Writeup for SB2006

Here's the writeup I submitted for SB2006. I was illprepared. This is no excuse. I will not get showing at SB2006. But it was worth a try. I believe the chosen artists will be informed before the end of this week.

A proposal for an exhibition of paintings at Singapore Biennale 2006

Title: I coME from over tHERE


"But if true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has it been transformed so easily into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture? ... Modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles, emigres, refugees." - Edward Said in Reflections on Exile.

I coME from over tHERE is a proposal for a series of paintings that celebrates a visual culture located in-between today’s marginal and mainstreams of curatorial and aesthetical practice.

As with his past exhibitions, 'Gridlocked' and 'Existenz', RJ continues to question absolute forms of knowledge or systems of thought which purport to be complete. In I coME from over tHERE, he hopes to show that reality is an artifact which can be made and unmade. He explores and celebrates his diasporic condition, hybrid cultural background and experiences of multiple ‘boundary-crossings’ through his paintings.

RJ has straddled three cultures in his lifetime, having called Malaysia, United Kingdom and presently Singapore his home. In I coME from over tHERE, he hopes to bring to fore the rapidly growing phenomena of transnationalism which challenges the very nature of citizenship and nationhood. Having lived a fragmentary life for years in various degrees of lack of comfort, certitude and settlement, he has nevertheless found within this strange middle ground, a fertile ground for artistic expression. “I relish the fact that I have been denied the comfort of settled truths for a big part of my life. For me I claim the responsibility of cultural insurgency to bring in a sense of newness”

This proposal aims to bring to fore the following questions about the artist’s life in Singapore after years of being away:
1. Drawing upon his hybrid cultural background, how does he operate with belonging versus not belonging here in Singapore?
2. How do ideological limitations of the artist’s past manifest themselves now in him at present? Has he, can he, transcend these limitations to address broader global issues in his paintings if at all?
3. What kind of hybrid and conflicting identities are mitigated through the paintings?
4. How does his crossing over from being a mathematician to a fulltime artist in Singapore influence his art and its message?

Even as he relishes the prospect of continual change and discourse, RJ dedicates much of his art to the cultural hotpot and his new home, Singapore. He nurtures a growing optimism for the future as Singapore moves towards challenging the hegemony of an "International Style" while transporting the notion of the "ethnic" beyond descriptions of cultural diversity.