10 Artworks You Must See at Singapore Biennale 2016
PUBLISHED November 16th, 2016 06:00 am
One of Asia’s largest contemporary art exhibition is back and well underway at our museum district from now till February 2017!
Organised by the Singapore Art Museum, the fifth edition of Singapore Biennale showcases works by an impressive 63 artists and collectives from 19 countries and territories across Asia. With an intriguing theme An Atlas of Mirrors, the four-month long exhibition offers visitors unexpected ways of seeing the world and ourselves.
How will an atlas and the curiosities of mirrors shift our perception of the world? Well, you just have to experience it for yourself. Don’t let the expansive selection of artworks intimidate you; from nutmegs plated in 24k gold to a map made with soap bars, we share with you our pick of the top pieces to see at Singapore Biennale 2016:
“Paracosmos” by Harumi Yukutake
Remember the iconic circular stairwell at the Singapore Art Museum? Let Japanese artist Harumi Yukutake propel you into a parallel dimension in her otherworldly display of glass mirrors, shaped by Shinto ideas of interconnectivity. Over 1,600 hand-cut mirrors spread from ceiling to floor of the stairwell, creating a sense of simultaneity in a a central transition space that connects two floors. In having no inherent image of their own, each mirror is able to hold every other image in itself – enfolding an ‘everywhere’ by being a ‘nowhere’.
Where: Singapore Art Museum Stairwell
“History Repeats Itself” by Titarubi
Few things are quite as visually arresting as a hooded sculpture made out of 15,000 gold-plated nutmegs, let alone three of them standing atop intricately-detailed, charred ships. During the early days of European colonialism, nutmeg was a spice worth its weight in gold, and bloody wars were waged over it. Through this stunning work, Indonesian artist Titarubi alludes to the ominous appearance of the colonisers on the horizon of seas, as well as the legacies of Southeast Asia’s colonial past, making reference to the burning of Indonesian ships by the Dutch East India Company to seize control of the spice trade. The hooded figures, hollow inside, suggests the illusory of riches and power; but at its heart, empty.
Where: Singapore Art Museum, Level 2
“Noah’s Garden II” by Deng Guoyuan
Walking into Chinese artist Deng Guoyuan‘s Noah’s Garden II is much like entering a kaleidoscope, where infinite mirror images are being endlessly reflected in the revolving mirrored panels. This garden, however, is a glasshouse filled with live and artificial flora and scholar rocks referencing the Song Dynasty, painted over in neon hues. The immersive, dizzying installation, set within the 100-year-old museum Chapel, seeks to blur the lines between the real and the artificial, recasting the world with a hope for the integration of diversity and resolution of conflicts.
Where: Singapore Art Museum Chapel
“Dislocate” by Bui Cong Khanh
Painstakingly handcrafted with master carpenters and woodcarvers over two years, Vietnamese artist Bui Cong Khanh‘s Dislocate is a wonder to look at. Made entirely out of jackfruit wood, the work explores the sociopolitical tensions between Vietnam and China (Khanh’s ancestral province), and the complexities surrounding social and national identity. Observe intricate carvings of a Vietnamese military jacket, American GI missiles and chain-link fences alongside traditional motifs of dragons and lotus flowers, as well as four miniature Buddhist pagodas set on plinths, each flanked by cannons and engulfed by Chinese bonsai plants.
Where: SAM at 8Q, Level 4
“I Wander, I Wonder” by Dex Fernandez
Homes in the Philippines are often abound with sentimental mementos and souvenirs from family members, but when disaster strikes, these items can imperil lives by becoming hazards. Based on the stories of the survivors of a deadly typhoon in in 2013 in Tacloban, and Filipinos living in Singapore, Filipino artist Dex Fernandez probes into the ‘unintended mirrors’ that these seemingly useless objects become, reflecting what we desire and perceive to be necessary, and how objects are cherished for sentimental value over utilitarian qualities.
Where: Singapore Art Museum Courtyards
“If you can dream a better world you can make a better world or perhaps travel between them” by Melissa Tan
Local artist Melissa Tan takes Singapore’s physical urban landscape and terrain, and translates it into abstract visual and sonic expressions. Three ‘music boxes’, playing tunes from hand-cut loops of paper, accompany a massive metal sculpture. Through the laborious scoring, carving, and notching of paper (which serves as a musical score sheet) and metal, the work attempts to mirror the actions made by natural weathering and human imprints onto natural and man-made surfaces – a sculptural recording of our transient landscape through time.
Where: SAM at 8Q, Level 1
“SONICreflection” by Zulkifle Mahmod
If you’ve ever been to Peninsula Plaza or Golden Mile Complex, you’d likely remember the characteristic auditory delight of the Burmese community and Thai diaspora. Zulkifle Mahmod‘s SONICreflection is a fascinating sound sculpture that blends together the sounds of various Southeast Asian communities that have put down roots in Singapore. The recordings are transmitted from wok lids, tweeters, and pencil microphones to create an ambient cacophony of the everyday lives of our migrant communities, from snippets of dialogue to incidental noise.
Where: Singapore Art Museum, Level 1
“Dread of Not Night” by Adeela Suleman
Using hand-carved wood and found vintage ceramic plates, Pakistani artist Adeela Suleman creates beautiful stylised Persian and Mughal miniature paintings to serve as a visual vocabulary for her modern narratives, laden with violence, death, and plenty of bloodshed. This is a contrast to the gem-like delicate plates, connecting violence to beauty in the same way that traditional arms and armour were often decorated with gilding, inlay, and gold or silver encrusting. In Suleman’s own words, “The more heinous the crime, the more beautiful the object needs to be.”
Where: SAM at 8Q, Level 4
“Soap Blocked” by Htein Lin
When life gives you soap, you might want to make art from it, as Htein Lin did. The former Burmese political prisoner, who participated in the failed uprising of 1988, was incarcerated for seven years under the Myanmar military government. There, he carved a little captive human figure into a bar of soap, trapped within four walls, and smuggled it out through a Red Cross representative to communicate to the world the deplorable state of Myanmar’s prisons during the 90s. In this artwork, Lin creates a map of Myanmar with over 1,000 bars of soap carved with the same figure, with red soap bars marking the exact locations where political prisoners remain incarcerated today.
Where: SAM at 8Q, Level 3
“Melampaui Batas (Beyond Boundaries)” by Made Djirna
Inside Made Djirna’s antique ironwood boat, and installed along the expanse of the gallery wall, are thousands of fragile terracotta figurines, each exhibiting individual expressions. The figures symbolise humanity and its fraility, and the boat the journeys made between the Nusantara (the Indonesian archipelago) and the larger world, as well as between the worlds of the living and the dead (in Balinese belief, the boat carries the soil to its ancestral abode after death). Meanwhile, embedded into a lone tree nearby, fashioned from driftwood, are fragments of other lives, cultures, and civilisations, collapsing concepts of distance, space and time.
Where: Singapore Art Museum, Level 1
Singapore Biennale is on now till February 2017, anchored at the Singapore Art Museum and SAM at 8Q. Other works are also found at National Museum of Singapore, Peranakan Museum, Asian Civilisations Museum, Stamford Green, and SMU’s de Suantio Gallery. Tickets are priced from $15 for adults and $7.50 for students, NSFs, and senior citizens. For more information, please see here.
