TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 179
11th April 2023
Five days in Singapore
Dear friends and colleagues
“Has the war made it difficult for you to obtain foreign research reports?” asked Stalin. “And do you have all the necessary laboratory equipment? …Goodbye comrade Shtrum, I wish you success in your work.” (Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, first published 1980, translated 1985, Vintage p. 747)
As you may remember I was due to go to Singapore back in January to make studio visits and see the rest of the Biennale. But I was too ill to go and had to postpone my visit. When I finally got there on March 20th the biennale had closed, so I can say no more about it.
I was able to do interviews with Ian Woo, Donna Ong, Guoliang Tan and Milenko Pravicki. I will have to get them transcribed and edited and, in some cases, completed on a second visit to Singapore in July.[1] These are all old friends so it was great fun seeing them again and we had good conversations – I hope you agree when we get them out.
What else did I do? I travelled on the MRT. I looked at public sculptures. I went to Gillman barracks. I went to a concert. I looked at architecture.
- In the MRT
MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) is the name of the underground railway system. It is super-efficient, clean and safe. It has become a very extensive network: When I first came here in 2009 there were three lines, there are six now plus sixty-eight new stations – not including new platforms at existing stations. Three more lines are planned and I guess already under construction. Fares are cheap SGD.92-3.10 (GBP 0.56-1.88) with discounts if you travel frequently.
2. Beware!
When I lived in Singapore, (2009-c. 2015) there was an epidemic of upskirt photography, now judging by the poster there is more groping at rush hour. As you can see the penalty for such “Outrage of Modesty” is a jail term of up to two years, fine and/or CANING.” Even if caning – yes, it is apparently excruciatingly painful – is rarely, like hanging, imposed, the government likes having it up their sleeves. It is supposedly part of the traditional family values that Singapore espouses. (N.B. women are never caned. It could impair their ability to bear children. That is a touchy subject. The government worries about the low birth-rate. Like Japan, China, South Korea and Taiwan, Singapore without immigration would have a declining population. That should be no problem – several million Filipinos and Filipinas would take a job there tomorrow (high wages, efficient government, good housing, very low crime, etc.) – but how to keep the racial balance of 75% ethnic Chinese, 15% Malay, 10% Indian?
3. Show you care
4. Stand-up Stacey
There has always been an ongoing campaign to make commuters behave nicely. It is currently led by the rather priggish Stand-up Stacey. Is it only a Singapore flaw that such user-friendly campaigns often end up seeming a little infantile? Like earlier MRT-wide campaigns promoting fertility!
Most, if not all, of the MRT stations have an artist involved. It is a great and little sung project. I will talk about that another time. Again, I want to talk another time about the public sculptures (there are some good ones and some stinkers!)
5 & 6 Ari Bayuaji
At Gillman Barracks there were two shows I especially enjoyed. Mizuma Gallery showed Ari Bayuaji, a Canadian based Indonesian. The pandemic stranded him in Bali. So he worked with what materials were to hand – and with issues of pollution sadly prominent in Bali. He gathered all the discarded fishing nets, ropes and plastic bottles that litter the shore, then with the help of some ten or more local weavers made fabrics with them. The show was called Weaving the Ocean.
7 & 8 Liu Liling
At Art Outreach’s Hearth Gallery were inkjet prints by Singaporean Liu Liling. To what extent they derived from photographic images I was unsure. They felt closer to the aesthetics of abstract paintings of a minimal inclination than the photographs of, say, Sugimoto. Muted colours delicately poised against or blending one with another. It will be interesting to see if she can develop these further.
I would have stayed to watch the video of a lecture performance by the indomitable Melati Suryodarmo on show at Shangart, but, alas, I ran out of time
Leaving Gillman I was saddened to see the empty building where CCA used to have a gallery (kunsthalle). I remember several good shows there, shows that made me think: Allan Sekula, Tomás Saraceno, Joan Jonas foremost among them. It closed last year, apparently because the government felt its audience too small. I think that was a mistake. In the art world as in other spheres (literary, scientific for example) it is in the more experimental venues that new things emerge. How many people attended January 5-31, 1969 in New York (300? maybe) or When Attitudes become Form in Bern, Switzerland, (a few thousand maybe – and mostly bewildered) yet those were the two exhibitions that above all others introduced conceptual art to the US and Europe. I am reminded of the fate of Victor Shtrum in Grossman’s two wonderful novels about the War (Stalingrad and Life and Fate) a theoretical physicist he is abused as a in effect dilettante, a bourgeois whose work is irrelevant to the war effort. His work position deteriorates: exile to the gulag seems inevitable. Then suddenly, out of the blue, he gets a phone call from Josif Stalin himself. You may not need theoretical physicists to produce more tanks, but you need them if you want to make atom bombs such as the Americans are making. I am not suggesting Singapore needs nuclear weapons, but to point out that innovation happens in small places within small, specialised groups and small audiences.
9. Before the concert in Esplande
One evening I went to a Concert, Mahler’s First Symphony, played by students of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music Orchestral Institute NUS (National University Singapore). It was very good – as good as a professional orchestra. I regret not having attended such concerts when I lived in Singapore. One would wish that given so many excellent musicians in the island state they do not have a bigger audience.
In 2002 the Albanian artist Edi Rama became mayor of Tirana. His big project was to cheer up the city, move it into the future by painting all the apartments with geometric blocks of colour. All colours chosen by him: not consensus or democracy, he claimed, but “an avant-garde of democratization”. That is what seems to be happening, as I saw from the MRT heading to the airport, in Singapore. It is as of yet a discreet highlighting compared to Rama’s Tirana, but maybe it will go further. We shall see!
10 & 11 Tirana comes to Singapore
Next letter I want to talk about dogs
Till then, look after yourselves
Tony
PS. Last week I forgot to mention the very interesting project of one artist I met in Baguio, Raena Abella. She plans to make a hundred or more portraits of Filipino artists using ambrotypes. She is using one of the earliest processes of photography – wet collodion which produces a glass negative that, however when viewed with a black background becomes a positive. There is a strange beauty to the ones she has already made. Looking forward to seeing more!
12. Raena Abella, Kidlatt Tahimik
- For various reasons these 4 interviews are still ongoing. TG 9.1.24 ↑