| Cover picture: Cao Fei, 浮槎 Fú Chá, 2020 |

Singapore Flyer – Whimsical Reality

2020 started with a trip to the Singapore Flyer to see the exhibition ‘Whimsical Reality’ featuring watercolour works by Ah Guo Illustration 阿果绘本. I’ve been following Ah Guo’s work for quite a long time, and I love his childlike, light-hearted illustrations of various Singapore scenes!

National Gallery Singapore – Chua Soo Bin: Truths & Legends

Spent a day out visiting National Gallery Singapore and went to see the understated exhibition of Chua Soo Bin’s portrait photography. I especially liked these photos of Wu Guanzhong sketching in the streets of London, Bangkok’s floating markets and at Singapore’s Bird Park (this should be Jurong Bird Park surely!) Click here to also see my review of the exhibition ‘Wu Guanzhong: Beauty Beyond Form’ at National Gallery Singapore from 2016.

National Gallery Singapore – Light to Night Festival: Invisible Cities

The Light to Night festival was also happening in January, and as always, it delivered a fun lineup of light installations and art skin projections. I also found it hilarious that one of Twardzik-Ching Chor Leng’s Five Stones was propped up above the bus stop outside Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall!

I’m not sure why this was here, but this setup of LINE’s Brown in a Merlion costume at Funan mall was so cute!!

Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre – Huat Huat Land

A display of giant pineapples, mahjong tiles and murals on the rooftop of Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre for Chinese New Year! Huat Ah!

Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre – SINGAPO人

SINGAPO人 is a permanent exhibition at SCCC that looks to discover Chinese Singapore culture. I really enjoyed visiting this and playing with all the interactive sections. There’s this game of ‘Would You Rather’, for example have Coffee or Tea, Eat Out or Eat at Home (as seen above) and after making your choice, it shows the poll percentage for each option!

Peeking into a small hole in a display to see a camera staring back at me!

Had to capture this drip tile from the old Nanyang University’s Administrative Building — especially as I’m studying at Nanyang Technological University now!

CB Summer

And then we hit pause — circuit breaker began in early April, classes went online, and it took a lot of effort to continue to study / work from home.

Over these few months, I also started to tune into art online (here are some of my recommendations!). Although there were also sadly a slew of exhibition cancellations, like the i Light festival, the Picasso and Matisse exhibition at National Gallery Singapore and the ‘Angelica Kauffman’ exhibition in London’s Royal Academy of Arts…

I’m currently researching Kauffman’s self-portraits and so I’d made travel plans to visit London and to see this exhibition — all cancelled! Ah well, so I made do with buying the exhibition catalogue. Here’s an image of Kauffman’s Self-Portrait with Stylus from the catalogue (excuse the colouring!), which is my favourite of all of her self-portraits! It belongs in a private collection so I really hope to have a chance to see it in an exhibition in future…

Asian Civilisations Museum – Fashion and Textiles Gallery

Ventured back out to see exhibitions again in August, and it felt like a grand affair! Dressed up again to view the new Fashion and Textiles, as well as Jewellery, galleries at Asian Civilisations Museum. The galleries will have a rotating display, and the Fashion and Textiles gallery currently features Chinese dress from the Qing (imperial wear) and modern periods (cheongsams). I thought the Fashion and Textiles gallery was surprisingly small!

National Museum of Singapore – Music For Everyone: Variations on a Theme

This solo exhibition of Song-Ming Ang’s work was first presented in the Singapore Pavilion of 2019’s Venice Biennale and had a re-showing at National Museum of Singapore. The title Music for Everyone ‘references a series of concerts organised by the then Singapore’s Ministry of Culture from 1971 to 1985’, and the exhibition overall also looks at music education in Singapore, like all those recorder music classes (so not for me)…

I especially liked Ang’s Manifesto for Bad Music, as I got quite into twentieth-century art manifestoes in class last semester!

Singapore Art Museum – Time Passes

Since Singapore Art Museum is currently under renovation, their exhibition ‘Time Passes’ is currently held at National Gallery Singapore. I thought the highlight work was Ashley Yeo’s intricate work of paper, which she makes using 3D printing.

In the gallery next door, ‘An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season’ is also showing at National Gallery Singapore. Both exhibitions are part of ‘Proposals for Novel Ways of Being’, a series of exhibitions and programmes made in response to COVID-19. Both exhibitions run until 21 February 2021.

Esplanade Tunnel – Combing for Ice and Jade

This is a solo exhibition of Kurt Tong’s work as part of the 7th Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF). ‘Combing for Ice and Jade’ tells the life story of Tong’s nanny (or majie) who became a ‘Comb Sister’ — ‘a community of women in Southern China who took a vow of chastity’ and left their hometowns to work and be financially independent. I liked the quiet, understated way of showing her life through various photographs, but I especially liked the video at the beginning of exhibition in which Tong discusses this seven-year project.

‘Combing for Ice and Jade’ is ongoing till 10 Jan 2021.

National Gallery Singapore – Georgette Chen: At Home in the World

The long awaited Georgette Chen retrospective is here! I enjoyed visiting this exhibition, and I will post about it in more detail in a separate post. In the meantime, I wanted to highlight this photograph of Chen painting Lotus Symphony en plein air (outdoors) in her friend’s garden full of lotuses. It’s nice to see a glimpse of the process and the final result situated next to the other.

‘Georgette Chen: At Home in the World’ is running for a long time until 26 September 2021.

ArtScience Museum – Margins: drawing pictures of home 

‘Margins: drawing pictures of home’ is also included in SIPF this year, and it’s a small exhibition featuring works by 15 contemporary photographers centred around Singapore as home.

My sister reminded me that we first saw this work in Hong Kong’s PMQ as part of detour 2015! While there were 1600 photographs there, the 12 photographs included here depicting the daily food choices for those living at the poverty line in different Asian countries still remains as poignant.

I liked the light humour of Hu’s People Mountain People Sea, a literal translation of 人山人海, which means a huge crowd in Chinese. Hu juxtaposes scenes of Singapore with ‘cutouts’ of the Old Master Q comic character, and I thought it was pretty fun!

My favourite from ‘Margins’ is Soh’s photographs of the last SS24 train to depart from Tanjong Pagar Railway Station (see my photos of the station at this link) before the railway line was officially removed.

‘Margins: drawing pictures of home’ is showing until 28 February 2021.

Gardens by the Bay: Christmas Wonderland’s Walk of Lights

Ending off 2020 with some festive cheer! I wanted to do another re-visit of Christmas Wonderland since this year’s Walk of Lights featured some new light attractions that have not been shown before! Loved all the lights and as always, the luminarie light installations (made all the way from Italy) are so gorgeous and impressive! Here’s to a brilliant 2021!

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This text-based installation was my favourite! I love how it made use of one of the bridges across the Singapore River as its site.

I felt this work was the most in (Bicentennial) theme of all, depicting a story of a traveller discovering an island… As for how water-light shows go, this felt like quite standard fare – I have probably seen too many in Singapore!!

I only realised the design was made up of laundry pegs until I saw it at closer range – I like the concept! Also caught a fashionista in action…

An interesting animation projected onto the facade of ArtScience Museum – always such a cool surface to work on.

This light installation took up a small part of the Helix Bridge, which was a fantastic site to make use of too! Lights kept flashing through the tubes on the bridge, so it did appear like I was in a space/time tunnel or something like that!

I gave up on catching these last few installations at night, and they definitely don’t look as nice as they do lit up in the nighttime!

I love this shot of the canopy of leaves above the Marina Bay landscape, so much that I find it so easy to miss the (unlit) neon tubes of Squiggle on the Marina Bay Promontory!

If you’d like to see how i Light Marina Bay 2018 was like, go over here for my blog post on it. As for this year’s edition, I’m not too sure how the Bicentennial theme really came across in the installations. I’d actually have preferred it if i Light hadn’t went along with this Singapore Bicentennial theme this year. But then again, the Bicentennial was making a huge splash during Singapore Art Week earlier this year, so I can see why i Light was planned to go along with the theme too.

Oh well, I hope i Light would be more inspiring next year! i Light returns to Marina Bay again in March 2020.

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Before I get into these events, I have to first say that the pre-opening act of Singapore Art Week (SAW) 2019 was the sudden cancellation of Art Stage Singapore. I’d always missed going to Art Stage – especially during my uni years when I would be in Hong Kong in January – but I’d intended to visit for the first time this year. Well, that didn’t happen, and the news of their cancellation caused such a big hoo-ha!

S.E.A. Focus

At least, there was the new boutique art fair S.E.A. Focus, which I was pretty interested in checking out. As the name suggests, the fair focuses on showing art from Southeast Asian artists – and it’s also nice to see stronger representation of Singaporean artists. I’ve heard so many Singaporeans complain that Singaporean artists aren’t more visible in Singapore itself, so it’s good to see more focus placed on them, too.

Of course, this gold coated Singapore-style dustbin was the first thing that caught my eye! For context, they’re usually green in colour and placed along the streets. I wish I knew the artist who made this, but there were no wall labels in this gallery’s booth. In fact, many booths didn’t have wall labels, some just hand-wrote the artists’ names on the wall – why, I wonder?

My favourites from STPI’s showing of Cheong Soo Pieng’s artworks. Not sure if these are part of STPI’s current exhibition on Cheong, but I must make the time to visit soon!

Light to Night Festival

Moving on to Light to Night Festival – there were two editions this year, firstly for Singapore Art Week with the theme ‘Traces and Echoes’ and the second for the Bicentennial (which ends tonight!).

I’m actually glad there were two versions of the festival, extending it from just a week to a whole month! I’d been so busy for the whole of January with work and life and yada yada, so I decided to check out the Bicentennial edition in February, which I thought would be more interesting.

Sticks is a light installation that keeps changing colours, and it’s inspired by the childhood game “pick-up sticks” and bakau piling, an old technique for constructing scaffolding. My sister tells me that she had played the sticks game during her primary school years, but I don’t seem to remember playing it too? Ah, a few years can already mean generation differences.

My favourite art skin was the one projected on the facade of The Arts House, about stories of the people who worked along the Singapore River. I like how the illustrations of the people projected on the columns remind me of Classical Greco-Roman sculptures!

There’s also this cute Alice in Wonderland-inspired installation, Open Books, situated outside The Arts House!

I really liked this quote! There were a few of these neon signs as part of the food bazaar outside National Gallery Singapore.

Yet another emphasis on Singapore Art… Though there’s still a ways to go.

I always love to capture National Gallery Singapore – the Supreme Court wing from this angle, and this is the most colourful I’ve seen it!

National Gallery Singapore’s art skin recounted the story of Singapore’s former Supreme Court and Civic District. I especially liked the bright colours projected on the Supreme Court wing, talking about how the building has been repurposed into an art museum, and the photographs of modern-day Singapore projected across the long stretch of the City Hall wing.

On the Bicentennial…

I had opted to only see the Bicentennial edition of Light to Night, due to lack of time and to see some light projections and installations that featured different narratives from the usual fare. As you can tell, the themes celebrate Singapore’s history and how far we have come.

While I did enjoy seeing these narratives, I’m not sure how the Bicentennial holds much significance in these festivals. The Bicentennial marks the 200th anniversary of Sir Stamford Raffles’ founding of modern Singapore in 1819. While this fact has never, in my opinion, held much negative connotation in the public eye, the focus on the Bicentennial this year seems to have tapped into issues of colonialism and post-colonialism vs. nationalism and nation-building that I feel has not been much discussed in Singapore before.

I think the problem here is: Should we celebrate a colonial past, for all its good and bad, or should we be celebrating Singapore’s own history since 1819? Or even pre-1819? Note that 7 Stories from 700 Years talks about a longer history of Singapore beyond the supposed Bicentennial mark.

Some say this uncovering of a longer history is a move to ‘decolonise’ Singapore, but I’m don’t think that’s effective when the Bicentennial term is used everywhere. It appears that the creation of a special Bicentennial that doesn’t even seem to be too sure of what it’s celebrating / commemorating has led to confusion and some ruffled feathers.

I feel that the public stir has also been triggered by the Raffles in Southeast Asia: Revisiting the Scholar and Statesman exhibition currently ongoing at Asian Civilisations Museum, in collaboration with the British Museum. I wasn’t initially all that interested to visit – I was put off by the steep price! But after reading news about visitors’ disgruntled comments about it, I want to see it for myself now… Probably on ACM’s programme days when tickets to the exhibition are at a $5 discounted rate.

In any case, I find ACM’s exhibitions hit and miss, and Raffles in Southeast Asia is probably going to be a miss. If you’ll like to see an exhibition on colonialism that is more sensitively done, check out my review of Artist and Empire at National Gallery Singapore in collaboration with Tate Britain here.

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2018 has been my full year back in Singapore since moving back, and at first, I thought there was less happenings in art here. After a while, things have picked up, but there have been many exhibitions and events that I didn’t choose to post in detail on this blog – lack of time is always a major reason for my lack of updates! So, I thought it would be nice to look back at all of the art exhibitions and events I went to this year!

Asian Civilisations Museum – Permanent Galleries

I started off 2018 with a visit to ACM to see their permanent galleries. I really loved seeing Tang Shipwreck with all of those painted bowls and those acorn-shaped game pieces (for gambling)!

ACM has just opened their new Christian and Islamic art galleries this month, so that’s something I’m definitely going to check out in 2019.

ArtScience Museum – Treasures of the Natural World

I went to see both ‘Treasures of the Natural World’ and ‘Art from the Streets’ at ArtScience Museum on the same day (double exhibition tickets are so worth it!). ArtScience Museum continues to be my favourite museum in Singapore as they have the best exhibitions.

I was surprised to find out that I really enjoyed seeing exhibits of preserved stuffed animals that look so life-like! All of the exhibits were on loan from Natural History Museum in London, which of course, I’m now planning to visit when I get myself to London!

National Museum of Singapore – The More We Get Together: Singapore’s Playgrounds 1930 – 2030

Peranakan Museum – Amek Gambar: Peranakans and Photography

There was then ‘The More We Get Together: Singapore’s Playgrounds 1930 – 2030’ at National Museum of Singapore, a simple exhibition talking about styles and models of playgrounds in Singapore. Basically, Singapore wins at urban planning, I have to say!

I also revisited Peranakan Museum for the first time in probably 10 years to see ‘Amek Gambar: Peranakans and Photography’. Sticking to the museum’s specialised theme of Peranakan culture, the Amek Gambar – meaning to take pictures – exhibition shows a range of black and white photographs of Peranakans and old cameras. The exhibition is on till February 3rd, 2019.

National Gallery Singapore – Rirkrit Tiravanija

I always visit National Gallery Singapore for exhibitions or events or just to bum at their Gallery & Co cafe. My first visit of the year was to see the new site-specific commissioned work of Rirkrit Tiravanija at NGS’ rooftop. It’s a large-scale bamboo structure with a pathway that you can walk through from one end to the other, and there’s also a Japanese teahouse in the centre, though it was too hot that day for me to join in in the tea ceremony events they were holding at the time.

Singapore Philatelic Museum – The Little Prince: Behind the Story

I like to visit Singapore Philatelic Museum (or the “Stamp Museum”) every once in a while to see their exhibitions that somehow always manage to incorporate stamps! It was nice to re-see Arnaud Nazare-Aga’s Little Prince sculptures at the ‘The Little Prince: Behind the Story’ exhibition. I had first seen them in Hong Kong in 2015 during the Christmas and New Year season – see the post here!

National Gallery Singapore – Children’s Festival

It’s always so fun at Children’s Festival at National Gallery Singapore seeing everyone, kids and adults, having fun playing with the artworks! The first one pictured is all kitchen sponges and for the second artwork, you could throw those triangle-shaped pieces and they would stick on the patterned wall.

I’m also very proud to say that I managed to speed-walk across Justiniani’s bridge in one piece this time round, HAHAHA! For last year’s edition, I was so scared of the never-ending depths of the illusionistic effect of the bridge that I actually paused while walking across it. I’m still kinda terrified of this kind of things, but clearly it’s only me, since all of the other kids were happily examining the details in the bridge.

National Library Singapore (Central) – Selling Dreams: Early Advertising in Singapore

‘Selling Dreams: Early Advertising in Singapore’ is a very well-researched and very big exhibition on advertisements in Singapore from the 1830s to the 1960s. I really recommend reading all of the details in the didactics for the exhibits, as they are all so interesting! This was probably the longest time I spent at an exhibition though, about 2 hours? The exhibition is on till 24th February 2019.

National Gallery Singapore – (Re)collect

I shared a mini review of ‘(Re)collect’ at National Gallery Singapore on my Instastories, now saved in my highlights, to try out a new format of sharing about exhibitions! That was really fun, but I also wanted to share Lee Lim’s composite photographs on a bigger screen, so that it would be clearer to see. His photographs appear like Chinese ink paintings, especially with their Chinese inscriptions and his seal on the sides of the paintings. It’s fascinating to see how photographs can also look like paintings in a way.

The Cathay – Whatshisname x Mighty Jaxx

The first time I saw these dogs, I was walking towards The Cathay from YMCA. From afar, I thought could this possibly be Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog I’m about to see?? Well, turns out these weren’t Koons’ sculptures, but Whatshisname’s pooping dogs are humorous in their own way, yes? A total of 4 dogs were commissioned for The Cathay, and they are still on show!

Singapore Night Festival 2018

For this year’s Singapore Night Festival, I was excited to see FierS à Cheval by Compagnie des Quidams after seeing photos of their performance at the opening of Tai Kwun in Hong Kong (which I must visit!). Horses are my favourite animals, and the performers really captured the elegant movements of horses. Funnily enough, this performance was made for the Year of the Horse in 2014, but it’s been so popular that the company has continued to perform this show until now!

I also went to see the dress exhibits from World of WearableArt (WOW), which holds an annual award competition for fashion designers from all over the world to present their avant-garde designs. These two dresses were my favourite!

STPI – Handmade Readymades

These two prints by Lichtenstein were shown at STPI’s exhibition ‘Handmade Readymades’. The exhibition featured the prints of four 20th century American artists, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein, but I only took a liking to Lichtenstein’s prints. The first time I visited STPI in 2015, I think, I also remember seeing and liking Lichtenstein’s prints. That aside, STPI always has top-notch exhibitions so I always like to visit. I’m looking forward to their Cheong Soo Pieng exhibition opening in January 2019!

Gardens by the Bay – Mid-autumn Celebrations

Gardens by the Bay had such a lovely display for the Mid-Autumn celebrations! The giant lanterns also gave me Story of Yanxi Palace vibes, which was everyone’s favourite drama of the year, right?? YASSS.

National Museum of Singapore – In an Instant: Polaroid at the Intersection of Art and Technology

‘In an Instant: Polaroid at the Intersection of Art and Technology’, a travelling exhibition that has made its stop at the National Museum of Singapore, was not what I was expecting at all!

The beginning of the exhibition charts out the history of the Polaroid, starting from its invention by Edwin Land, who was inspired by his daughter when she questioned on a holiday trip, why can’t we have our photographs printed out instantaneously, instead of going through the long process of developing film.

Most of the exhibition features artistic Polaroids following a few themes, but my favourites are these more contemporary shots captured on Polaroids. I didn’t realise that so many prominent artists and photographers had worked with Polaroid! The exhibition is on till 31st March 2019.

Affordable Art Fair Singapore 2018

I went for a quick walk through Affordable Art Fair in November, and all of my photos can be seen in my Instastories highlights! It was my first time attending it in Singapore and I found it much livelier that my experience at AAF in Hong Kong in 2015.

I found the paintings of those curly haired little, hmm, midgets by a Japanese artist (in the first two photos) really cute! There were also many South Korean galleries at the fair, and I really liked the style of these works by Korean artists (latter two photos).

ArtScience Museum – Future World (Revamped!)

This year was really the year of teamLab for me, seeing their works across ArtScience Museum, National Gallery Singapore and Marina Bay Sands. See my posts on teamLab – Part I and Part II!

I’d shared about ‘Future World’ at ArtScience Museum before it closed for revamp, and I was debating if I should visit the revamped exhibition… Guess what, I did! I bought a bundle ticket to see the new Future World and the Minimalism exhibition across ArtScience Museum and National Gallery Singapore, and I’m glad I did because I like the revamped exhibition even more! Also, I’m definitely going to do up posts on the ‘Minimalism: Space. Light. Object.’ exhibition(s) because I have so much opinions on it, so I would leave my comments for those upcoming posts.

Christmas!

We have reached Christmastime, the best time of the year!! This year’s theme of Disney Magical Moments for the Orchard Road Christmas decorations were so fun! I grew up on Disney, so this is definitely a special year!

Ion Art Gallery – Virtually Versailles

My last exhibition of the year was ‘Virtually Versailles’ at the Ion Art Gallery and Ion Sky, all the way up on the 55th floor of Ion Orchard. I already know that Versailles is on my travel wishlist, and this exhibition gave a taste of the Palace of Versailles’s architecture, decor and extensive art collection.

It’s mostly made up of a lot of videos, so I didn’t really capture many good photos of it. There are many interactive elements though, like biking around different parts of the palace (actual biking, virtual tour of palace), and having your face superimposed on royal portraits, which was really fun!! This free exhibition is on till 6th January 2019.

The last photo was a candid shot of me taken by my sister looking at the collection in the Palace, and it just seems like such a nice reminder to keep looking at all the art around us! Here’s to 2019!

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The annual light festival has apparently been here for six years already, but it’s only my first time catching it! I think such a light festival is perfect for a place like Singapore, where digital installations and light shows always seem to be very popular. I also really liked that it made me go on a nighttime walking tour of the Marina Bay area, which I would always want to do but not actually not do it because of excuses like humidity, heat, so on… ;)

The entire walk took me about one and a half hours, starting from Esplanade Park, crossing the Helix Bridge to the Marina Bay walkway and completing the circuit near One Fullerton, with a total of 22 light installations situated along the way. I will be highlighting 10 installations in this post!

Studio ALEX, Flawless

I’m starting with the last installation listed on i Light’s map because Flawless was the first one I saw while walking along Esplanade Park on one afternoon – without realizing that this was a part of i Light! I really like how it gives a fluttery leaf effect.

Yuree Hong and Siyong Kim, Dancing Grass

Perfectly placed on the large grassy patch at Esplanade Park.

Luzinterruptus, Transistable Plastic

I was a little, er, alarmed by the immense use of plastic in Transistable Plastic, but of course, it’s meant to raise awareness of the amount of waste we generate, and all of these plastic was ‘waste’ contributed by the community and corporate partners.

It’s a huge installation of hanging bags of plastic which you could walk through and be enveloped in – but I always have a few misgivings about these kinds of work that raise awareness of certain issues or products by performing or making use of such issues or products, like in this installation. I just think, are there perhaps better ways of raising awareness and getting to the heart of these issues?

Nanyang Technological University, School of Art, Design and Media, Starlight

Starlight was one of a couple of interactive pieces. The suspended balls start off unlit, and you could bang one ball at the end against the next, and the rest will light up in sequence. That’s me lighting up the upper row! :)

Serge Maheu, Passage

I didn’t walk through the Passage, but I found it really cute to see so many people walking through it, and it’s fun to see it changing colours as well!

Nanyang Polytechnic, School of Interactive Design and Media, Kloud

I think the various structures of Kloud were supposed to change colour when you touched them but I couldn’t seem to get it right…

Christopher Simpson, Isabella Bain, Khanh Nguyen, James Rotanson, Anthony Zeater and Steven Bai, Mailbox

So many people were crowded around Mailbox with their phones out, which made me very curious to see what it was all about! Turns out you could tweet emoijis/messages to it and your message would appear on the giant digital mailbox.

Franck Pelletier, With Love…

Ended my tour and i Light adventure With Love… which is my favourite of all. The large heart (that kinda looks like an apple from some angles) was pulsing along to the sound of a heartbeat and the red colour was going on and off to the beat.

I really enjoyed the added liveliness and colour that i Light brought to the area at night, and it’s fun to see tourists and locals alike taking in the extra sights as well, haha! The entire i Light circuit felt a little unexpectedly big, but it seems like there are plans to go even bigger for next year’s edition in conjunction with Singapore’s Bicentennial, marking the 200th anniversary of Sir Stamford Raffles’ founding of Singapore. Let’s see what comes up next year!

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