'What do you call a midget fortune teller who has escaped from prison?" asks curator Joyce Toh. "Small medium at large," someone guesses, standing in front of a wall painted with words, photography, performance and mixed-media, all linked to look like electrons circling in an atom.
Ho Tzu Nyen's The Cloud Of Unknowing.
The exhibition "Medium At Large" at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) brings together 31 works of contemporary Asian artists which defy simple categorisation by medium.
The exhibition texts points out: "Art has long been classified by genres and disciplines, such as painting, sculpture and photography, yet in resisting the confines of traditional definitions, contemporary works often behave in shape-shifting ways, where a painting may slide into video, or a video performs like drawing and a drawing is painterly."
But it is an age where internet art has become its own singular art form, a post postmodern age, a century after Duchamp's ready-mades, half-a-century after Rauschenberg's Combines and more than 20 years after Damien Hirst first placed dead animals floating in formaldehyde in glass tanks in museums. To question the fluidity of medium is rather banal in the current discourse.
Experimenting with the expansion of expressive media is not a novel concept — the scope of medium is so incredibly wide in contemporary art.
The works in the exhibition are arranged according to the medium they subvert, drawings in a room, sculptures in another. The comparisons seemingly suggest art needs to justify itself.
But on their own, the works, most of which are from SAM's permanent collection, are remarkably compelling. In most, form and content are inseparable — they are part of both conception and execution.
Melati Suryodarmo, in a black dress and a pair of red heels, dances on butter in her performance Exergie-Butter Dance, captured in a mesmerising video and in photographs. She twists and turns, slips and falls. She picks herself up and continues the sensual movements, then crashes to the ground. On YouTube, her performance has been put to Adele's Someone Like You and even Skrillex's First Of The Year. The YouTube videos themselves become, incongruously, another work of art.
Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich's Cycle is a sculpture made using the traditional rattan weaving technique into a porous organ, where emotions are held and contained. Rattan weaving has long been a part of Cambodia's heritage, disrupted by years of war and torment during the Khmer Rouge regime. The sculpture is hung high above the stairwell, casting intricate shadows, like ghosts of the haunted past.
Jane Lee's Status.
The cultural significance of materials is also revealed in Alvin Zafra's portraits of two significant Filipino figures, "Pepe" Jose Rizal and Benigno Aquino Jr, both of whom were shot. Zafra conceived the two portraits by grounding two M16 bullets into sand paper panels, immortalising the two heroes by the instrument that was used to kill them. In a similar vein, Titarubi's Shadow Of Surrender, which was commissioned for the Indonesian Pavilion at Venice Biennale in 2013, presents a colonial history through the use of wood in all its physical forms, from pages in a book, to benches and desks made from charred railroad tracks, to charcoal drawings in gilded wooden frames.
In these works, the medium and subject matter are intertwined. Rather than being concerned with their own material identities, they are more connected to individual cultural histories.
Gerardo Tan captures the physical manifestation of the passage of time in his 2001 works, thisisthatisthis, a square of black grime, collected from an 1895 painting by Filipino master Juan Luna, in a gilded gold frame, and thatisthisisthat, a bowl of gooey dust from the painting Entrance To The Grand Canal from the Molo, Venice (1740) by Canaletto. Tan transforms dust into the materialisation of an accumulation of history and memory.
"They are the oldest pieces of works here," says Toh.
Natee Utarit, one of three Thai artists represented, presents The Birth Of Tragedy, a triptych oil on canvas true to realist Western painting conventions. In the context of the exhibition, Natee's work references the early theory of art where it was an imitation of a reality, rather than a form of expression or communication. His contemporary work plays, instead, with allegorical references — a sleeping skeleton, an eyeball, a mouse in the shadows, a row of toy soldiers.
The year-long exhibition, which runs until May next year, succeeds as an extensive survey of contemporary Southeast Asian art, in all its fascinating forms.
Others works on display range from Korean artist Osang Gwon's 3D larger-than-life-size model made from photographs, to a video installation The Cloud Of Unknowing by Ho Tzu Nyen, which plays on loop in the chapel of the museum.
The works often embody within themselves a political history, the story of a nation, a deeply personal story. Perhaps the artist is the medium.
To place an importance on whether a video is a painting or a drawing may be to discount the emotional impact each individual work commands. They are all mixed-media installations, if you will.
