✷ Sundry AiR: The Gift That Keeps on Giving (2023)
✷ I’m Exhausted, Where is He? (2022)
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
✷ Lady Dior As Seen By (2024)
✷ Of placebos that sing sweet in the... (2024)
✷ Between The Lines (2024)
✷ ASEAN ON PAPER (2023)
✷ Serving Thots (2023)
✷ Diverse Visions (2023)
✷ Nature and Now: Asian Art in Focus (2023)
✷ There Are Flowers in the Morning Mist (2022)
✷ State of Play (2022)
✷ It’s my party and I’ll if I want to, you’ll... (2022)
✷ only losers left alive (love songs for... (2021)
✷ The Foot Beneath the Flower: Camp... (2020)
SERIES & CATEGORIES
✷ Untitled (Chocolate Boxes) (ongoing)
✷ Who Knew I’d Be the Stable One (ongoing)
✷ Untitled (Radial Sculptures) (ongoing)
✷ Installation
✷ Print & Drawing
✷ Text
State of Play
28 August–31 October 2020
Richard Koh Fine Arts
Singapore, Singapore
Images Courtesy of Richard Koh Fine Arts
Related Artworks
You’re Spiralling Again (2022)
You’re Repeating the Same Mistakes (2022)
You’re Bending to His Will (2022)
28 August–31 October 2020
Richard Koh Fine Arts
Singapore, Singapore
Images Courtesy of Richard Koh Fine Arts
Related Artworks
You’re Spiralling Again (2022)
You’re Repeating the Same Mistakes (2022)
You’re Bending to His Will (2022)
Description
Excerpt of Essay by Writer Euginia Tan:
Demystifying Playgrounds
“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.” - 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).
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.
Free/Play
As part of her forum transcript, Ali begins by mulling on “how our conception of work is framed, from a perspective of privileged economics”. 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”. 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.”
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.
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.” By discarding the convoluted affiliation of exhaustive labour-mapping – Ghazali, Lin and Xun engage in an orchestration of unshackled artistic tempo.
Excerpt of Essay by Writer Euginia Tan:
Demystifying Playgrounds
“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.” - 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).
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.
Free/Play
As part of her forum transcript, Ali begins by mulling on “how our conception of work is framed, from a perspective of privileged economics”. 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”. 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.”
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.
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.” By discarding the convoluted affiliation of exhaustive labour-mapping – Ghazali, Lin and Xun engage in an orchestration of unshackled artistic tempo.