Demystifying Playgrounds

BY EUGINIA TAN - 20 AUGUST 2022

“Art, frolicking in the sand playground of our memories, has a crucial role amidst Singapore’s endless
cycle of demolition and rebuilding and the accompanying logic of pragmatism and state control.
Contemporary art can critique but also console.”^[1] - Clarissa Oon, Writer

The subject of ‘play’ for artists requires extensive navigation. The current open call for Singapore Art Week 2023 is in fact, responding to the theme of Play. What are the grounds of play, or the playgrounds for artists? What are aspects of a state of play which apply to creatives then and now?

The humbling element of a playground is its pre-ordained status as a fun zone, an active, mobile site for bodies and minds to roam. This same need for fun activity is crucial in an artistic process. In State of Play (2022), seven artists invite us into their pursuit of alternate creative zones traversing play, catharsis and myth. Showcasing works by Ash Ghazali, Hu Qiren, Mengju Lin, Faris Nakamura, Ivan David Ng, Melissa Tan and Samuel Xun, this essay attempts to analyse the common denominator of play from the seven featured artists with three main entry points: Myth/Play, Free/Play and Structure/Play. For these three categories, the essay will draw reference from a forum transcription by theatre practitioner Paul Rae, anthropologist Mariam Mohammed Ali and Associate Professor of Sociology Nirmala PuruShotam regarding cultural production in Singapore, entitled Strategies for the Practice and Management of Cultural Production in Singapore Inc. (2001)^[2].

Myth/Play (Ivan David Ng and Melissa Tan)*
*Cited works by Ng and Tan are all created in 2022.

In Ng and Tan’s works, the artists’ work in tandem with their viewers to create an immediacy and relevance around myth and riddle. Tan’s sculptures continue her inquiry of metamorphosis around female goddesses and creatures, their liminality from one world to another re-routing the portals of mortality and eternality. Tan’s three chosen works Aditi, Arachne and Sphinx, revolve around the locus of female freedom. Veined ravines line the gemstone portions of her works– a clear, unbridled state of movement in material persists.

Ng’s paintings Celestial Signs for Wondering Minds and Embargoed Till Noon echo a similar quality of an in-between. In tatters of colour and proclaimative strokes, Ng offers an insight into the Chinese ink tradition of “leaving the white behind”. The concept advocates that painters leave vast expanses of space on their paintings untouched. These reserved spaces in composition would then be alluded to expansive bodies in landscape paintings, or may serve as compositional counterweights in calligraphic works.

The fraction of Myth/Play is used for Ng and Tan because they offer two corresponding qualities of the art narrative. In Paul Rae’s perspective of cultural production, it is namely “the work of the artist and the work of the audience member” which bring forth myth and concept into responsiveness. “The philosopher, Elaine Scarry, describes work as something which is transformative and shareable. You turn one thing into another thing, and then you send it out into the world. It’s a way of extending your own consciousness beyond your bodily limits… One might also say there is a progression at an emotional level… the labour of performance is similar to other kinds of work. On the other, it shows how this is also a very particular kind of work.”^[3]

Rae elaborates that past a stage, canvas or medium, a work has an ability to contain a conscious, mythic playfulness “where the audience is engaged and at work”^[4]. In Ng and Tan’s processes, we see that their research is fuelled by their re-interpretations of passed down legacies. The two artists push the axis slightly past the point of what is known to them and us.

Free/Play (Ash Ghazali, Mengju Lin, Samuel Xun)*
*Cited works by Lin and Xun are all created in 2022. Cited works by Ghazali were created in 2021.

We shall now examine the aspect of Free/Play with the works of artists Ghazali, Lin and Xun. A decision of freedom is usually brought about by a prior bout of suppression, even to the extent of alienation. To demonstrate how the artists’ works respond with being deemed free, we can first contrast it with how it may feel to be artistically suppressed. On this point, we can refer to Ali’s explanation of a privileged work /labour force from an anthropological stance in Singapore.

As part of her forum transcript, Ali begins by mulling on “how our conception of work is framed, from a perspective of privileged economics”^[5]. Progression of labour has led to many seeing the workplace as a corporate desire, wherein the notion of work has also swerved to “produce notions about consumers”^[6]. Ali reiterates this point by stating that at the moment, “the economy itself is a product of culture. Historical narratives are also culture at work over time.” The dependency and evolvement of highly skilled labour resulted in organised work becoming specialised. “Work processes got chopped up into their smallest and simplest parts. One of the crises this era created was the crisis of alienation. There was an alienation of people from their work processes, their work environment and colleagues.”^[7]

This forum had taken place twenty-one years ago, and the idea of alienation around labour at large had already been suggested. The economics of labour have only sped up since then. Inevitably, our artists have had to keep up with this labour as resiliently as they could. However, it is unavoidable that exerting too much on any system of labour would result in fatigue. The emphasis on specialization would also put in place higher barriers of entry in artistic production. A pursuit of contentment was no longer sufficient with societal ideology. Both home and the workplace faced a pressure to be “perceived as place(s) where you can express yourself creatively… (with) a need to farm out work related to the home sphere, such as sending children for piano lessons.”^[8]

In their statements, Ghazali, Lin and Xun infer to the yearning of freedom. Through his mixed media collages, Ghazali sought to use his ‘Cut Paintings’ series Bandar, P Ramlee, Sarong Pesta and Budakflat as conduits, straddling a balance between anarchy and peace. Combining geometric abstraction with traditional fabrics from Malay ethnic groups in Indonesia and Malaysia, Ghazali arranged cut fabrics in folds and layers to highlight a single vertical chasm slit down the middle of his works’ composition. As Ghazali brandished blade to canvas, the artist reaches an epiphany of discarding a familiar habit of pre-conceptualizing in exchange for a rhythmic present.

In a stream of free flow consciousness inspired by textual nudging, Lin’s direction for her paintings Owl, The Hermit and Pansy took a poetic approach in offering a melancholy soliloquy of textures, sensations and light. “It rained every day of the year... The summer felt like a chiffon jacket against my skin… There is a line drawn longer and longer between two pairs of feet that are walking further and further from each other. I promised I’d visit again. The waves crashed hard and loud, but I could tell that you were giggling.”^[9] Lin narrates her paintings with a penchant for cropped and abstracted forms that have the potential, but not the intent, to become representative or symbolic. These draw from her personal archive of photographs collected over the years, or routine scenery preserved in memory as photographic images.

Lastly, Xun’s wall-mounted installations You’re Bending to His Will, You’re Repeating the Same Mistakes and You’re Spiralling Again are rooted in themes exploring therapy for self. Xun chimes off consistent, deprecating and disillusioned reminders for preservation and rationalised behaviour, questioning the motivations behind alluded self-improvement. The works expand on the artist’s prior series of a similar intimate premise, with a fixation on chalking down rhetoric thought processes.

In the ardour of expectations and creative tasks, these artists have found ways to bend the humdrum of medium and identity into a call for catharsis. This can deflect the usual notion of making art in regulated rigour. As Ali concludes in her transcript, “We can look at work as a task, or an array of processes by which we make a living. Tied to this is the notion of “career”. You have a situation where all the other processes tend to be seen as less productive. They support work but are not seen as crucial or sustaining.”^[10] By discarding the convoluted affiliation of exhaustive labour-mapping– Ghazali, Lin and Xun engage in an orchestration of unshackled artistic tempo.

Structure/Play (Faris Nakamura and Hu Qiren)*
*Cited works by Nakamura and Hu are all created in 2022.

A space of play, for play is equally significant when we think about how to navigate grounds of play. For the artists Hu and Nakamura, we will examine how structure contributes to the expression of playfulness in their works. In this concluding segment, we will draw on Associate Professor PuruShotam’s (henceforth referred to as PuruShotam) observation on (literal and metaphorical) spaces and the artistic community.

PuruShotam distinguishes different sectors of artistic space into effective microcosms of time, space and human spirit. She stresses the importance of understanding a community’s humanity. PuruShotam asks the fundamental query of “Who inspires the spirit with which (artists) produce, with which (artists) work?” and follows up with the “assumption that for the ‘human spirit’ to fashion art, then art and the artist must be ignorant of market conditions, must be innocent of the popularity that they will still be judged by, but still must be cognisant of the work being done.”^[11] From this analysis, she detects a paradox whereby if artists are to be recognized, an acknowledgement of the spaces they occupy is needed. Yet on the other hand, this acknowledgement of artistic creation and space will also be governed under strict state censorship and legislation. “The problem is that, in this way, the arts community potentially becomes the excuse for a curbing of the ‘human spirit’. If the arts community is free to produce… Then that is an index of the larger society. But if the arts community is not free to produce, then it becomes a spokesorgan for the state.”^[12]

The response of Nakamura and Hu’s works lie in capturing the irony of artistic congruence. Hu’s framed images Dust (New Moon 2), Dust (New Moon 3) and Dust (New Moon 4) tap into his leaning of satire, envisioning a Zen parody of trapped dust particles from fan filters, forming a perfect full moon. As the pandemic restrictions forced Hu into isolation and sanitization, the artist pushed these two encounters to extreme ends. The choice of dust as a medium can be perceptibly stinging– When left on a shelf to create, are artists making works akin to objects gathering and collecting dust? As the moon of our nation turns, will we witness its shape shift from the cultural beginnings of a crescent?

Nakamura continues his fascination with architecture in the wood installations Bachelor Pad, Midnight Hour and Glowing Sky Just Before Dusk. Drawing from three aspects: Preservation, restoration and design, Nakamura accentuates the use of clear materials. Acrylic plastic is used as a protective covering for a fragile structure, in making additions to buildings without burdening its foundation. Nakamura’s research shows that buildings from the 20th and 21st century employed a prominent use of glass and acrylic plastic as construction material in their façade, citing examples of architecture such as Gwyn Hall (Wales, UK), Glynn Vivian Art Gallery (Swansea, UK) and the Glass House Project (Menokin Foundation, USA). The artist was also intrigued by the storage/display methods of art work, i.e. to prolong their lifespan, art works are typically encased in a glass/acrylic plastic case or framed with the same material. This guarantees a sturdy layer of protection, in addition to simplifying future cleaning processes. PuruShotam underlines the dynamics of artists and their inhabited spaces/structures, driving home the point that as citizens, we are informed of “a separation of work and play. Play as a reward for work rather than play as the engaging principle of work.” The idea of playing within structure is characterized as a separate entity of an aftermath, rather than its due credit as a constant stream of energy, allowing artists to create. This is where PuruShotam succinctly pinpoints all of us as potential creators, in any of our ample, chosen structures. “Indeed, the arena of what constitutes cultural production in this perspective reveals that space and time are separate from what most other people do. Artists do things that others do not. Yet culture is the idealisation and the material with which we work to reproduce our daily, socially meaningful lives. That means all of us are daily cultural producers.”^[13] In spite of our limitations structurally, we are all able to carve an essence of a space to forge a momentary bubble of unadulterated play. The solid dimensions of structure give rise to environmental and external commentary, the way we play can also be traced to the way we live and die. Hu and Nakamura succumb to Structure/Play in circumstances of dire desperation– When the plausibility to make art is tested, or when a structure’s survival depends on meticulous protection. Their works reflect on PuruShotam’s paradox of an artist’s right to space and humanity, harbouring an unsullied, desolate final go at the slides and swings of a creative playground banished to impeccable order.

From these seven artists, we glean that play is vital in more means than one, with a host of valid reasons. PuruShotam sums up our basic instinct to play with an urging message in the transcript, “I remember playing as a child. When we indulge in play, we also indulge in producing the items which we used to play…. We have lost that in part because of the time-tabling of late capitalism. It does not give the masses the ability to produce but rather tells the masses that we (artists) will produce the culture that you will consume. That is the overlapping problem. Artists are caught between time, space and resources to produce.”^[14] While we ponder on why we disallow work and play to co-exist as two halves of the same whole, we tune in to the next episode, in search of fantastical heights reached by those who dared to play harder.

^[1] Oon, Clarissa. (2017) Sand in Singapore Art: A Last Playground, Discipline the City, The Substation, Singapore.^[2]The Necessary Stage (2001) Issue 3: Work/Play, Kitsch & the Singapore Modern, Bodies & Text, FOCAS (Forum On Contemporary Art & Society), Singapore^[3] Rae, Paul. (2001) Don’t Pray Pray: The Serious Business of Fun in Singapore Inc., FOCAS (Forum On Contemporary Art & Society), Singapore, page 22.^[4] Ibid, page 23.^[5] Mohammed Ali, Mariam. (2001) Strategies for the Practice and Management of Cultural Production in Singapore Inc., FOCAS (Forum On Contemporary Art & Society), Singapore, page 28.^[6] Ibid.^[7] Ibid, page 29.^[8] Ibid, page 30.^[9] Lin, Mengju. (2022) Excerpt from artist’s artwork statement.
^[10] Mohammed Ali, Mariam. (2001) Strategies for the Practice and Management of Cultural Production in Singapore Inc., FOCAS (Forum On Contemporary Art & Society), Singapore, page 30.
^[11]PuruShotam, Nirmala. (2001) Strategies for the Practice and Management of Cultural Production in Singapore Inc., FOCAS (Forum On Contemporary Art & Society), Singapore, page 31.
^[12] Ibid.^[13]Ibid.
^[14]Ibid, page 33.

This writing first appeared in the exhibition catalogue for State of Play (2022) on 20 Aug 2022.