Singapore Biennale 2013
Singapore Art Museum | Various Venues
Countering the trend for big exhibitions to be as global as possible, the Fourth Singapore Biennale took the unusual step of restricting its curatorial reach to Southeast Asia, with a smattering of artists from South Korea, Japan, and Australia. The result was, as one gallerist put it, “a no-name biennial”—a show without the stars of the international circuit but ostensibly bearing fresh news. In addition, this biennial must have achieved some kind of a record by involving no fewer than twenty-seven curators from around the region without an artistic director to oversee them. They might have been better called “selectors” than curators in any case, given that the show was not organized according to curator, region, or thesis; the works were instead distributed across eight venues seemingly based on their suitability to the spaces.
“If the world changed” was the title and theme offered to the artists, and the resulting exhibition was dominated by research-driven, issue-based art—all predigested and explained by leaden interpretive texts that accompanied each work. The Laotian artist Bounpaul Phothyzan, for example, worked with villagers in the Bolikhamxai Province in his home country, a site of persistent flooding and soil erosion, to create larger-than-life, representational pieces of Land art (e.g. found logs and driftwood forming the skeleton of a fish).Here he showed We Live, 2013, a group of photos and videos that document his interactive project and point toward the ecological issues in the region. The sculptural installation Tiempos Muertos (Dead Season), 2013, by Filipina artist Nikki Luna consists of numerous large sculptures in the form of diamonds made of sugar and resin. These “sugar diamonds” are intended to highlight or symbolize the exploitative culture around the growth and harvesting of her country’s monocrop of sugarcane. Luna’s was among the many works here that were commissioned especially for the show. Another was Shirley Soh’s Seeing (from) the Other, 2013, a sewing-and-embroidery project undertaken with local female prison inmates. Together Son and the women worked with the notion of change in the world to create fabric pieces. The most poignant and prominently placed work was a capsule history of one of these unnamed women, listing the highlights of her life and reminding us that she would not be free until age fifty-nine, after serving a twenty-four-year sentence.
Despite the highly personal nature of some pieces in Soh’s collaboration, in general, the works here could be described as post-Conceptual projects in which ideas took precedence over the senses, and sociopolitical themes over personal concerns. Yet the poetic imagination could still be found in unexpectedly quiet gestures. Nguyẽn Trinh Thi’s video projection Unsubtitled, 2010, for example, presents a crowd of life-size, wooden, cutout screens on which images of individuals consuming food are projected. “Eating,” the artist says, “needs no explanation.” The piece was a subtle response to her studio building being shut down by the Vietnamese authorities because of an exhibition there of photos of a nude performance; the people portrayed in Unsubtitled—Nguyẽn’s peers in the Hanoi art scene—can be described as simultaneously under surveillance and performing the mundane task of eating. The artists end by naming themselves and what they’ve been eating—a display of individualism implying a subtle sense of resistance. One of the artists chose to smoke instead of eating—and given the draconian smoking laws in Singapore, this added another kind of statement. If the world changed, maybe there would be more of such moments of individual poetry as those found in Nguyẽn’s video. Or maybe more such moments would help change the world.