Dear friends and colleagues
It was nice to hear from your responses to my rhetorical question, “when did you last read a poem?” how many committed poetry readers I have on my mailing list! As always, I welcome all comments and questions.
I have known the painter Ian Woo since I first came to Singapore in 2008. As there are very few other abstract painters in Singapore he enjoys conversations with someone like myself who has been involved with abstract painters on and off for close on forty years. (Well, if he doesn’t enjoy it, he is being very polite to me!) We both like music so we talk about that too.
Myself & Ian
His earlier paintings were somewhat like thickets or woods. Looking at them was, as I wrote three years ago, “as if in a dream one is struggling through a dense wood, glimpsing periodically light between the trees, light falling into and filling glades, over hillsides and cliffs falling away: confusions and tangles of branches that yet seem planned, balanced one against another.”
These new paintings are different, there is more of a sense of things piling up slowly on each other – like geological strata or plate tectonics. The marks are often slow, large and scraped quite thin. They are still sensual – but in a different way.
In a hyper modern town such as this where control is everything, references to the natural (and hence by implication to the body and its tastes) may seem escapist. Singapore would seem to be a town of tower blocks and shopping malls, famous for efficiency and cleanliness, but the wilderness is always close at hand: here the jungle quickly seizes any empty space, fills it and proliferates.
Literally! Just behind the gallery where I have curated these three years is a little tract of the jungle. I have never, as I originally meant to, explored it. I was put off when in my early days there, when pausing at the bottom of the stairs that led up into it and bending down to look at a small, beautiful and very scared tree frog, I saw something else move. Glancing up I saw that three or four foot away from my face a large snake was slithering away.
Naturally, keen zoologist that I am, I went back inside and straight away looked it up on Google, it was a spitting cobra – and they are rather scary!
As I said, Ian is passionate about music, a performer himself. The build-up of myriad marks in some of his paintings, their multiplicity of counterpoint and rhythms are not unlike musical compositions that seek as much sound yet without collapsing into sound. Yet, the feeling of his work is intimate: chamber music but with as many timbres as a full orchestra.
Perhaps we can think of the natural – arboreal or geological – and one could also call this the gestural instead of the natural – in his work as being, in effect, a metaphor for or equivalent to not just the sensuous world, but the subconscious or the imagination. Perhaps.
And you are always aware of how inadequate words are. Abstract painting remains especially challenging to write about – describing one’s feelings and responses is as impossible as describing scents or tastes. All you can do is try and evoke something of one’s experience without waffling or being ridiculous. Theory doesn’t help much here.
Abstraction is a global language, but one often inflected with a local accent or twang. Is there such a thing as “Asian” abstraction? Probably not: you can find abstract painters here or Bandung, or Bali, or Shanghai, or Taipei but they don’t connect to one another much. Perhaps, above all else, they are looking, like it or not, at New York. It’s where the discourse on abstraction is richest. It where you are most likely to meet other abstract painters.
I remember reading a 1989 catalogue from Stedelijk called UABC (Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile) which made the point that just as Swedish, Danish and Finnish artists in the nineteenth century were most likely to meet in Paris not Scandinavia, so Latin American artists were only ever likely to meet in New York. (Singapore would of course like to be the centre for such meetings of South-East Asian artists, but rents are so high, and there is not the strong collector base of NYC, and no art magazines for discourse to flow around. Maybe when the new national gallery opens this year some sort of critical mass will have been achieved?)
Well, that’s my speculation for the day! But it is lunch time here and I am taking a break and I want some sensuous pleasures. So I will go and look at Ian’s paintings again and then go to the nearest food court, eat a mosala dosai and, if available, also drink some fresh soursop juice.
Enjoy your breakfast!
Tony