“After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art”

All around Singapore this summer, signs announce the fiftieth anniversary of the city-state’s independence and, implicitly, celebrate the accomplishments of a financial center known for continually reconstructing itself. Inside the Singapore Art Museum, however, a wry note is struck by this exhibition, which features work that questions idealized states—physical, political, and emotional.

Though the show overtly tackles utopia through ideas of Eden, the city, legacy, and issues surrounding the self, a powerful theme of air, and a lack thereof, is present throughout. Shannon Lee Castleman’s Jurong West Street 81, 2008, gathers films of neighbors by residents of a dense Singaporean block. While all of the subjects are complicit and often bemused, the sheer proximity of the neighbors to each other lends a sense of claustrophobia, and the video itself is a reminder of how easy it is to be watched. Lack of air is conveyed in multiple ways by Made Wianta’s Air Pollution, 2014, a dense sculptural tangle of motorcycle exhaust pipes, and is made visceral in Shen Shaomin’s haunting Summit, 2009, in which a faintly breathing life-size model of Fidel Castro rests on his deathbed next to a peer-group of embalmed Communist leaders who aimed to symbolically preserve a legacy through their own remains. Air’s invisible weight is felt in Svay Sareth’s emotive film installation Mon Boulet, 2011, in which the artist drags a six-and-a-half-foot-wide metal ball like a rickshaw from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh in memorial of Cambodians affected by the Khmer Rouge. Sareth, who grew up in refugee camps, is one of many for whom the invisible weight of civil war is tangible, in the very environment. The best works in the exhibition are a powerful prompt that what we can’t see is often more affecting than what’s apparent.