show happening simultaneously at a different wing of the National Gallery (Between Dreams & Declarations). The Latin American paintings look like the Southeast Asian paintings, except that they have a legacy of mural painting too. 

In the first gallery, massive cloth banners spelled out the manifestos of various art collectives that were formed across the two regions, highlighting a shared post-colonial crusade to establish a native art history and art vocabulary that break away from the Western canon. I found it surprising that they were presented in such a bold and matter-of-fact way, as if their mission still prevails to this day, though there’s so much to unpack in them and the context from which each manifesto arose. The Manifesto by the Union of Mexican Workers, Technicians, Painters, and Sculptors said, “We believe that while our society is in a transitional stage between the destruction of an old order and the introduction of a new order, the creators of beauty must turn their work into clear ideological propaganda for the people, and make art something of beauty, education, and purpose for everyone.” The manifesto was published in 1923, exactly a century before the present show opened, and yet the exhibition presents no transitional passage or pushback that might suggest to viewers how things have changed since then. The show fully embraces the spirit of the manifestos, which is strange, because I would have thought that a show so laden with masculine modernist painters would have been treated with some critical detachment. 

Like an introductory theory course at a second-rate university, art institutions seem to have this idea that art can be analysed through a Feminist analysis, a Postcolonial analysis, or a Marxist analysis, but always within one of these frameworks and never all together nor beyond. And when one has a post-colonial show, then simply adopting the postcolonial "lens" is sufficient without actually doing the work of theorising something new or daring to make a statement. And the usual post-colonial lens, as it is taught and adopted not just in universities in the West but all over the world, sees things in this way: glorified depictions of labour, especially pre-industrial forms of it such as farming and fishing, and bare skin, supple muscles, plump breasts and succulent fruits, and the hot hot sun that bears down upon all these big brown bodies…

But what about the darker side of the tropics, the side that drives white people crazy and the thing that the tropics really share with each other? The tropics as black hole, a bacchanalian zone of lawlessness, ancient tribal magic, headhunting and human sacrificial practices, the tropics as a hothouse of unknown diseases, where colonial Europeans contracted malaria and lost their minds? where notions of civilisation and European history go to waste, where law of the jungle rules, as depicted in American films like William Friedkin’s “Sorceror” or Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”? The savage beauty of tribal artefacts and architecture, the mysterious energies of Bali and Tahiti… Instead of exploring this with any evocative depth through images and art, the National Gallery just stuffed Bali and Tahiti into two separate reading corners with a bunch of books to peruse (my least favourite exhibition genre, btw — “bunch of books in a room presented matter-of-factly”), in an erroneously purple-carpeted and wallpapered section of the gallery that later reminded me of the carpet patterns at Changi Airport. 

Per exhibition brochure, “These expressions are uniquely animated by the shared struggles against colonialism that have significantly defined their histories.” The show takes for granted that the post-colonial framework is the only framework within which to talk about the kinships between Latin America and Southeast Asia, despite that the postcolonial story is one that’s only been in the making within the past century. Despite the bold claims of the manifestoes to create a new and vigorous form of art that inspires the postcolonial native subject, the exhibition doesn’t do much beyond inundating us with idyllic and tropical paintings that would have been equally at home in a colonial salon.  

Oddly, the “Afro” part in Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics might have worked better alongside the Southeast Asian works in Tropical. At Tropical, the Southeast Asian portraiture outflanked the Latin American presence in the show and in Translations the opposite was true, with a bulk of African-American figuration sitting oddly alongside a more diverse thematic range of Asian works. Translations was lauded by a lot of the older and more established art world cognoscenti that I chatted with during my working hours at ART SG and indeed received a lot of press, but one young local curator I met brushed it off as “some rich guy showing off his private collection”, so I took this as a lesson on the extreme division of opinion and goals within the Singaporean art scene.

The exhibition was split across six locations, five of which were at Gilman Barracks, and four of which were open on the day I visited. Most of the rooms were curated liberally: works were shuffled together because of their similarities in medium or appearance, but the show was otherwise contextless and made thematic leaps from one work to another that were unsubstantiated and, well, unpoetic. A lot of the “Afro” works are more specifically works by African American or Black American artists and speak to the specifically Black American experience, with its legacies of slavery and the Underground Railroad, and police brutality and mass incarceration. As for works that come the African continent, the show did little to help  Southeast Asian viewers distinguish which works come from where within the vast continental context. A few paintings of black portraiture showed enough skill to be expensive but were otherwise spiritually void. Like the manifestos in Tropical, the works in Translations take for granted the fact that portraying the subjectivities of the oppressed is forceful enough to mean something to viewers who don’t share the same subjectivity. (And as if we should all assume as general truth that since various African and Asian nations and populations have histories of colonialism and dispossession, then by default any piece of art that emerges from these nations carries the aura of this historical subjugation like a ghost, and is therefore automatically sacred even if the work, confronted in physical reality in a foreign and context-less space, stirs the soul not.) Nothing from the “Afro” portion of this show necessarily translated into the “Asian” part of this show, nor vice versa: the “Afro” selection largely consisted of political works, while the “Asian” selection was more varied, touching on themes as diverse as war and the legacies of colonialism, yes, but also with the inclusion of many artists who were working in a more purely conceptual register, like crowd-puller Do Ho Suh or the cluster of minimalist paintings and sculptures in one of the blocks. Finally, and I’m willing to grant that this might be due to the lacklustre curation and framing of the show, I’m actually not sure if the overall quality of the works were any good. Only a single work out of the 100+ works in the entire show stood out to me, and it was a four-panel print by Zarina Hashmi, an Indian-American artist. 

Singapore Art Museum 

Ho Tzu Nyen: Time and the Tiger 

I didn’t finish a single video in this exhibition. I was momentarily taken in by “The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia” as I’m generally a fan of the found image/video collage medium and also thought the modulated AI voices were quite amusing. But as the warbled voices went down the alphabet assigning improbable phrases that had nothing to do with Southeast Asia, like “L for Legible”, “N for Narrative”, it became more evident that this whole thing was just going to be a bunch of dry academic onanism. To be clear, I’m fine with allusions to more academic traditions in art, but not when academic ideas are regurgitated without any attempt at processing them for a non-academic audience, as they are here. Just a bunch of nerdy unaesthetic warbling for nerdy, unaesthetic people to lap up and write nerdy, unaesthetic praise of. “The Cloud of Unknowing” was an insult to anyone who sincerely loves film as much as I do — it displays the most juvenile level of filmmaking skill. The production looks expensive and polished, but the shots are needlessly long for little to no return, and the overall point of the film stumbles all over the place. The literal cloud of smoke that spurts out at the end is a dumb gimmick. The Japanese videos in the little inns were supposedly appropriated and roto-scoped versions of films that actually exist by Japanese wartime filmmakers, but they only made me long to see the original films in their full version instead. The tiger video in the second gallery I won't even touch on, I stepped inside, saw two screens with silly graphics of a tiger floating about in space on one end and a colonial surveyor floating about in space on the other end and I just left the room without even sitting down. This type of art and exhibition is its own form of philistinism, the type of art that doesn’t believe in the power of images and visual style alone and so retreats from the attempt into the muddy realm of cerebral bookish intellectualism, berating you with words and books and citations instead of persuading or seducing you with style and images. It’s the same disappointment I had upon the Tahiti and Bali section in the Tropical show at the National Gallery, a generous gesture on the surface — here are some books for you to check out, “some readings for you to educate yourself” — that in practice just adds to the dull, oppressive feeling of non-comprehension in the face of art, that all the things contemporary art encapsulates are just too complicated to understand, a wicked ruse. 

S.E.A. FOCUS 2024: Serial and Massively Parallel

I didn’t understand why an art fair needed a “curatorial theme” (in this case it was something about artificial intelligence etc etc) but whatever, it wasn’t adhered to anyway and galleries mostly went about doing their own thing. Most of the work was unremarkable, but one I enjoyed was Tan Zi Hao’s "Bags of Stories", ultra-microscopic close-ups of household case bearers that were mounted on light boxes suspended face-down from the ceiling so you had to crane your neck upward to look at them. The shapes of the case bearers brought to mind the gunungan, a spade-like Tree of Life that appears in wayang kulit performances and symbolises the cycle of life within its elaborate branches. The case bearers are ovoid, pregnant in the middle like the gunungan is, and they also appear highly structured in the way the collected dust particles on their back are organised. I had a pleasant time standing underneath this work—the irritating household pest now switched places with the oppressive human tenant, now I have become the bug over which the case bearer looms—and thinking about the innate structure within all living things, how even something as stupid and small as a case bearer understands the properties of dust enough to organise it on its back, and has some divine sense of proportion to turn it into neat patterns. This whole art thing isn’t so complicated after all, you see—even a tiny insect has the sense to know that similar things go together and dissimilar things go elsewhere.