The Sight Oracle

Country and Town House Magazine advertisement

2012-01-19T00:19:00.000+08:00

Here is my recent Country and Town House Magazine ad...hmmm

Show at the London Art Fair 2012 this week

2012-01-17T23:32:00.001+08:00

I am showing at the fair with Stephanie Hoppen Gallery in booth G9. See www.londonartfair.co.uk

Group show in Kuala Lumpur with a Vinyl Toy

2011-12-02T23:52:00.002+08:00

I am showing at 18@8 SaveThe Planet at Wei-Ling Contemporary ( 2nd Dec 2011-5th Jan 2012) in Malaysia. Here is my entry...

Rajinder Singh

‘Occupy Nut’

Acrylic and oil paint,

varnish, bitumen and

collage on vinyl

Rajinder Singh

Hummin' Alor Star

Bitumen, acrylic,oil paint, varnish on unprimed canvas

122cm x 122cm

I believe that to save the planet we need to tackle the vice that consumes us all - avarice. When there is money to be made, the environment and workers go to hell - become expandable. Someone always gets rich and someone always get sick. Our degrading planet is linked inextricable to our greed.

A is for Avarice. A is for Alienate.

Avarice that makes for an unfair economic order around the world is destroying the planet and it is destroying us. To fight it I believe we need to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. We need to stay true to our differences.

My paintings depict this destruction, not just in our planet but in our communities, in our identities.

Robonut power is the power of A - to accommodate, adjust, adapt and affirm. To save the planet, Robonut, brings affirmation to our identities and to our differences. Robonut wants to be less like him (automatons; cogs). To Robonut, respecting diversity comes from respecting biodiversity which in turns shouts the message - stopping hurting Mother Nature for profit.

Solo in Melbourne Nov 2011

2011-12-02T22:57:00.001+08:00

Here's an Art Guide entry for my recent solo in Australia.

Interchange: the Tribute edition

2011-12-02T22:06:00.002+08:00

Here is a group exhibition I am in with Patrick Storey, Lynn Lu and Andy Yang.

My first major exhibition in London opens tomorrow...

2011-10-05T07:49:00.001+08:00

Ya-ad - change of dates

2011-09-22T07:05:00.003+08:00

A finalist in an art competition? Cool?!

2011-09-21T07:06:00.006+08:00

Top winners, 3rd ward opencall out of Brooklyn New York... I got a look in! See below.

Alan Gaynor	Alice Odilon	Alice Rodriguez	Amanda Roberts	Ashley Campbell
Bartosz Sikorski	Caridad Sola	Craig Hudson	Daisy Chen	Elizabeth Gill
Emese Szabo	Emi Brady	Esteban Figueroa	Ginny Mangrum	Giordano Cipriani
Hannah O'Hara	Henry Fernando	Ian Atkinson	Jamie Masters	Johnny Tang
Jonathan Wang	Jonny Briggs	Jwalant Mahadevwala	Karie Titus	Kat Ryals
Katherine Mann	Kevin Arnold	Kevin Ewing	Kitty Lin	Laura Alexander
Lauren Kalman	Michael Schmidt	Michelle Hamer	Mike Brown	MJ Miller
Nicolas Vionnet	Nicole Dextras	Nicole Salimbene	Nikki Romanello	Patricia Ridenour
Patricia Gutierrez	Priscilla Aleman	Rajinder Singh	Renata Cione	Ruey Shiann Shyu
Ryan Raffa	Sara Keith	Talita Gutierrez	Tang Kwok-hin	Yvette Kaiser Smith

I guess it is my installation work that will make any kind of mark..

Ya-ad opens end of Oct in ICAS Singapore

2011-09-21T06:55:00.001+08:00

After finishing his MAFA at LaSalle School of Fine Arts, Rajinder moved to
London. Working out of his studios in Fulham, West London, he concentrated on
making works that are fragile; which are still until disrupted, on a verge of
something- perched on a precipice. There has been trauma and it has changed
everything and it is going to change again. Rajinder’s new installations are
vulnerable to the slight alteration of space around them. The smallest movement
can cause the works to alter. They sit quietly, subtly - in anticipation. The
material, the positioning and the viewer’s senses are vital. Whether the viewer
chooses to or not, if they are even aware, the viewers’ movements can and do
disrupt the work. Change is inevitable. Ya-ad is such an installation. It is created
mainly with talc powder which is allowed gently to sift onto walls that are not
entirely smooth.
Rajinder's background in philosophy and mathematics is the driving force behind
his art practice. He is interested in the possibilities of knowledge outside the
domain of traditional paradigms. Rajinder's research today is based on sculptural
interventions situated somewhere between the architectural space and the
materials he uses to shape it. "I am interested in sculptures that are perched in
between form and formlessness, either leaking away or resolutely building some
potential for site-specific systems of knowings." Rajinder sets out to traumatise
the body through disrupted, dislocated architectural spaces forcing the viewer to
pause and question certitudes, abandoning for a short moment the subjectivity
and significance of built space.

SOUTHEAST ASIAN CONTEMPORARY ART COLLECTING ART

2011-06-16T17:36:00.001+08:00

Here is an article about a radio interview with Valentine Willie,owner of VWFA galleries in South East Asia on Art Radar Journal (see here). One of my paintings is shown. This particular painting has been in a BBC series on art and in several other magazine articles. Cool....

Political correctness enemy of good art says Valentine Willie – BFM podcast

Posted on February 23, 2011

SOUTHEAST ASIAN CONTEMPORARY ART COLLECTING ART

In a June 2010 podcasted interview with Malaysian business station BFM, Valentine Willie, founder of Southeast Asian-based gallery Valentine Willie Fine Art, Willie explains how artworks are priced, why international reputations aren’t always necessary for artists and why he would sack the staff of The National Art Gallery of Malaysia.

WONG Hoy Cheong, In search of faraway places (from 'Migrants' series), 1996, charcoal, photocopy transfer and collage on paper scroll, three panels: 204.5 x 151cm (each); 204.5 x 453cm (overall). Image from visualarts.qld.gov.au.

Click below to listen to the interview (26m:34s), or listen to it on BFM.

We’ve selected a few choice quotes to give you an idea of why we think this interview is an oldie but a goodie…

Valentine Willie on Southeast Asian contemporary art:

You know, compared to prices in China, Southeast Asia’s relatively cheap and it’s new. … With Southeast Asia there’s ten little countries that have a very different take on things and that makes for an interesting culture to look at and to collect.

Gallery view, Iskandar Malaysia Contemporary Art Show (Imcas), 2009, artwork from Farouk Khan collection. Image from plushasia.com.

Valentine Willie on pricing art:

There is no formula [for pricing a piece of art]. Size is one factor, the artist’s reputation is another factor, how long [the artist has] been in the business is a factor, many things.

[How much the artist's last piece of art sold for is] a kind of benchmark. You work around that figure. It doesn’t have to match that.

Yes, it’s quite … common practice [for artists to raise their price by ten to fifteen percent every year] but also healthier. In the last three [or] four years, before the recession, prices were going up by leaps and bounds, by a thousand percent. That was the art boom and [it was] not healthy, not sustainable.

Firstly you must dispel this idea that price has anything to do with quality. Price is really a function of the market itself, supply and demand, who is in vogue now, who is popular now. We, like every other kind of lifestyle industry, are susceptible to trends and hype as much as the next person. So, firstly, you need to dispel that because [an artwork has] a lower price, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s worse. By the same token, it works the other way.

Chong Siew Ying, 'Trace', 2002, oil on vellum, 60 x 400 cm. Image from vwfa.net.

Valentine Willie on international reputation:

There’s this terrible terrible standard that we hold not only artists to, that they must make it big overseas, as if that is the only validation. What about domestic [recognition]? I mean, [some Malaysian artists] are hugely successful here and that’s plenty enough for most artists. They don’t need to be showing in MoMA and Tate to validate what they do and we also shouldn’t use that as a kind of necessary benchmark.

I’m not discouraging artists from going [overseas]. In fact, I try to encourage them to show overseas to expand their audience. What we shouldn’t do is make that the be all and end all of a career. Some artists are very happy just selling and showing in Malaysia and for very good reason because they deal with Malaysia, they deal with a particular audience.

Valentine Willie on Malaysian art institutions:

I haven’t been [to The National Art Gallery of Malaysia] … for almost a year, mainly because there isn’t anything there that I want to go and see. They haven’t really made the effort to engage with the public or do something interesting. It’s a shame because they do have a collection that deserves to be seen. I’d sack the lot of them and get new people to run it.

There is a lot of [figurative work] in The National Art Gallery but I think in the next few years they’re not going to surface… because it ‘provokes’, I suppose, which is really the function of art. It should provoke,… otherwise why bother. But then, you know, [it's a] government institution.

Rajinder Singh, 'Muse I, 2007, mixed media on canvas, 74"x 65", in the collection of Aliya and Farouk Khan. Image from sightoracle.blogspot.com.

Valentine Willie on what to look for in an artwork:

Firstly, obviously with any artist you look for the skill: Can they paint? Do they understand colour? Can they draw a straight line? And apart from that, you look at… what are the things they’re painting? Why are they painting what they paint? Is it an interesting question? Is there something I should re-look at?

Trappole - A group exhibition in Singapore

2011-06-08T20:38:00.000+08:00

An article on Trappole ( a group exhibtion I co-curated and participated in) at ArtVocate (http://artvocate.tv/2010/11/17/trappole-snared-by-a-wiley-curator/)

TRAPPOLE – snared by a wiley curator.

This last Monday, I attended an art opening with a difference: one night only, nothing for sale, no obvious art on the walls and an unsettling atmosphere. What had happened? I had been ‘trapped’ by curator Daniela Beltrani, a woman bent on producing an exhibition that perturbs, excites, provokes and disrupts the bodily experience we’ve come to expect during our polite, run of the mill art openings.

With walls leaning against the walls, mega-ants menacing the artworks and malodorous installations, I think the show succeeded.

A lot of uber-contemporary, deeply-thought-out art exhibitions can appear to be the last bastions of elitism, catering only to the miniscule population in any one town who has studied Critical Theory, holds a MA or PhD in Art Theory and generally swims in those waters…you know who I mean. Not that I am anti-intellectualism, at all, I am one of those people, but I also hold close the idea that contemporary art cannot be purely about preaching to the converted. So to have a thoroughly high-brow premise that was well presented, accessible, and witty was refreshing (and depressingly rare).

The exhibition was a collection of pieces from five Singapore-based artists – not a collaboration as such, but an open-minded exploration of the ideas surrounding disrupting our bodily experience and expectations.

Rajinder Singh, a noted Singaporean painter who broke his own mold by scattering pre-fab walls across the space which had been weathered and exposed to life on the streets of Singapore. (Whilst these streets aren’t exactly ‘mean streets’ one wall did get knocked over and damaged, and one was slightly graffitti’d.) Strewn across the space, propped against the actual gallery walls, they were monumental, and made the first impression that this wasn’t going to be the usual polite affair. The central space was divided into three by these walls on their side around which people milled and it was the first time I’ve actually seen someone put their drink down on an artwork and not be swooped down on by a black-clad assistant.

Kenneth Feinstein produced a witty projection of super-sized ants marching endlessly upwards on one of Rajinder’s wall slabs, the forgettable permanent nuisance of the tropics rendered massive and portentous by the difference in scale.

Matthew Bax’s piece was one of the subtlest works of the evening – a series of paper signs taped onto bare, crisply white walls bearing the words “Caution – Wet Paint”. Another ping in the growing sense that it was all a bit wrong maybe, until you got the joke – having sprung away from the walls for fear of ruining hair and clothes it became clear that there was not fresh paint, for what paint truly doesn’t smell, even a little bit?

Ezzam Rahman complemented a lightly abstract video meditation on tea with an installation of a little tea-station, complete with foam cups and refreshments – I saw several guests help themselves, either unknowingly completing the artwork or deliberately accepting its premise. Either way, knowing or not, it was accepted as part of the strange evening.

Finally, the piece that confused me most was that by Zaki Razak, who had filled a plug-in- the-wall aromatiser with something, I have no idea what, but all at once I was struck by the smell of burnt popcorn. Other guests hazarded guesses at laksa, or over-cooked red-bean soup, and one ventured it smelt delicious whereas I was wrinkling my nose at it. Perhaps this is why Matthew didn’t complete his illusion with an open tin of Dulux behind a wall somewhere, as that may have overpowered Zaki’s piece. For me, this was the most potent moment of the show – the sense of smell is not often used in exhibitions, and standing where I was, eg unknowingly almost right on top of the diffuser, I was thrown off balance, torn between being hungry and wanting to prevent a fire from burning foodstuffs.

The venue was a new gallery in the center of town, a beautifully restored, mid-century block of office and retail space, providing an elegantly Singaporean take on the white cube. All very proper and smart, however the area of space allotted to this exhibition was that just by the door – masking tape prevented inquisitive guests from wandering into the existing

exhibition, again creating a sense of something that broke with our understanding of what this opening was going to be.

For once nothing was for sale – you couldn’t have bought anything even if you’d wanted to, and that was also a break with the norm. Each artist generously gave their time and materials to create this event, and Daniela used that to bring each guest a little closer to something focusing on art only, not commerce or networking or branding. Not everyone enjoyed the show – several guests were just happy for a party on a Monday night, but at least they had been given the opportunity to understand why they weren’t keen, and had thought about the overall concept. It wasn’t an impenetrable wall of education and self-reference that held them from enjoying the experience, more a personal inclination towards other forms of art.

For myself, I had gone not really knowing what to expect, beyond perhaps a typical self-funded opening, and I was pleasantly surprised by the quiet thought and cohesion of the show. No one piece fought with the others, there was space enough for each to exist and make its point. Apparently there had been nine artists lined up, four of whom fell by the wayside during planning, but I think the space was a good fit for five.

I’d like to see more of this kind of experimental, brave, non-commercial art happening here in Singapore. Oh, did I mention accessible? Not hiding behind walls of pretension and terms found only in late C20th art theory primers, but in your face, open, honest, provocative and generous offerings for everyone.

1000 Living Painters

2011-06-08T20:17:00.000+08:00

I am mentioned on a compendium of contemporary painters based out of Amsterdam for 2010. Only other South Asian artist mentioned I believe is Milenko Pravacki, the former dean of fine arts at LaSalle College of Arts.

An interview at Ninunina

2011-05-29T22:46:00.001+08:00

See http://ninunina.com/2011/02/14/rajinder-singh-art/

LASALLE SHOW 2011

2011-05-29T22:05:00.001+08:00

I am part of the above exhibition currently on in Singapore till June 9th 2011.

It reminded me of my work last year captured partially by studio wall photo below:

Assemblage exhibition

2011-05-29T21:55:00.002+08:00

I had a show in Singapore recently ( in absentia) - a kind of a mid career retrospective.. perhaps a little early but those were the words that were bandied about and advertised by my agent..

It was a big hit!

Extended for a week

2010-11-30T14:51:00.001+08:00

The Cause & Defect exhibition has been extended for another week to Monday 6th of December 2010

see www.causedefect.com

Interview with Rajinder Singh in TimeOut Singapore

2010-11-30T09:54:00.000+08:00

I like the idea of making art about the imperfections of painting. What is it about mistakes which can make art-work even more human?

Mistakes are finished paintings. I get busy making mistakes when I paint. The mistakes lead me to exciting new places. Error is the bossom buddy of my craft.

When we commit an error, we become, if only for a fraction of a second, a little off-balance, a little less sure, a little traumatized, a little schizophrenic and in my opinion a little more human and a little less machine…

Name one famous artistic mistake you wish you had made.

I want to have made the mistake of painting my figures the way Francis Bacon famously did. I want to have made the mistakes that Henri Cartier-Bresson made when he took his beautifully composed photographs. I want to have traipsed the error-prone path of Cy Twomboly. Such is my affliction.

What effect has being a Dad have on you and your artistic method. Is it harder to tear yourself away to work?

I guess I am calmer, a little less brazen, a lot more patient since becoming a dad. My little Rekha mucks about helping me mix colors in my studio quite a lot. I am constantly prying brushes from her tiny fingers and wiping paint off her face. She is slowly and surely helping me achieve that calm I yearn to finally accept with grace my many mistakes. Work therefore is home and home is work. The two have become inseparable in Rekha’s vigilant presence.

How does your residency in Paris come through in this work?

The idea behind Cause & Defect was borne in Montparnasse in Paris. Print presses run a set of trials before going into full print. These test prints caught my eye. They had a certain defective beauty of their own. This got me thinking about highlighting the defective rather than attempting for perfection and sorely accepting the mistakes. It is like making the negative spaces prominent – the underside of a chair, the hole that makes a cup etc.

Cause & Defect Exhibition at Gajah Gallery

2010-11-29T23:11:00.000+08:00

Cause & Defect Exhibition at Gajah Gallery

2010-11-23T00:55:00.002+08:00

Go to www.causedefect.com

Gajah Gallery Singapore Presents: Rajinder Singh - Cause and Defect Thurs, 25th Nov 2010, 7pm

2010-11-09T23:04:00.003+08:00

My last show here in Asia for a bit. Come!

A group exhibition in Singapore

2010-11-09T10:42:00.000+08:00

I am part of a group exhibition in Singapore at the Art Trove gallery. The exhibition, Trappolle, is a one day flash-show of several installations by some prominent artists in town. Here is the invite.

Curio opening at the Chinese House Gallery, Phnom Penh

2010-11-09T10:05:00.001+08:00

Cambodia is an unusual place to exhibit. The Chinese House is not really the quintessential art space. But both my agent and I agreed that Cambodia and the Chinese House made for a perfect environment for the Curio series of paintings. The collection depicts aged walls in Malaya 100 years ago. The collection is based on a certain trace of the formless, of reducing potentialities through entropic degradation over time. The collection refers to an unusual alter-history of Malaya when it was in the process of becoming. Cambodia and Chinese House provides a remarkable setting for this.

Curio opened at The Chinese House on a Sat evening. We had a-capella renditions of some French and Khmer songs, a visiting UN delegation, a lot of French people and even two Malaysians.

A mural in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

2010-11-08T23:45:00.004+08:00

I am working closely with a charity organisation called PSE in Cambodia that helps Phnom Penh's poor children. I have a special relationship with this particular organisation. They have done wonders. Pour un Sourire d'Enfant (PSE) which translates to 'For a Child's smile' is committed to helping children.

I worked with 45 kids at the charity's huge school in Phnom Penh to paint a mural. Here it is. It was an amazing experience.

The school accommodates almost 6000 children and has a department that actively goes out to engage with kids of the poorest families to join the school.

I hope to continue working with this particular charitable organisation for I subscribe to their priorities. See http://genuine-joy.blogspot.com/ - a blog I recently set up to track my work with PSE.

An exhibition in Cambodia

2010-10-29T12:27:00.000+08:00

Here is a poster for the event in Cambodia.

An exhibition in Cambodia

2010-10-29T12:24:00.000+08:00

I am travelling to Cambodia for a solo showing of my latest collection, Curio. Here is the invite.

A new mural in Malaysia

2010-09-27T14:38:00.000+08:00

It took 3 full days with the help of 6 people..

An interview with artist and cartographer Debbie Ding

2010-09-22T10:42:00.002+08:00

I got an opportunity to talk to the brilliant Debbie Ding who was recently selected for the annual OpenCall Exhibition by The Substation in Singapore. Here is her profile and the interview.

Debbie Ding is an artist, designer, and cartographer who likes mapping and visualising spaces whether they be real, imaginary, or dream spaces (mythopsychogeography). She graduated with a B.A (Hons) in English Literature from National University of Singapore in 2007, but alongside her writing, she pursued her interest in the visual arts and interactive media. She currently works as an interactive designer, and she likes investigating how people are influenced by the built environment, and how it affects the patterns of human interaction with the urban public spaces in cities such as Singapore and London. See also http://dreamsyntax.org and her blog for the show http://singaporerivermap.blogspot.com/
\\ : The Singapore River as a Psychogeographical Faultline is her first solo show.

RJ: Tell me a little about you Debbie. Your proposal for the OpenCall is fairly conceptual. There is much there that seems to be well researched and matured over a period of time. Have you always veered towards the conceptual realm of art making – towards installations and interventions ( in the experimental field of media arts) or is it something new for you?

DD: The proposal I submitted for the open call really began as a conceptual piece of writing. I don't think things necessarily have to keep to specific traditional forms in order to be good or to be understood. It does not mean that the form is not important - it is the most crucial part in fact. But I am quite happy to experiment or explore the shape of things to see what might turn out. It might be easier for me to write a poem, but the problem for me is that I'd know exactly what I'd have at the end of the day: simply a poem. I might write a very brilliant poem, but it would still be a poem. And there is nothing that dictates that I have to make works in the shape of a poem, or anything specific. For me as a writer by training, venturing into the building of an installation is something no one expects.

I quite like the term "bleeding edge", which is often applied to technology which is so experimental that there is no guarantee if it will be the next great success, or whether it end up being completely useless and completely forgotten after a short while. Although I may be exploring well-charted territory, learning how to do programming, or tinkering around with hardware is something that I have to push myself much further to understand. When I see works made by people in forms which I have not even imagined or explored before, that is what spurs me on to experiment and make new things all the time. Many new things start off as being "unclassifiable", but we'll eventually find the words for them.

RJ: You have obviously done some illustration work and your graphic presentation is wonderful. You are an avid programmer and apparently quite the techy. You have a grasp of some difficult Euclidean space math and your English is almost perfect. Where did the conceptual artist in you spring from? I am trying to understand for instance, how you became involved in the art world here in Singapore. How did you know about The Substation? How long were you contemplating the OpenCall? What got you to get up and tackle this highly political, immensely competitive and blindingly territorial group of people?

DD: My involvement in the arts sort of began while I was back at university studying for my degree in English Literature. At that time, I also worked with the Substation's Moving Programme doing some graphic, web design and booklet designs. I had a number of close friends whom I had met mostly through common interests in music - although in a way our "common interest" did not refer to something specific, but rather the quality of having a curiosity about every sort of music and a healthy disregard for restrictive genres.

Since most of us were still studying at that time, we had plenty time to visit museums and galleries to see what was going on. Some of my friends (Simon and Bruce) were working on an arts podcast called "The Wire" (archived here: http://www.server-foundation.org/wire/), working with Tien from p10 / postmuseum, and I often tagged along with them on their interview sessions. Meanswhile I had also been working on some theatre-related work (sound design, set building) and writing about art in Singapore.

When I moved to London for about a year, I was working in Brick Lane where a number of art galleries were clustered, and I went to a lot of galleries and museums in my free time. But I was actually more involved in music than art while I was in London. Me and some friends ran a experimental music night called Hulk Dash (http://wwgou.org/hulkdash). In London the distinction between music genres was even more clear, and there were also even more and more genres and subgenres to contend with! Bassline? Nu-rave? The whole italo disco revival? There also seemed to be no other consistent experimental nights around the East London/Shoreditch area, so we pulled together a (almost) monthly music night, that featured unusual musicians and sound artists from around the East London area. By dint of its experimental nature, our humble little music night also ended up hosting quite a number of very performative acts as well. Not all of it was terribly accessible to mass audiences, but we thought at least it made a really good platform for the sounds!

I felt that London was quite a sobering experience in that it made me more aware of the need to keep on making new things. It is very easy to slip into the mode where you only absorb all the new sights and sounds rather than to work on your own creative output. London can be quite draining because there are always events and things going on, and many people seem to get lost in that. I realised instead that I would really rather be on the producing side of things! Particularly the visual arts, which I had observed for so many years, and there were many times when I had gone to see something that was unfortunately disappointing, and I'd think to myself that I could make more meaningful things if I had spent time working on it. I also really like the idea of creating interactive works where the participation of the audience is also key, and the role of the audience is not just as a spectator, but also to contribute to the work, to archive ideas or introduce errors into the system, and also to evaluate and reflect on it.

So I guess that is how I came to apply for the Open Call when I came back to Singapore. The Substation has always been a place close to my heart, and I think that my most meaningful work can only be made in Singapore, because it is where I grew up.

RJ: Your first solo is a media-art installation! When and how did interactive design become art to you? Is it interactive design first before art or the other way round for Debbie Ding? Could your psycho-geographical maps be manifested in a form other than one that involved some kind of computer based art?

DD: For me, interactive design is just the medium through which we can produce a tangible experience within an imaginary/virtual space. I think anyone who uses a lot of Flash or Aftereffects will be familiar with the motion of "scrubbing" through a timeline or sifting through multiple layers which can be rearranged, turned on and off, or individually selected to be recoloured, masked, or edited. The actual space where the layers "exist" as they are being edited does not exist, but we can visualise them as if they almost do exist (we have to be able to visualise it in order to edit them or create things).

To me it is just a tool with which I can create the art that I want to create. I don't think I could have done it without the computer, because I have grown up using the computer almost all of my life - it is simply an extension of oneself.

RJ: Can we talk a little about your exhibition title: The Singapore River as a Psychogeographical Faultline
Psychogeography emerged in the 1950s in Paris and Boston from what I understand. The practice is apparently committed to the development of an objective description of the relationship between the urban environment and the psychic life of the individuals. And apparently also, the practice depended on walking as a method. How does this description sit with you and your understanding and use of PsychoGeography? How do you understand the relationship between the object and the subject here? As in would you call psychogeography an exercise in phenomenology in a way? Is there a potential for a generic subjectivity here?

DD: Yes I am aware of the longer history behind the term "psychogeography". I was actually quite interested in reading about Situationism and Debord's Theory of Derive during my university days; back then I had a lot more time to go on long meandering walks. But even right now, walking is still my main mode of transportation - from the previous workplace in Chinatown, I would walk to Substation on foot because vehicular traffic in the CBD is always too slow at peak hour and it only takes 15 min to walk from Southbridge Road to Armenian Street. I think pedestrian walks are an important part of the city experience. No walkman, no ipod, just walking, maybe encountering people and their stories. If there is nothing to do at home, I'd rather go walking and exploring outside, rather than sitting at home watching the telly. To me, psychogeography means to treat the city and its architecture with a sense of play like a exploratory game, to approach it with a certain degree of experimentation.

You're right, I guess psychogeography is a kind of an exercise in phenomenology; after all, it is about being aware of situations and actions and the experience of places. One thing I like doing is to observe a scene so intensely that I notice new things about it - which help to make it feel like I have not yet fully explored it all over again. Like trying to get that "new" feeling that one gets when visiting a new or alien country. Singapore is pretty small as a country, so things can get boring very fast, but if one can try to approach the same object as if one has never seen or touched or experienced it before, sometimes new and unexpected things emerge from it.

Can there be a generic subjectivity? I am not sure. Do you mean can there be a generic experience or generic meaning to things? Well, I have noticed that a lot of the recent literature about psychogeography which is being explored in that tradition originates from out of London/Europe, but I don't know for certain if there is a direct correlation between the time I spent living in London and my continuing interest in spaces and places. Friends and other people have told me of events coming out of the specific areas in London I had previously lived in, like http://psychogeophysics.org/ - but... just coincidence, perhaps?

The small web/media company I was working for in London was building a simple site for a London based firm named Space Syntax and by coincidence I ended up reading a lot of the white papers on the site; that is what spurred me to read more about architecture and cities. Another big thing there were the walking maps - in fact one of my first experiences in london was following a Jack the Ripper walking guide through a particular part of bricklane/whitechapel which was later, very incidentally also to become my work place. The point of the walking guide was like a search for the places or traces where jack the ripper had been, along with a brief social history of the area. I guess guidebooks and walking trail maps suggest that there may be a generic subjectivity or even a generic traveller's narrative that can be experienced through these routes. Walking maps and guidebooks often come in the form of some travel narrative which travellers read and then reconstruct for themselves as they travel over the same route. Even playing foursquare (and other similar located based services on iphone), it has the same effect of creating trails and journeys with a story, which people then follow or enact.

RJ: What is a psychogeographical faultline? Can you tell us a little about how you came to using these two words together?

DD: I like neologisms. I am pretty pedantic when it comes to words and terms, and psychogeographical faultline is the best way I could describe the River. Singapore is far from any tectonic faultlines, but that is also precisely why I like to describe it as a faultline - because I know that people will always ask why it is a "faultline". But it is a faultline in another way. Faultline makes you think of earthquakes and tectonic plates; different slabs of land crushing up together, or cracking apart, revealing the different layers beneath the surface. A faultline is a site of stress from all directions, and inbetween shockwaves, it can also be a site of deceiving calm. The river is not a geographical faultline, but I think its a psychogeographical faultline in that the river is the point at which everything meets, all the canals flow towards, all the people gravitate towards it, all life and memory of the city flows into the river, and from there it flows out as well.

RJ: Your OpenCall exhibition at The Substation is on till the 26th of Sept. Can you describe the layout of the exhibition and why you chose the three installations?

DD: I have divided the exhibition into 3 parts:
what people perceive it to be (the set of framed illustrations)
what it actually looks like (the map platform)
and a speculative map (the map reactable)

For me, these three parts show the different facets of the Singapore River: past (memory), present (imagination), and future (speculation/technology)

RJ: The reactable or interactive table is a focal piece in your exhibition. What does it do and why? How does it hook up with the other installations? Do you think it was successful in terms of delivering the intended experience and/or message?

DD: I devised the map reactable because I wanted to create a speculative, ever-changing map of the River, and i specifically wanted to build it entirely out of opensource tools. I like the idea of a table as the place where you lay out a map and plan your movements - thats why I made it so high as well, like a standing table height. This component was the part which took the longest for me to build and it involved a great amount of research and a steep learning curve to figure out all the technical parts (both hardware and software). When I began it I had no actual experience in building anything of that scale, and I felt if I could build an entire reactable setup from scratch by myself, then it would prove that anyone could do it too!

I do realise that having to figure out the technical side of the installation often took time away from the time I could have spent on honing the other parts of the exhibition, so I tried to simplify this part of the project a lot along the way. I had envisioned something much more complicated at one point (with landmarks! and many more fiducial markers than you actually see on it right now), but I realised that the minimal approach was better as it was more important to be in control of the shape and form that the work would take.

There are still many aspects of it which I could really improve on, but for me I consider it a successful first attempt as the main mechanism of the table is working as I intended, and I now know how to build a tangible touch table installation. Hopefully i will be able to build even better things in time to come!

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER LAUNCHES A FITTING TRIBUTE TO MALAYSIAN CONTEMPORARY ART

2010-09-05T13:36:00.000+08:00

-Here is the press release for a huge art book that was produced recently by a collector couple in Malaysia. I have a chapter in it. What a marvelous tome! I wish only that I could afford a copy.

Private Collection of internationally-acclaimed local artists

Kuala Lumpur, Monday, June 7, 2010:-

Deputy Prime Minister Malaysia, Tan Sri Dato’ Hj Muhyiddin Hj Mohd Yassin today launched the MALAYSIAN CONTEMPORARY ART: THE ALIYA AND FAROUK KHAN COLLECTION book (AFK Collection Book), a tribute to the depth and breadth of contemporary artistic talent here in Malaysia.

The book, sponsored by Bandar Raya Developments Berhad (BRDB), known as a builder of iconic communities, showcases works from the private collection of Aliya & Farouk Khan, who have made an impact on the Malaysian art scene through their support of contemporary Malaysian artists and their analytical, systematic approach to building their collection.

At 932 pages, 13”x 13“ and weighing in at a hefty 10kgs, the book showcases the best, brightest, boldest and most inspiring art, sculpture and installation works of over 85 Malaysian artists, depicted across close to 900 images.

The launch was held at BRDB’s Bangsar Shopping Centre, Kuala Lumpur, where selected works from the collection were also displayed.

Also present at the launch was Minister of Tourism Malaysia, Dato’ Sri Dr Ng Yen Yen, who commended BRDB on its support of the upcoming 1Malaysia Contemporary Arts Tourism Festival (or MCAT), which will be launched this coming July.

Speaking at the launch, Dato’ Sri Dr Ng Yen Yen said, “Works of art represent the soul of the nation. It manifests our consciousness, curiosity, creativity and excellence. We need them as mirrors to our society. Nation building is as much about patriotism as it is about our identity, our values, world views and position.

“Hence, the Ministry will hold its first ever and Malaysia’s biggest celebration of contemporary arts tourism, the MCAT, in Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Malacca and Johor, for a duration of three months beginning July 2010,” said Dato’ Sri Dr Ng Yen Yen.

Commenting on BRDB’s support of the book and launch event, its chairman, Dato’ Mohamed Moiz said, “Alpha global cities are cities that excel across the multiple dimensions of economics, finance, infrastructure, political stability, arts & culture and the creative industries. Alpha global cities attract high quality human capital – the best and brightest of minds -- on which to build vibrant economies.“

“Under the leadership of YAB Dato Seri Najib Tun Razak, we can see the vision to transform Kuala Lumpur into a truly alpha global city, and as one of Malaysia’s oldest and most established property development companies, BRDB is very conscious of the role it can play in helping the Government achieve it s vision and goals under the NEM.”

He said that alpha global cities are characterized by four key elements – significant financial capacity, sound infrastructure to meet the physical and lifestyle needs of its citizens, political stability and a strong arts and cultural presence to inspire the growth of creative industries.

“Kuala Lumpur today is the emerging world capital for Islamic finance, but other major and emerging financial centres have and are investing major capital in their arts, creative industries and cultural sectors to complement their financial and commercial offerings. In order to stay competitive, Kuala Lumpur needs to do this, and do it quickly.

“Kuala Lumpur needs to integrate arts and architecture, culture and business to bring a cultural soul to Kuala Lumpur, and to attract and retain the necessary human capital to ensure its economic and financial success. We need to make Kuala Lumpur a preferred destination for human capital migration and for tourists.”

He added that more than just a compilation of Malaysian talent, the AFK Collection Book would also go a long way in positioning Malaysia as a global hub for contemporary art; a very important recognition, as hubs for contemporary art – like the Tate Modern in London and New York’s Met – have played significant roles in driving tourists into cities.

“We very much hope that this becomes a meaningful and significant step in Malaysia’s pursuit of the global contemporary art tourism market,” he concluded.

On the Malaysian Contemporary Art : AFK Collection Book
The AFK Collection Book features works from the private collection of Aliya & Farouk Khan, a collection considered by many to be Malaysia’s definitive contemporary art collection. The book is curated by ShooShie Sulaiman, an award-winning Malaysian artist of international renown, and is dedicated to Liquat Ali Khan, younger brother of Farouk Khan and the inspiration behind his interest in art. ShooShie worked with the editorial team of Leila Khan and Joshua Fernandez to design and produce the book, which will be distributed at all leading Malaysian and international bookstores.

A new BBC documentary on Malaysian Art

2010-08-28T11:01:00.002+08:00

"Most people come away from a holiday abroad with the odd trinket or tatty souvenir.

But while on a break would you consider purchasing a piece of contemporary art?

Well, that's exactly what the Malaysian government is trying to promote, a form of art tourism - as Mike London has been finding out."

The text above describes a BBC FastTrack documentary on Malaysian Contemporary Art. Watch it here..

My piece comes on at the very end just before the clip suddenly breaks...

Title: Muse I
Size: 74"x 65"
Year: 2007
Mixed Media on Canvas
In the collection of Aliya and Farouk Khan

A mural of John Lennon in Kuala Lumpur

2010-08-28T10:05:00.004+08:00

Just finished a large mural in memory of John Lennon in Malaysia. It took three full days with several helpers..

Title: Lennon

Media: Matt acrylic on wall

Size : 115" x 111"

A recent press release by the Malaysian Government

2010-08-23T21:53:00.001+08:00

MEDIA RELEASE

MINISTRY OF TOURISM MALAYSIA UNVEILS NEW ART WAVE
TO ATTRACT HIGH-YIELD TOURISTS

KUALA LUMPUR, 23 June 2010 - The Minister of Tourism Malaysia, YB Dato’ Sri Dr. Ng
Yen Yen today announced yet another exciting and innovative tourism product, the
“1Malaysia Contemporary Art Tourism 2010” (or MCAT 2010) Festival which aims at
targeting more high-yield tourists to come to Malaysia.

MCAT 2010, the brainchild of YB Dato’ Sri Dr. Ng as an effort to spur the
development of the local contemporary art scene, is Malaysia’s first ever
contemporary art event and will be held annually from July to September each
year. It will showcase the most explosive, dynamic and provocative art produced by
internationally-acclaimed Malaysian-born artists through a series of exhibitions as
well as seminars nationwide.

For a start, MCAT 2010 is aimed at establishing Malaysia as a reputable destination
for art aficionados in the region to enjoy and acquire contemporary art, with
museum-quality pieces. It is also hoped to encourage owners of art galleries to
launch new pieces by young artists that will set the trend for the next few years.
Speaking at a media conference, YB Dato’ Sri Dr. Ng said the Ministry believes that
MCAT 2010 will educate, excite and inspire both local and foreign visitors particularly
on the beauty and variety of contemporary art.

2
“We are indeed very glad to introduce MCAT – Malaysia’s first Contemporary Art
Tourism Festival. With rising interest and demand for contemporary creative works, I
hope that this event will serve as a meeting point for art enthusiasts, gallery owners,
artists as well as new generation of collectors from all over the world in forging
business alliance, acquiring new contemporary art works, sharing ideas and
exchanging information - all under one roof. Of course, to discover and learn about
the new contemporary Malaysia as well.”

“The Ministry of Tourism, Malaysia, hopes that through 1Malaysia Contemporary Art
Festival, we will be able to attract more high-yield tourists which is expected to also
increase the contribution towards the economic spin-off through new market niche
areas in the tourism industry.

“Through this new initiative, and tourism industry being among the 12 main National
Key Economic Areas (NKEA), we believe the country will be able to achieve the
goal as stated in the 10th Malaysia Plan -- that the industry will contribute RM115
billion to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with two million jobs created by 2015,”
added Dato’ Sri Dr Ng.

Local and foreign visitors who enjoy spending time browsing in art galleries, will have
the opportunity to view many sculptures and art works, revealed for the first time in
Kuala Lumpur at Galeria Seri Perdana, Starhill Art Gallery, National Art Gallery,
PETRONAS Gallery, Malaysia Tourism Centre (or MaTiC); Folk Art Gallery in Melaka
and IMCAS 2010 Danga City Mall in Johor.

Among the key highlights of the Festival will be a display of Aliya and Farouk Khan’s
personal collection as well as several exciting and vibrant works by some of the best
internationally-acclaimed Malaysian artists, both young and established ones such
as Abdul Multhalib Musa, who is regarded as one of Malaysia’s leading
contemporary sculptors; Fauzan Omar; Annuar Rashid; abstract expressionist Yusoff Ghani; Eng Hwee Chu; visual artist/writer A. Jegadeva; Dhavinder Gill and many more.

Other art works that will be showcased include those by Ahmad Zaki Anwar, Hamir
Saib, Tan Chin Kuan, Shooshie Sulaiman, Eng Hwee Chu, Umi Baizurah Mahir, Kaw
Leong Kang, Anthony Chang, Rajinder Singh, Bayu Utomo, Fauzan Mustapha,
Stephen Menon, Ivan Lam and the list goes on. Besides the presence of curators
and art collectors during the three-month period, world-renowned speakers such as
Mika Kuraya from Japan and Russell Storer from Australia will also be there to
conduct the seminars.

The Ministry of Tourism Malaysia is also highlighting the Festival via its “Tourism Art
Trail” - a directory that contains a listing of contemporary art galleries, seminars and
talks on Malaysia’s contemporary art scene, information on places where tourists
can visit as well as events that they can attend or participate.
For more information, log on to:

http://www.tourism.gov.my/en/ContemporaryArts/default.htm

Recent interview I gave for a magazine about my new exhibition - Curio

2010-06-02T18:53:00.001+08:00

1. What was the response like at the opening? As expected? How did people react?

Raj: I am afraid everyone balked and scattered for a quick getaway. It was shocking to see grownups cry and exclaim loudly – ‘what rubbish!!’ But seriously, many were intrigued by my portrayal of an alternative early 1900s Malaya. There were scattered comments on the complexity of the visual cues in the paintings. In general the paintings invited the audience to decipher, to step in for a closer look at the fragments of text and images that I used to construct my narrative. Although many plain refused the invitation..

2. It is mentioned that Curio is heavily influenced by your time in Paris. Care to elaborate – how is this so? What was the experience like in Paris?

Raj: Apart from being titillated by the gregarious art scene in Paris (there was this artist who was always in a Castro uniform complete with a beard that stomped around in big army boots), I fell head over heels in love with print. Curio owes a lot to my love affair with screen printing. And Montparnasse is a place which every artist should visit to eat croissants, drink coffee, sit around and philosophise and occasionally make some art.

3. Also, could you kindly elaborate as to how the idea behind Curio is very much supported by your background in Math and Philosophy?

Raj: Hah… can’t get away from the two subjects even if I wanted to. That is what I do when I am not doing art and I guess it seeps in into my art sideways. It has something to do with epistemology and what can be known and how can we go about knowing it and alternative truths and that sort of stuff.

4. How do you combine the two disciplines– your math background and your creative side? Could you kindly elaborate please.
Raj: I don’t. Except when I ask questions pertaining to both mathematics and art. When you do both as much as I do, there are cross overs and the gap that builds up between the two starts becoming uncomfortable and confusing until you do something about it. I did and I have humanized my maths and altered my art in the process.

5. I’ve read the basis behind Curio – based on foreign press clippings on Malaysia – could you kindly elaborate more on this please.
Raj: There is a lot of freaky stuff that goes on around the world no more so then in Malaysia. Everything from crazy politics to record breaking structures, exotic sultanate, mindblowing flaura and fauna, amazing race mix and its accompanying shenanigans and better-than-fiction gyrations etc etc. The non-Malaysian press cannot come near to understanding the freakery of Malaysia. So they often get it all out of context and often the news reports of Malaysia sound like stories of some freak show on some savage unknown corner of the world.

6. What are your personal feelings on what is said in the foreign press about your home country? How have these transpired into your art? From how long ago have you based the clippings on / and what is the most recent clipping?

Raj: I have been living abroad for a long time - never out of touch with Malaysia. I know of many occasions when I have had a chuckle to myself reading some exaggerated news report on Malaysia which I use to go out of my way to find. A lot of what Curio is based on is fiction. I have created a fictitious early 1900s Malaya. I wrote fictitious newspaper columns, dreamed up powerful and highly secretive organizations that played a large role in this fiction complete with secret membership manuals and handshakes and conjured up imaginary Malayan human creatures that entertained the world through high publicized fictitious Freak Shows and circuses. And lots more. There is a mountain of material, all fiction, based on real documents from early Malaya that inform the series.

7. What does Curio celebrate and capture – Elaborate please.

Raj: It celebrates our difference. It celebrates alternative realities and hopefully captures everything and nothing in a sort of a Derridean universe.

8. The play of symbols, words and information in your pieces – what’s the purpose – purely intentional or otherwise?

Raj: Everything conspires to confuse and collaborate to build multiple narratives about Malaya and its many possible histories.

9. What are the issues that this collection focuses on – and why these?

Raj: I am not sure if I am grappling with any issues. I am interested in knowledge and the many ways I can balance or unbalance an equation.

10. Let’s focus on the technique used - could you elaborate how Paris played a role. Plus the techniques involved in creating your pieces.

Raj: There is a cacophony of techniques and processes and screens and fragments of material and layers that make for the final product. The journey, I assure you, is much more interesting than the painting that you see.

11. Why the focus on these particular towns – were these stopovers in your life’s journey? Why Setapak for instance? Which depicts Ipoh?
Raj: Why not? I know the journey from KL to Penang best from my child hood. I imagined that the paintings represented old 50 year walls I would find in these towns in my fictitious world.

12. Is each piece proclaiming the town or its living heritage since people seem to take center stage?
Raj: Nope.
13. The man in the turban – the Sikh figure appears quite prominently – why is this – does this have a connection with your particular heritage (I’m assuming you’re Sikh too).

Raj: He is my grandpa! He represents me, the voyeur, looking on, cashing in on the oddities of the universe around him.

14. The freak show – how do you envision yours and how does it play out?

Raj: Just like in my paintings - a mass of confusion masking the real deal if there is such a thing.

15. Why the weathered look of the pieces – what does it symbolize?
Raj: Old walls recently discovered with layers of discarded posters once proclaiming a land rich with freaks.

16. Why the use of glitter and varnish – what does that symbolize?

Raj: Glitter emphasizes the razzmatazz of my erstwhile world of freakery. Varnish protects my paintings.

17. How does one begin to uncover the layers of your work? What would you like your audience to discover in the core of each work?

Raj: I want them to discover what they want to discover. I do not want to tell them what to see and what not to see. Everyone will see the paintings differently and thank bejesus for that. Just the other day I entertained an art lover who was convinced that the paintings were about Malayan multi-racial history. Who am I to tell him otherwise?

18. You view the country and its goings on from across the border– you capture it in Curio – who are you – a Malaysian longing for home, or for how things used to be, politically, economically, socially?

Raj: Nope, none of that! I am just portraying it another way. And an artist at his best can only hope to reveal an alternative way of looking at things.

19. What does MOLC stand for?
Raj: It stands for whatever you want it to be.

Gallery pic from recent opening at Pace Gallery in Malaysia

2010-06-02T14:19:00.002+08:00

Pics from Exhibit at ParkerAsia

2010-06-02T12:30:00.004+08:00

Paintings from the Curio Series at the ParkerAsia event. Photographs by Benjamin Yu from Studio One.

Blockbuster Alor Star

2010-05-25T16:33:00.002+08:00

Here is one of paintings from the recent Curio series

Title: Blockbuster Alor Star
Media: Bitumen, acrylic, oil, parquette varnish, ink and glitter on PVC
Size: 153cm x 212cm
Year: 2010
Collection: Curio
Presently available with PACE Gallery, Malaysia.

A long awaited new series of works...

2010-05-11T12:02:00.002+08:00

I am launching my new series of paintings on the 19th of May - next week - in my home country, Kuala Lumpur Malaysia.

I have struggled a year and a half to get here today. Year and a half of practice based research and lots of sleepless nights and half-painted canvases. My residency at Montparnasse in Paris in 2008 at a print studio has had a lasting influence...

'Curio' owes a lot to it....

R

A Room to Read Auction

2010-05-07T13:05:00.004+08:00

My painting "Uprooted" was auctioned off. The Room to Read Charity did well. I believe over $2M was raised..

Here is the letter of thanks from the organisers:

Dear RJ,

We would like to sincerely thank you for your donation and support for the Room to Read Singapore Gala Dinner. The evening was a huge success and lived up to its theme of "An Evening of Wine & Philanthropy" with Jancis Robinson taking the guests through the many wines served, and John Wood talking about Room to Read's past ten years and future directions - with especially poignant stories of the children and communities whose lives are impacted so positively through the Room to Read projects and investments.

Due to the wonderful support of organisations like yourselves, and very generous guests on the night - we were able to raise enough money to build 19 Schools, develop 150 Libraries, and support over 1,000 years of Girls Scholarships - in total, last night will impact more than 60,000 children in the developing world. We are truly humbled by and appreciative of your generosity and partnership - and we thank you once again for helping to bring the gift of literacy to so many.

Regards,
A.H., A.R. & K.B.

Singapore Chapter of Room to Read
World Change Starts with Educated Children.®

A Room to Read Auction

2010-05-05T12:04:00.003+08:00

Have you heard of this wonderful non profit called Room to Read set up 10 years ago by a microsoft executive who gave up his job to build libraries for children in Nepal, India, Cambodia, Vietnam etc and also a education fund for girls?

To date Room to Read has impacted the lives of over 4 million children by constructing over 1000 schools and 9,000 libraries, publishing 433 local language children's book titles representing over 4.1 million books and donated over 3.3 million English children's books and has been funding over 8,000 long-term scholarships for girls :)

At Room to Read's event tonight I am auctioning one of my older pieces from my " IcoME from over tHERE" series called "Uprooted" showing a Buddha ripped asunder from the ground...

It is in Silent Auction tonight 5th of May - An evening of Wine and Philanthropy. I hope it makes the charity some cash...

Parker In Asia Art exhibition

2010-04-29T04:06:00.005+08:00

I will be exhibiting some of my first works from my brand new series 'Curio' at the 'Ultimate Parker in Asia' event at the Fullerton Hotel on Monday the 3rd of May.

See http://www.parkerinasia.com/events.html for details on the super deluxe private event. You will need to cough out a cool $2500 to get in.

I am also donating a painting for an auction in aid of NUH Patient Care Fund.

An interview with artist Lim Shing Ee

2010-04-08T00:05:00.011+08:00

I interviewed artist Lim Shing Ee recently. Here is a synopsis of the email interview. I have refrained from editing the interview as much as possible to preserve the artist's voice. An edited version of the interview will be published in LASALLE's Praxis Press.

For those who don't know Shing Ee, here is a profile of the artist written for her recent exhibition at Sculpture Square Singapore:

At 34 years of age, backed by 9 solo and 35 group exhibitions spanning Japan, Korea, Philippines, Bangladesh, Malaysia and the Peoples Republic of China since 2000, Singaporean born artist Lim Shing Ee boasts a commendable portfolio. Her accomplishments have propelled her as being one of Singapore’s notable visual artist.

Upon graduation from LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts (B.F.A.) in 1998, Lim was bestowed with the JCCI Art Scholarship from the Japan Chamber of Commerce to attend one of Japan’s leading art universities, Musashino Art University where she obtained her Master in Fine Arts (MFA) in 2002.

Lim’s work ranges from intimate drawings, paintings to large-scale 3-dimensional installations. Her quiet style has become the hallmark of her voice in her art. She adopts the trait of having whimsical setups of bizarre yet familiar looking shapes and forms which maybe baffling but draws us further into its simplicity. This minimalistic adaptation of her art is possibly stemmed from the education she received in Japan where the artistic genre there has an inclination towards sophistication, clean lines and subtlety.

Her paintings, drawings and installations explore the process of concocting visual associations with fragments collected from everyday encounters with people, things, creatures, architectural spaces, environments and atmospheres, creating what she refers to as 'mental maps'.

Lim Shing Ee currently lives and works in Japan.

Shing Ee provided the following descriptions for the images above from her recent exhibition 'drawing circus' at Sculpture Square. Pictures were taken by Lim YingXi.

1. I associate the idea of circus with acrobatics, physical activities, something that is in between reality and imagination. And the idea of drawing is not only just the physical action of making lines or marks on paper but also the idea of extraction, absorbing and executing. So i thought putting the two words together will be very appropriate as to describing what I do and the resultant objects i make. It is hard for me to describe the exhibition to a person who have not seen the exhibition. I think I would just show him/her the prologue of the drawing booklet and perhaps say that it features a couple of objects that are interwoven into the space responding to the architecture structure of the space, at the same time, creating conversation among themselves and with the ideas of drawing. ... well the best would be to show pictures! :p

2. Just as you say, the shadows somehow allow the objects to "come into existence" . They become visually there. I see shadows sometimes as a solid objects in itself. In my work, spaces become objects and vice versa....3D becomes 2D and vice versa. For example, the hollow passageways of the arches sometimes become solid objects in a dome shape, and the solid dome objects extends from its ends shadows on the floor and onto the wall and that part of the shadow on the wall might just become another object in 3D.... and so on.

3. the branching motif on the floor is a "division" pattern that came up in my earlier works. A line splits on one end to form a Y and from the two splitted ends of the Y, each splits again into two and the pattern repeats itself. I like the repetitive and constant generation of points and lines. Actually the motif of the "ribbon" comes from the division idea as well... the splitting of the ends into two. THe idea of a body having two legs somehow is based on that same idea too -- Splitting. I used to love Math in school.. so I think that is why I like the Mathematic inclination in that thinking. even though it might not make any logical sense.

The interview:

Raj: Upon discovering your associations with Japan, many of your audience tend to jump to associating your work with Japanese preoccupation with daintiness, pop and fetish.Are they wrong in making these associations? Are there any strong influences that shaped your art to what it is today?

Shing Ee: I do not suppose they are wrong to associate my work with the fetish and pop culture of Japan... Even though I do not consciously adopt specific characteristics in my work, living in Japan makes it inevitable to get influenced by the culture.

At the starting point of my expedition into art, I was quite entranced and influenced by Surrealist painters especially Rene Magritte. And when I started moving to making installation work, I loved and still like to look at works of Jessica Stockholder. and also Mark Manders. I think Mark Manders' work is very intriguing. The visual and tactility of his work is remarkable. So i think his work has quite a bit of influence to what I do.

Raj: Sometimes I think of your work as being the work of a surrealist artist involved in something like “character design”? Some of the shapes in your sculptures, your installations, your drawings seem to deserve a name, a family and a history?. The characters might appear in a circus or a freakshow and might inspire someone like Tim Burton to make a superb surreal animation movie with you as the puppeteer? Comment?!

Shing Ee: I LOVE TIM BURTON. I see all his movies and I love all the characters and the colours he uses.
I ever dreamt of working in a studio making muppets... (I love muppet show too)... or try out stop animation production.
Well, within the realms of art, I prefer my objects to remain nameless... ambiguous. I like them being 'in-between'... not here nor there.

Raj: How will you classify your art if at all?

Shing Ee: Same goes with classifying my art. neither here nor there. I don't really wish for my work to be categorized. It would be ideal if it can be sometimes here and sometimes somewhere else. sometimes art, sometimes design, sometimes just everyday things.

Raj: How far are you concerned with making your art seductive? Your work is generally quite pretty. It is difficult to miss it. Do you consciously engineer this seductive quality?

Shing Ee: I do not intentionally make my work to look seductive but I think subconsciously I enjoy looking at attractive things or things attractive in my own sense, so the work I make naturally has a certain appearance or style developed in that sense. In the past, I have tried to venture into making something look messy or grotesque... but somehow it didn't make sense to me and no matter how I tried, the degree of messiness and grotesqueness wasn't quite enough and was too forced. I felt like I was lying to myself and to my audience. ... so I deduced it is just too unnatural a process for me to take. I think when it comes to making a good piece of work, honesty is so important.

Raj: For your readers at LaSalle School of Arts in Singapore, can you help me chart your journey from your LaSalle days on to where you are today in terms of your art? Were you already working with “small furry creatures” and “shadows” that take a life of their own even then?

Shing Ee: During the first three years, I was just painting and drawing a lot with a style that was pretty much surrealistic ...Magritte influence... and sometimes abstract.

There was a period of time when I started getting hooked on red and white stripes... reminiscent of candy stripes, circus, cartoon. I had a series of 'happy' paintings with organic forms (shaped like sausages) that were all striped. and also a series of paintings that were pretty much abstract attempting to 'de-construct' the stripes. at that time, I think I was inspired by Daniel Buren and Yayoi Kusama.

Towards the end of the third year (diploma), I started making puffy wall works. Stretched fabrics over the canvas stretcher and stuffed them with cotton wool or polyfibre so they look somewhat like pillows. The corners were sewn such that they are long and pointed.Some had multiple corners extending from each corner of the canvas. At that time, I was into the idea of fetish. I made a lot of work with protrusion, (pointy corners) sticking out of fabric surfaces. Most of them were wall works.

There weren't much furry things. Mainly I used glossy surface vinyl fabrics or plain cotton... in mainly pink or white.

At the Fourth BA year, I made more objects than paintings. I started making multiples. and the material was mainly balloons. I was into the idea of temporality. I made lots and lots of tiny objects by layering balloons and stuffing them with cotton. so they were really candy-like. then I tried to box or jar them. so they looked like commodities. I made large giant cupcakes with balloons as well... Well I wasn't sure what I was doing throughout... but before i realised I made a lot of work! Think the whole process of making multiples by hand has got to do with fetish as well. All the works ended up looking super brightly coloured and blobby. It was during that year I started making installation as well.. but I didn't think they really work out that well cos I was so naive. :p

Raj: What were your memories of LaSalle? How did it nurture you into becoming the artist that you are today?

Shing Ee: I have a lot of fond memories of Lasalle. The classmates I had, the lecturers. I entered Lasalle after going to Junior College, so it was like culture shock when I got in there. there were lots of weird looking people who weren't serious about doing anything... but I was super inspired by Milenko who was my drawing teacher at that first year. He was playing his guitar in class while we were drawing... I cannot forget it! :)

Of course there are lousy times as well. The heat in the dirty studios was hard to bear. (SO unlike the current stylish studios you have with air conditioning!!!)
I loved the critique sessions. though the sessions always freak us out cos of all the harsh comments we get. But I think they were the main lessons I learnt. I enjoyed listening to Gunalan (he was our theory lecturer).. think he was really inspiring. I enjoyed Ian Woo too. he was my painting lecturer in my third year.
Mainly it is the whole community. I could be around people with the same art interest... so it was heaven. I think I found my identity mainly during those time in lasalle.

Raj: Are you involved in any projects in Singapore at present?

Shing Ee: Over the last year or so, I have been involved in some large scale commission work for the MRT (Cross Street Station) due to complete in the next 2 or 3 years and for the Mapletree Business City which will be completed some time mid this year, but I am unable to disseminate images or sketches for these until the projects are completed.

An interview with the wonderful and exciting Jane Lee

2009-11-18T10:15:00.007+08:00

There is a wonderful new artist in town. I last saw her at her first major solo at Osage Singapore end of Sept 09. Who is she? What is her pedigree? Here is her amazing profile, one that reveals that we have still got it here in Singapore - to spot a talent in the making despite our numerous estwhile faux pas.

Jane Lee was born 1963 in Singapore. She graduated from LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts with a BA in Fine Arts and a Diploma in Fashion. Her works have been exhibited in a number of notable exhibitions in the region such as Wonder, Singapore Biennale 2008, where she presented Raw Canvas. Other exhibitions include CODE SHARE: 5 continents, 10 biennales, 20 artists, Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania (2009), Coffee, Cigarettes and Pad Thai: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, Eslite Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2008), Always Here But Not Always Present: Art in a Senseless World, Singapore Management University, Singapore (2008) and the solo exhibition, Transformation / Process, Taksu Gallery, Singapore (2006). Lee has won several awards, most recently the 2007 Sovereign Art Prize (finalist), Hong Kong, and was also the first recipient of the Singapore Art Prize in 2007.

I asked her some questions through an email interview. Here are the questions and her responses:

RJ: Jane, how would you describe your art? Are they paintings? Are they sculptures? I sympathize with you if you find this question irrelevant. We use our analytical knife to demarcate areas in our fields of endeavor to be able to make sense of them.Perhaps there is an in-between category for your art? A “fabric sculpture” perhaps? Or a “dressed painting”?

JL: While my works are about painting, it is also about challenging what we understand painting to be. They are about pushing the boundaries in painting, and seeing the impossible. The emphasis, or fetishisation, about the medium is not as important as what my work is about.

RJ:Is there some area of art making that you are challenging with your work? I see the weave,the contours and creases and some sensuous feel in your work that reminds me of fabric.(Perhaps this is further accentuated by the fact that I am cognizant of your background in fashion).

JL: My works question painting—what constitutes a ‘painting’, and how paintings can be made. In other words, my paintings explore the possibilities of constructing one. They are not about fabric at all.

JL: Paint has its own tendencies, so I just let things happen. Sometimes things don’t turn up well,and certain parts have to be retouched. These are parts where you see a thicker layer of paint. Therefore, any similarity to fabric is incidental.

RJ: A famous example cites that if you take a teacup and line it with fur, it has to be considered a work of art, because perhaps there is nothing else left to consider it as. Perhaps this is how you pitch your art work against our increasingly static perception of art (which of course needs to be violently jarred at its very foundations every now and again). You have created a new type of fabric. One that is no longer a fabric. Perhaps you have taken a potentially craft-like area of work into the realms of art? Can you comment?

JL: It’s not my conscious intent to incorporate dress-making (craft) elements into my artwork. The influence of my fashion background on me is subconscious, something that I cannot escape. The concern in my paintings is not for fabric; it’s for the material components of a painting.For example, the canvas—as a material—, which is part and parcel of painting.

RJ: It would be interesting for my readers to understand how you came to using the particular material for the making of your art. What was the process? How long did it take? What influenced you and what were the considerations or the criteria for you to narrow down your choices.

JL: I don’t set out to use particular types of material, although I do explore alternative sources other than fine art shops: everyday life for tools like spoons, forks, cake-making icing nozzles, ham slicers, syringes, and even simply my own bare hands, and industrial suppliers for alternative qualities of acrylic and oil paint and mix media materials. Any and all kinds of material may come into play.

JL: Of course, the tools chosen have to interact well with the paint. They have to be able to bring out the beauty and/or interesting qualities of the paint; they have to be the means through which the paints manifest a certain character. To me, (the characteristics of) paint is what’s important—the tools are merely a medium.

JL: My technique is largely trial and error. As part of my primary motive to push the boundaries of painting, I test and pursue all possibilities.

JL: It all started back when I was painting in the traditional style. One day, I noticed the beauty of the acrylic paint that has dried onto my palette. This made me realise my painting had already begun on the palette, even before the first application of paint onto canvas. Painting can exist without a canvas, I realised. This epiphany inspired me to explore indirect means of painting, such as by working on a painting’s components before sticking them onto the canvas, as opposed to through the direct way of applying paint straight onto canvas. It takes me about a year to complete each project.

RJ: Finally, I am wondering if there was a conscious effort in your part to de-gender or to ‘genderise’ your art. Do you for instance want your art to be recognized as woman-made, bringing perhaps feminist meanings into your work? You might not have consciously thought of it in that vein. Has there been anyone who has suggested that your artwork is essentially feminist?

JL: The delicate details on my paintings may look ‘woman-made’, but then the large scale that some of them are constructed on also implies a ‘man’s touch’. There are both masculine and feminine connotations taking place at the same time. This, I think, reveals my belief in the notion of Yin/Yang, in the idea that a duality exists in every individual. This duality results in elements of masculinity in women, and of femininity in men.

JL: I do understand the imperative to categorise—there is safety and security in knowing for sure that man fit a certain type, and women another. However, I don’t think it’s right to label artists that way, viewing their work through the lens of gender expectation, and thereby possibly interfering with the meaning. After all, the beauty of art is in its exploration of ‘in-between’ conditions and spaces.

JL: I definitely do not take conscious effort to implicate gender into my work. I do, however,consciously discard the limiting notion that I am a woman. During my process, gender identity ceases to exist for me.

RJ: You art is beautiful. It is immediately seductive. What is your view on the aesthetics of your art? Are you seducing your audience to draw them closer to reveal and perhaps hide new interpretations? Is aesthetics to you more than seduction?

JL:I do seek to create a compelling quality about my artworks, compelling enough to draw people closer. This is perhaps the essence of all visual art.

JL: However, I feel that seduction is cheap. Seduction requires effort, conscious intention, and therefore will not last long. Rather, I see myself offering viewers stimuli that evoke the beauty inherent in each one of them. The beauty comes not immediately from what I present to them, but comes instead from my prompting them to slow down and surrender to their inner nature, allowing joy to overtake. My works are purely the trigger.

An interview with artist John Westmark

2009-09-22T14:38:00.004+08:00

I recently attended the opening of an amazing artist from Florida,US here in Singapore at Collector's Contemporary. See here for John's work and here for Collector's Contemporary Gallery

John Westmark was born in the Southern United States. John’s first exposure to artmaking was watching his mother draw on paper scraps during long Baptist sermons.

John holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Kansas City Art Institute and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Florida.

He presently works and lives in Gainesville, Florida. Westmark’s work has been exhibited widely and is held in collections worldwide. Recent acquisitions include the Council on Foriegn Relations, Washington, DC; and the Frederick
R. Weisman Foundation in Los Angeles, CA. John is a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship recipient, was recently featured in New American Paintings, and has been selected for the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art Artist-in-Residence for the summer of 2010. Westmark has earned a position on the watch lists of museums and institutions.

John’s solo show at Collectors Contemporary marks his Singapore debut. The show is on view through September 30, 2009.

I spoke to Dr Koh from Collector's Contemporary gallery and here is what he had to say about John:

My partner and I started collecting John's works before we actually met him. We were in Miami for Art Basel and saw his works which was part of a group show in a local gallery at that time. After 3 intense days of art overload we chanced upon that group show and found his works refreshingly original.

About 6 to 8 months after that, we started communicating by email. We gradually, acquired more of his works and kept the communication channels open.

John's works are so strong and distinct that we found it difficult to fit into any of our group shows. As we acquired more, we felt that it would be best to give him a solo show.

Finally, I had a few questions for John. Here are the questions and his responses:

A. Tell us a little about both your flight series and folklore series.

The flight series was the beginning of my work with the sewing patterns. The close visual relationship of the sewing pattern pieces and sections of aircraft was quite attractive to me. So the first pieces were these Orwellian winged contraptions. The exploration into flight and how it forms and impacts our lives led me to mythological references, such as Icarus, and many others. The notion of flight and myth and
mankind is still a very fertile place to conceive work from – a kind of faith versus reason argument.

Gradually, my focus has become two-pronged, the flight work and most recently, the folklore series. With the folklore work, the sense of narrative becomes a key component to the work - the sense of a story. Several key sources of folklore/storytelling are the Brothers Grimm and the rich heritage of storytelling from the Southern United States. I'm also looking at folklore from around the world, and interestingly, the are many similarities in the moral and message of stories from very different cultures/societies. There is a common human thread that speaks to good versus evil and finding the "right" path. But I will also say that a great many tales are very dark and do not always have a happy ending. The "happily ever after" line is pure Disney.

B. Brockelman links collage to a postmodern knowledge system rooted in paradox. You use collage extensively in your work. Do the epistemic contradictions of collage find any bearing in your work?

“Collage practices—the gathering of materials from different worlds into a single composition demanding a geometrically multiplying double reading of each element—call
attention to the irreducible heterogeneity of the “postmodern condition.” But,insofar as it does bind these elements, as elements, within a kind of unifying field ..”

- Brockelman, T. P. (2001). The frame and the mirror: On collage and the postmodern. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Ah yes, well put.
Collage has been a pleasant surprise. If you would have asked me about collage a few years ago, I would have scoffed. For many years, I embraced the definition of the artist as a pure painter and nothing else. It's naive and embarrassing, but true, I would not consideranything other than paint and canvas. Now, things are different, and I do agree with Brockelman in that the postmodern condition is and must be inclusive of any process or material, there is a pluralist approach to making art now – and at the root level heterogeneity is the catalyst for metaphor. And I don't just mean the implied material metaphor that collage presents; rather, conceptual metaphor, the ability for a work to "flip" meaning for the viewer. For me, as a viewer and an artist, I get the most joy out of artwork that oscillates from one place of conveyance to another without being obnoxious.

Bertolt Brecht remarked that the mechanics of collage run contrary to the organic model of growth...assumptions of harmony, unity, and closure. The idea that collage is an act of disruption through assemblage of pre-existing images is appealing. It is a fascinating premise: the appropriation of material created by machines of reproduction with a specific intent opens the work up for a new set of associations – essentially reactivating it. Yeehaw!

There is something really interesting and appealing about arrangements of letters..

2009-08-07T09:46:00.005+08:00

Text-portraits by Ralph Ueltzhoeffer and a word cloud for this blog by wordle.net

Art is politics

2009-08-06T10:11:00.002+08:00

I was at the opening for an exhibition at VWFA entitled Curating Lab: 100 Objects (Remixed) yesterday. It was a crowded opening and there was little time to look at many of the artworks there. I will head back before it ends on the 30th of August.

I write this because I am intrigued about a comment made by Heman Chong in his opening question in the transcript of an interview between curators for the exhibition.

A quote from a german art critic Jan Verwoert was used -" Art and politics belong to the same trade".

I am intrigued.

I have always thought of politics as a struggle for power in the Max Weber's sense. You talk about the politics of a country or corporate politics where oneupmanship is the salient defining trait.

So Jon Verwoert must mean politics in a different sense.

"They [art and politics] share the medium of gesture, which, in its expanded sense, encompasses all the physical manifestations through which people confront each other and seek to evoke desired responses, whether by speech and expressions of body language or by the display of signs and signals in images, texts, music or architecture".

Is Jon Verwoert saying that politics ( and art) is about invoking a desired response?
In the case of art, the above statement seems to subscribe to the aesthetic theory of utile. Art has a function. It evokes a preconceived, premeditated response.

But the above position is trite and I am not concerned about it much. It is discussed forever in art circles.

But what about the other position, vis-a-vis politics is about invoking a desired response? Is this only in a limited sense? Perhaps.

Read another look at art is politics taken from the great xurban.net

Art is politics. It is political as opposed to politics as management (ie. of state), a profession, a power play, manipulation or propaganda. As a matter of existence, art aims at the political as the ultimate means of emancipation, absolute freedom from commodification, if such is still possible. Art is a critical necessity as long as it fights being a part of the spectacle, as it aims to turn the spectacle upside down, as it exposes the 'culture industry.'

The crisis of art and with it the artist in the 'center' (West) stems from the impossibility of politics as such, within the captured psyche of the consumer culture. Political correctness without the political agenda, or art as expression of the ethnic and sexual self is bound to be neutralized through the all encompassing spectacle. While this appears, as it did to Baudrillard, as the 'complete liberation' of art and the artist, free from the historical drive that kept the tradition alive, it also marks the disappearance of the impulse, the loss of the cause: Not that of a liberation en masse (a revolution), but it renders the production (ie. of culture) irrelevant as such.

In the periphery the situation is just as bleak, as the tranquillized masses are more prone to turn into a mob of fascist/nationalist/religious thugs. The lie of globalisation, besides creating a monster as such, aims at a liberation of a different order, that of the capital and free enterprise. While it is business as usual, the power (ie government), already corrupted, becomes more oppressive, more violent. Yet still, if 'pockets of resistance' are a possibility, they are possible within the very pores of the military-police state, as the unavoidable necessity of existence, of simply 'being.'

Ironically, the last refuge of art as politics comes around a full circle, to that of the historical avant-garde in the time of crisis, but with a difference, not as the history repeating itself in the historicism's bordello. To expand on Benjamin's 'optical unconscious' one demands a 'geographical unconscious', a slip of the tongue apart from the genetic, folkloric, regional, traditional and 'oriental.' In these parts of the world, the 'reflexes' of the totalitarian regimes are without a doubt on the oppressive side. But for the ordinary man, the accidental/instinctive favors a special blend of violence, pity and a deeper sensation of poverty that is peculiarly geographical. Already in Istanbul, owing to a long tradition, the civil organization of social space displays an autonomous charity of its own, rarely disturbed by the authority. While the post colonial sphere is marked by inept institutions of the western kind, Istanbul leads a life of its own, again disjunct between tradition and change, but nevertheless with a sense of decency, a comraderie as it surfaced after the 1999 earthquakes. The will of the artist-intellectual in this geography should follow from this, that is an acknowledged belief in the best intentions of the civillian majority, a kind of third world humanism.

Hence the imposibility to turn inwards, a subjectivity of the work of art that misses the catastrophic existence, the scar of social consciousness. Only here the artist avoids being a proffessional and can afford to be a dilettante in order to defy being part of the spectacle as such. The bliss (as in ignorance) is the lack of institutionalized art that turns one's self into a 'specialist' in the specialized sphere of the production at large. Just as Istanbul still resists the logic of late capitalism and the multi-national corporation with its fractured economic organization, so can the artist produce without the burden of consistent, synchronised mode of professionalism that is demanded by the 'industry.' The amateur fascination with 'real life' out on the street leads to an affirmation of sorts: While life supercedes art along the way, emancipation should be sought on varied fronts, indeed through the phantasmagorical fraternity of the cyberspace.

The phantasm of equality in the domain of the great equalizer, that is the world wide web, is bound to give way to a new alliance of the nodes of resistence that demand the recognition of differences. Once the dust is settled and the hype is over, and the commercialization of the cyberspace is complete, the second wave of the telematic revolution should aim at the politicizing of the web via truly artistic means. Referring back to Adorno, if the technique of the concentration camp is to make the prisoners like their guards, the murdered, murderers; and to abolish the difference to an absolute in the sense that nothing different survives, then the resistence is to find its path through the counter-flow of the information technologies, crisscrossing the popular media on the way in order to gather the momentum to overturn the tide. The inverse flow is where the collectivity finds its expression of being simply political, different.

Group show in Malaysia opening on 8th of August 2009

2009-08-04T01:12:00.002+08:00

Cadres RG

2009-04-30T16:17:00.003+08:00

My paintings at my gallery in Paris were recently framed by world famous and Paris' finest framers - Cadres RG. They have worked with the likes of George Braque and Joan Miro. Cool huh!

See here...

Framing is an art and as with any art it takes much learning and practice. Even though I tend to stretch my own canvases, I leave the framing of my paintings to the experts. I have never been disappointed.

My gallery in Paris uses the best and I can't wait to see the result.

Contemporary Malaysia art gets an airing

2009-04-15T23:26:00.002+08:00

The above pic with the collectors Aliya and Farouk Khan with my RAIN painting in the background appeared in Business Times last week on the recent IMCAS. Read the full article here

The opening at IMCAS 2009

2009-04-10T13:24:00.002+08:00

Here is the pic of the opening at IMCAS 2009. I am chuffed to be standing with the very very best of Malaysian artists. Everyone from Jai to Fauzan to Yusof Ghani to the Matahati group is on stage. And so is the Director General of the National Art Gallery of Malaysia and the two collectors Aliya and Farouk.

This is in my opinion the start of a new dawn for Malaysian art - a private collector is leading the way..

New Straits Times article dated 7th April 2009

2009-04-07T22:15:00.003+08:00

One of my paintings is featured in the article below in NST Malaysia today.

The caption: Rajinder Singh’s ‘Rain’, (acrylic on canvas) at the Iskandar Malaysia Contemporary Art Show 2009.

Farouk's art
By Anis Ibrahim

2009/04/07

CONTEMPORARY art is often misunderstood. It's seen as pretentious, intentionally controversial, even self-indulgent.

Contemporary art pieces, after all, are never just watercolours of pretty flowers or idyllic scenes of village life.

And if the meaning behind a piece of art isn't instantly obvious, some will give up trying to comprehend it and head towards the nearest "friendly" painting in the gallery.

As a result, Malaysian contemporary art is undervalued and unappreciated, says art collector Farouk Khan.

"Appreciating a classical painting is much easier than understanding contemporary installation art," he says. "You need to think a bit harder to appreciate contemporary art."

But therein lies the value of contemporary art, he adds.

"Contemporary art is more intellectual. It's current, it's 'now' and relevant to what is around us."

Farouk and his wife, Aliya, own 800 Malaysian contemporary art pieces, among the country's largest private art collections.

They own works by established artists such as Jalaini Abu Hassan and Ahmad Shukri Mohamed, and Farouk is always on the lookout for emerging artists and encourages others to do the same.

Young artists whose works he started collecting in 1996, he says, have developed into some of the country's best contemporary artists.

Identifying a good artist involves looking at profiles and not simply picking out famous artists.

"I look at where they've exhibited and whether they've been at art residencies," Farouk says.

"That's a good guide to see how far someone's gone and how far he will go."

Farouk is involved in the Iskandar Malaysia Contemporary Art Show 2009 (IMCAS).

Currently running in Johor Baru until June 14, the show features 1,000 works by more than 100 contemporary artists. Some 150 pieces belong to the Aliya and Farouk Khan collection.

Farouk concedes that not everyone can afford to own art, so his tip is to buy art while it's young.

"Buy good quality art by artists in their prime in their 20s to 30s, when it's cheaper. Don't wait until they reach their 60s. By that time, their art will cost tens of thousands of ringgit."

He says the strongest case for contemporary art is that it represents the cultural development of the country.

"Years down the line, art produced this year will be a record of Malaysia's history, its politics and culture. That's what I see when I look at pieces I bought 10 years ago."

Prospective art collectors would be happy to learn that the price of art never drops. Art, especially contemporary art, always appreciates in value. According to Farouk, the prices of contemporary art have risen higher than for classical art for the simple reason that it is more relevant to the times.

"People can relate to contemporary art better. There is no concept of 'the right time to buy'. The right time is whenever the art is available."

Unlike in foreign art markets, Malaysian art prices have not been affected by the recession.

Art works in China and Europe, for instance, have become more affordable in the wake of the economic slump.

"Our base is so low that our art prices have not been and will not be affected. That's another reason to buy art as and when it's available."

The cultural significance of contemporary art should be reason enough for the country's public institutions to expand their art collections.

Farouk says that while private collectors dominate the art scene at present -- "They don't mind parting with their money to buy art" -- he is happy to note that the National Art Gallery has increased its budget for acquisitions.

"I'm very glad that the new director-general, Dr Mohamed Najib Ahmad Dawa, has raised the gallery's annual budget for contemporary art to RM1 million.

"Ever since he took over, there's been a strong movement towards buying more contemporary art, which is very good.

"The gallery should keep its collections up-to-date, so this is a move in the right direction."

The irony is that Malaysian contemporary art has sold for much more overseas.

In May last year, an artwork by Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann, which sold for RM12,000 locally, fetched RM117,000 at a Christie's auction in Hong Kong.

Similarly, a piece by Jalaini Abu Hassan sold for RM196,000 at another Christie's auction.

As his eyes sweep over the creations on display at IMCAS, Farouk says: "Look at this. Anyone can see that Malaysian contemporary art is a world-class product.

"What a shame it would be if we can't see that ourselves."

Why has the British establishment never quite accepted the Singh Twins?

2009-04-01T12:25:00.001+08:00

Why has the British establishment never quite accepted the Singh Twins?
Written by independent.co.uk
TUESDAY, 31 MARCH 2009

Amrit and Rabindra have always produced their fabulous art the only way they know how: together. Peter Stanford meets a singular pair

You're doing very well telling them apart," Amrit and Rabindra Singh's elderly father remarks as he watches me talk to his daughters. "I still get them confused." The identical twins, dressed in matching Punjabi outfits, right down to the earrings, necklaces, bangles and jewelled bindis in the centre of their foreheads, smile indulgently at his joke. Even their laughter sounds the same.

But these Sikh sisters long ago stopped worrying about being mistaken for each other and have turned being twins to their advantage. They have made it part of their brand in the art world, where they are known and celebrated as one artist: the Singh Twins.

Their style is a fusion of Indian tradition and contemporary Western influences which they label "past modern". Each canvas is produced jointly and combines the bright colours, intricate designs and flattened perspectives of intricate Indian miniature paintings with modern political, social and cultural themes. Among their best-known are From Zero to Hero, featuring the Beckhams, and Art Matters, a piece commissioned to mark Liverpool's tenure last year as European Capital of Culture, but Singh Twins' works are to be found across major national and international collections. In 2002, they were only the second British-born artists, after Henry Moore, to be accorded an exhibition at New Delhi's National Museum of Modern Art. And the windowsill of their neat, calm, book-lined studio, next to the family home halfway up a sandstone hill between Birkenhead and the Irish Sea, is lined with awards that are sparkling in the spring sunshine.

"One thing that might help," offers Rabindra, as I once again address her as Amrit, "is that I tend to find myself, almost subconsciously, standing on the right." Indeed, the reddish shawl each wears is, helpfully, over her right shoulder and Amrit's left until the photographer mentioned it and Rabindra duly moved hers to match her sister. There is undoubtedly an element of playing with hapless visitors' confusion over which is which, but the twins regard their shared identity, I quickly come to realise, as more than a game or a marketing device. They have turned it into something to highlight the tensions they have encountered, as citizens and as artists, in being both British and Asian.

"Western contemporary art is all about the individual, the inner self," reflects Amrit, the more talkative of the two, as the three of us perch at the end of the long studio table where their latest painting – based on events in Palestine and looking at the impact of politics on everyday lives – lies half-finished. "So in Western art, it doesn't matter if anyone else understands the work, as it is about the individual artist and what they are feeling. This was certainly the view when we were studying art at university [from the mid-1980s until 1991 first at University College, Chester, later Manchester]. We were constantly being told that to be individual was healthy, that we had to be more different from each other, be influenced by different Western artists from each other, but that didn't seem valid to us. From the point of view of Sikh, Indian or even Asian philosophy, the community comes first and the individual is second."

The clash between the two codes, say the twins, left them, like many other British Asians, under sustained pressure to abandon their cultural heritage. Their final degree grades were even reduced because they wouldn't yield – though they subsequently had the marking overturned after a seven-year battle with academia. The prejudice they encountered – at one stage an examiner was reported to have remarked, "Give them a 2.2, they won't mind because they'll soon be in an arranged marriage" – might have broken some, but it brought out the rebel in the sisters. "It was when we were at college," Rabindra recalls, "that we started to deliberately wear the same clothes to challenge the notion of individuality. We'd always had the same clothes, but until then had not necessarily worn them on the same day."

They see their art, too, as a challenge to questions of identity and what is acceptable or fashionable. It favours narrative, detail, colour and time-honoured techniques – none of which are qualities likely to see them lionised alongside their contemporaries, the Young British Artists. Yet it is also very modern and even edgy because of its exploration of what it is to be British and Asian simultaneously.

"We were told by our tutors that the miniature was outdated," Amrit remembers. When they first wanted to exhibit, they would routinely receive "nice letters, saying how much they liked our work, but perhaps we'd do better in an ethnic gallery in the East End of London". They have, with their success of the past two decades, turned the tables – though they feel that a "London, art- establishment elite" continues to look down on their work because of its traditional Indian roots. They decided early on not to sell their works in order to build a touring collection, but do accept commissions and have, of late, allowed some pieces to go into national collections. But it is hard to say what their paintings would command on the open market; substantial five-figure sums are mentioned by dealers.

Though they are "twin-dividuals", they insist, the Singhs spend 99 per cent of their time together. They simultaneously discovered a passion for Indian miniatures aged 13, while spending a year travelling with their father around his native Punjab. They jointly devise and execute most of their works, their skills interchangeable. "We could probably tell which of us has done which part, but otherwise only those very close to us could work it out," says Amrit. Some pieces, especially in the various series they have completed on particular themes (such as "The Hart Project" and "Facets of Femininity"), are wholly by one or the other. "But we don't see it as my work, your work," Rabindra stresses. "It is not that we can't do things on our own, but this is a joint venture. Our thinking, our ideology, our political-social outlook is identical."

She does concede that the sisters have different characteristics. "I am a perfectionist, which is not always a good thing, and Amrit is the one who gets it done." But they also say the last three words in harmony.

Their mode of working, the twins point out, has parallels in the medieval age, when monks would work together on a single illuminated manuscript. And there is something rather monk-like and self-abnegating about the Singh Twins. For all their warmth and humour, they continue to see themselves as outsiders and are more comfortable talking about their work than themselves.

The twins' Sikh father came to Britain when he was nine. They were born in Richmond, Surrey, but moved to the Wirral when they were still small and encountered what they describe as low-level racial prejudice as youngsters – name-calling and, on one occasion, a brick through their window. Though now in their early forties, they continue to live in the extended family home with their father, uncles and cousins. They used domestic settings a lot in their early work – part, as Amrit puts it, "of celebrating the more positive side of the traditional Indian lifestyle rather than girls locked in their bedrooms and forced marriages".

One of their best-known works is based on the wedding of their elder sister, Nyrmla. A print of it is propped up at the entrance to the studio. Typically, it includes both the traditional ritual of the bride's hands being henna-ed with images of globalisation and reminders of consumerism in the Power Ranger toys lying on the carpet. "There is always," says Rabindra as we study it, "a serious message in our work – which includes saying to youngsters who are going through similar pressures to the ones we experienced as teenagers that it is OK to explore your Indian identity, that you can be British and Asian, and have the best of both worlds."

Malaysia's biggest private art collection debuts at IMCAS

2009-03-26T14:11:00.000+08:00

Nearly two hundred masterpieces of Malaysian art from Malaysia’s biggest private art collection, the Aliya and Farouk Khan collection will be the main attraction at IM©AS, Iskandar Malaysia Contemporary Art show in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. The private collection will make its debut at this renowned cultural show of Malaysia’s contemporary art as a preview to the hosting and launch of the collection by Malaysia’s National Art Gallery slated for early 2010 in Kuala Lumpur. The collection will be launched at an invite-only event at 10.30am on Saturday the 4th of April at Level 4 of Danga City Mall by HRH Raja Zarith Sofiah, the consort of the crown prince of Johor. The exhibition will remain open to the public for three months till the 14th of June 2009.

About the Aliya And Farouk Khan Art collection

The Aliya and Farouk Khan art collection represents the largest collection of contemporary Malaysian art in the country, private or public. Both in terms of quantity and quality the collection’s body of Malaysian art is without peer. Comprising some 800 works of art, it features major paintings by contemporary Malaysian artists from the last three decades including iconic works from the Matahati group, works from major artists such as Jailani Abu Hassan and Anwar Zakii as well as young new contemporary Malaysian painters such as Shooshi Sulaiman and Rajinder Singh.

IMCAS invite

2009-03-20T15:44:00.002+08:00

Four pieces

2009-03-19T13:56:00.005+08:00

Three of my paintings will be featured at IMCAS under Aliya and Farouk Khan Art collection. The show is on now at the Danga Mall in Johor Bahru, Malaysia.

About IMCAS 2009

2009-03-19T13:52:00.001+08:00

Malaysia’s largest exhibition of contemporary art will kick-off the 2009 art calendar in a big way.

The inaugural Iskandar Malaysian Contemporary Art Show 2009 or IM©AS 2009 will feature a showcase of major and established contemporary artists, alongside talented and emerging contemporary artists vying for the coveted IM©AS 2009 Award.

Set to become Southern Peninsular Malaysia’s most developed region, Iskandar Malaysia and IM©AS 2009 is a perfect combination considering the rise and rise of Malaysia’s contemporary art movement over the last few years, and the emergence of Iskandar Malaysia as the key driver for Malaysia’s global economic push. IM©AS 2009 is thus well-positioned to showcase Malaysia’s strength in contemporary arts, as well as economic and political stability through Iskandar Malaysia… in a big way.

With the largest gathering of more than 100 artists, featuring more than 1,000 contemporary works encompassing paintings, sculptures, installations, photography, films, videos and new medias, spread over 26,000 sq feet of exhibition space, IM©AS 2009 is the exhibition for Malaysia’s contemporary art movement.

IM©AS 2009 is the best possible way to kick-off the 2009 art calendar. A statement of intent more than anything, IM©AS 2009 is a revolution in itself, telling the world: Malaysian contemporary art has arrived.

There is nothing like it to date, and if there is only one exhibition to see in 2009 in Malaysia, this must be it.

A failed art thesis..

2009-03-19T13:33:00.002+08:00

I wrote the following wall-text for a figurative art section in, IMCAS, Malaysia's largest exhibition of contemporary art which features the Aliya and Farouk Khan Art collection.

"This section of Aliya and Farouk Khan’s collection is curated under the theme of figurative art. The term figurative art today is used as a counter point to abstract or conceptual art and more often than not refers to any form of modern art that retains strong reference to the real world. Nevertheless, figurative art still holds a strong connection with representation of the human figure. It holds the potential of exploration of identity and the articulation of personal and social values and beliefs. The one element that remains constant between the artist and the audience is the human body. In figurative art, the human body becomes the representation of the real, the ideal and the symbolic.

The production of images is discouraged in Islam and the Malaysian art scene saw a marked absence of this basic form of art making in its early years. Malaysian art revolved in the precincts of abstract and geometrical art for a period. In seeking the authenticity of personal experience, Malaysian artists remained away from the intrinsic nature of the human form as a sign of their personal and social ideological believes.

Breaking the shackles of censorship, postmodern Malaysian artists such as Rajinder Singh, Jeganathan Ramachandram, Kow Leong Kiang, Yau Bee Ling, Jailani Ahu Hassan, Ivan lam, Bayu Ridjikin, Ahmad Fuad and Steven Menon use the formal aesthetic effects of line, shape, color and light to amplify their conceptual concerns with the treatment of human figure as other representational forms in their art."

Farouk Khan, wrote back with the following comments on the above:

"the thesis of censorship of arts in any forms has been proven to be false in light of the constant imaging of art using figurative by artists such as ibrahim hussein, yusof ghani in his topeng and sri tari series, by malaysia's foremost figurative asrtists amron omar and countless other artists.

in fact, the thesis is now considered to be an attempt to marginalise malaysian malay artists as being either prone to censorship or as govt lackeys propogating propoganda. The origin of the thesis is now a major source of embarrassment to the writers of the earlier period of malaysian art who took comfort in the lack of opposition to their writings to mean that they could write like idiots and not justify their statemnets.

i most certainly would not like to be associated with a failed thesis in the introduction of my collection to the general public.

The deconstruction of the failed curatorial era is contained in the book , susurmasa which the national art gallery has put out and was written by hasnul jamal saidon. It is also generally felt that hasnul was a bit kind to the idiot art writers of the earleir era in his deconstuction of their thesis.

i appreciate that being in singapore that u would be a bit behind the progresison of new art thesis's of the region as they develop and would be stuck in era's gone by. In the contemporary art development one has to keep up with the times.

Try again pls. "

Titty brain

2009-03-03T08:26:00.005+08:00

I am going to be a dad in 6 weeks and I cant seem to stop painting big breasted abstractions...hmmmm?

"Because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth"

2008-12-22T19:49:00.002+08:00

A new piece for Gajah Gallery painted mid 2008:

Title: Because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth
Dimension: 63” x 74”
Mixed media on Polyester cloth

2008-12-14T10:20:00.002+08:00

Title : Here and Now

Venue : Pace Gallery
64 Jalan Kemajuan, Section 12
Petaling Jaya

Opening Hours :
Daily: 11am - 7pm

Date & Time : Fri 12 - Fri 26 Dec 2008 (11am - 7pm)

Tickets : Free Admission

Phone : 03-7954 6069

Synopsis : An art exhibition featuring recent works by 16 prominent Malaysian artists, namely Ahmad Zakii Anwar, Bayu Utomo Radjikin, Ahmad Shukri, Rajinder Singh, Hamidi Hadi and Yusof Majid among others.

Part of proceeds from the paintings sale will be given to Force of Nature, a grant making foundation that helps rebuild the lives of those who were disaster affected.

The opening of the show will be held on Fri 12 Dec 2008 at 8pm.

"Here and Now" group exhibition in Malaysia

2008-12-14T01:46:00.002+08:00

I am presently participating in a group exhibition with artists such as Ahmad Zakii Anwar and Shukri at Pace Gallery KL. The exhibition is in support of the Force of Nature initiative. The invite is attached.

First solo in Australia

2008-11-17T10:58:00.004+08:00

I am busy preparing for my first solo in Australia. I will be showing my Number-Trance-Face collection there.

The problem with mathematics

2008-09-30T23:01:00.001+08:00

The problem with mathematics by itself is that it doesn’t provide the big picture; it’s limited to a particular discipline, so it’s merely a shadow of the form of the Good.

- taken from here

The Problem With Mathematics

2008-09-30T22:53:00.001+08:00

We like to think of ourselves as rational, logical creatures. We are far from it. Rational behavior, behavior directed to obtain a goal or avoid unpleasant consequences, has to be learned, studied and practiced. Logic is a recent development forced upon us by a growing awareness of the universe and is a subset of language governed by strict rules that have to be learned and obeyed for logic to function. Neither comes with the package we call language. They are both additional features that have to be purchased with hard work and study.

Mathematics is a diverse set of tools developed to help us understand the universe. The basic tool upon which all others depend is logic, for it is mathematical logic that justifies and validates the remaining tools. All of the tools that are mathematics must conform to a number of criteria, such as having consistent rulesets by which operations within the tool are defined. Any inconsistency will invalidate the tool and make it useless. Mathematicians go to great lengths to test their tools and demonstrate that they are up to the tasks set for them, the dreaded "mathematical proofs". These 'proofs' are logical meta-tool examinations of the basis and validity of the tool's ruleset.

And that statement highlights one of the biggest problems we have with mathematics: it is hard to talk about mathematics and even harder to teach to someone to whom the tools are unfamiliar.

When we teach arithmetic and basic logic in elementary and middle school, we don't stress the concept of layers of meta-language, of talking about language itself. Many of the tools of mathematics function like language. Logic is, as I have mentioned, a strict subset of natural language. When we apply logic to geometry, logic doesn't become a part of geometry. Our proofs are done in the meta-language 'logic' as applied to the tool 'geometry'. But we teach it as one subject.

Geometry is simple enough, once you learn it. So is algebra. Trigonometry is based on geometry quantified, although too little is done with imaginary numbers. Calculus is based on geometry, algebra and trigonometry with the concept of infinitesimals thrown in. They build upon each other, so that if one is learned well, the student has a solid basis for learning the next. There are lots of little fiddling details to remember and some people have enough of a problem with spacial visualization that they are unable to conquer geometry, but apart from the complexity, the tools are pretty simple. Once you learn them, they are easy to use, particularly now with the computing problem eased by the use of calculators and computers.

But mathematics isn't being sold as simple. It's being painted as being horrible difficult. For some people, it is.

Some people are incapable of learning logic. They will never admit it. In fact, should you suggest it they will shout you down or bully you into withdrawing your suggestion. Being capable only of highly emotional thought patterns, they don't have any idea what logic is and are incapable of learning it. Such people will most likely do sports while in school, then get into politics or business, where they can strive for alpha status, later. They would make poor scientists.

Still, for those capable of learning and using the tools, there is no point in confusing them by starting them off with the misconceptions we are currently generating. Mathematics is a heirarchy of little tools, each simple enough in its own way, integrated to work together. We can teach the tools individually.

We have to learn how to talk about mathematics.

- taken from here

Poincaré Conjecture

2008-09-30T15:59:00.003+08:00

This Millenium problem was recently solved and the mathematicians collected US$1 million dollars for their solution. Grigori Perelman used the Ricci flow developed by Richard Hamilton tp develop the proof.

If we stretch a rubber band around the surface of an apple, then we can shrink it down to a point by moving it slowly, without tearing it and without allowing it to leave the surface. On the other hand, if we imagine that the same rubber band has somehow been stretched in the appropriate direction around a doughnut, then there is no way of shrinking it to a point without breaking either the rubber band or the doughnut. We say the surface of the apple is "simply connected," but that the surface of the doughnut is not. Poincaré, almost a hundred years ago, knew that a two dimensional sphere is essentially characterized by this property of simple connectivity, and asked the corresponding question for the three dimensional sphere (the set of points in four dimensional space at unit distance from the origin). This question turned out to be extraordinarily difficult, and mathematicians have been struggling with it ever since. - taken from claymath.org

In an ordinary 2-sphere, any loop can be continuously tightened to a point on the surface. Does this condition characterize the 2-sphere? The answer is yes, and it has been known for a long time. The Poincaré conjecture asks the same question for the 3-sphere, which is more difficult to visualize. - Wikipedia

The problem with religion..

2008-09-30T08:24:00.001+08:00

... our visions and arguments concerning the "reasonable" and "the public" are infused with and are significantly and discrepantly shaped by particular histories, doctrines, perceptions, and sensibilities with which we identify - in ways that seem powerfully to elude transparency. (p.246 Beyond Gated Politics)

International school and art

2008-09-25T10:50:00.002+08:00

I was invited recently to go talk to several classes of 9 year olds at an International school here in Singapore. I was around a hive of energy and fresh inquisitive minds for the day. It was fun talking about being an artist and trying to frame what I do everyday and comparing that with a regular job. It got me thinking too. I rarely go straight into my study after breakfast in the morning.I usually stay up all night painting and don't leave my studio or bother to have breakfast..

But it was fun albeit a little tiring. It was a full-on a couple of hours and what an amazing lot the kids were. Some of them were quite good. And what characters! They kids wanted to know all about me and there was one round little one that even asked me if I still lived with my mum and if I had more than four bucks to rub together. Cheeky sod but it made me laugh. Preconceptions eh! At such a tender age!

Group exhibition opening at PACE Gallery Malaysia

2008-08-18T09:34:00.003+08:00

Here is the invite for the group opening in KL this weekend. Come! It is fantastic to show with the most celebrated artists in Malaysia.

I am exhibiting alongside the likes of:

Ahmad Shukri
Annuar Rashid
Hamir
Masnoor
Jailani
Daud
Umi
etc etc

Negative capability

2008-08-18T08:57:00.004+08:00

In an attempt to rewrite my 'Manifesto of the Unprimed', I am considering the ideas behind the term 'negative capability' coined by the poet John Keats in 1817.

"I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."

Keats believed that great people (especially poets) have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved. Keats was a Romantic and believed that the truths found in the imagination access holy authority. Such authority cannot otherwise be understood, and thus he writes of "uncertainties." This "being in uncertaint[y]" is a place between the mundane, ready reality and the multiple potentials of a more fully understood existence. - Wikipedia.

Reason and our unconditional love affair with it, despite our lack of understanding as to how best to use it, is my target. Reason and our need for accuracy and rational sustainability in all that we do today, needs to be continually challenged. The lives we lead and the complexities that underlie our existence seems to suggest the handling of Reason with gloved hands.

As an artist and one that has had mathematics as his main companion for the last 30 odd years, I question its solutions and unchallenged truths which has prescribed our lives. Our reaching after fact and reason hides the unimaginable complexities of our beings. This needs to be complemented by an artists different way of seeing things revealing new insignts onto the intangible - that which our sciences and mathematics are unable to account for.

The 'Manifesto of the Unprimed' ( see www.unprimed.com) is a description of my lifework as an artist.It unfortunately finds fault after harrowing fault against my beloved subject, mathematics, in the hope of discovering the in-betweens, the forgotten but fertile grounds of living and making do with ambiguity and uncertainty. What price though a negative capability?

Working on Stone

2008-08-11T13:47:00.005+08:00

I had the wonderful opportunity to work on stone at IDEMs in Paris

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My second solo in Malaysia

2008-06-09T20:59:00.004+08:00

Here is the invite for my second major solo in Malaysia. Above it is a picture of PACE gallery in Kuala Lumpur.

I managed to produce 8 new works for this show which will open on the 25th of June at the prestigious PACE gallery. Now to see if any of the collectors will like the new paintings. It is a nail-bitingly tense period. The catalogue is published soon and a pdf version will go to all the potential collectors.

Singapore Arts Street 2008

2008-06-09T18:02:00.004+08:00

I am one of the featured artists at Singapore Arts Street 2008. It is on at Clark Quay on the 14th and 15th of June. See www.singaporeartsstreet.com.

Background

Singapore Arts Street is where visitors are able to appreciate and try out various form of arts in a casual setting. Our event also serves as a platform for artists to showcase their work to international and local audiences. We've attracted,
-more than 85 local & local reside artists participating in the past 2 years event
-approximately 18,000 visitors (mainly consists of local & expatriates families, Art lovers, Art buyers & tourists) last year
-10 publications + 1 radio station to list or write on our event (Straits Times, XIN.sg, Class 95FM, Arts Xplosion, IS magazine, etc) last year

Singapore Arts Street will be having 2 tours this year

City Tour
Singapore Arts Street 2008 @ Clarke Quay will be supported and promoted internationally by Clarke Quay and Singapore Tourism Board targeted to international visitors.

Date : 14 & 15 June 2008 (Sat & Sun)

Venue : Clarke Quay, Central Fountain Square

Time : 11am - 8pm

Heartland Tour
We will be co-organising Singapore Arts Street 2008 @ North East with North East Community Development Council (CDC) with the support (in kind or in spirit) from National Art Council (NAC), People Association, Community ArtReach & Adjunied Town Council.

Date : 21, 22, 28 & 29 June 2008

Venue : Hougang Central Hub

Time : 11am - 6pm

Official Opening Ceremony
Guest of Honour : Mrs. Lim Hwee Hua, Senior Minister of State for Finance & Transport, MP Aljunied GRC
Date: 22 June 2008 (Sun)
Time: 2pm

Who is joining us this year?
Just to mention a few, well-known artists such as Chng Seok Ting (internationally renowned printmaker and President of Printmaking Society- Singapore), Low Tho Seng (artist of highly commended UOB Painting of the Year of 1984, 1988, 1994, 1996, 1998), Jimmy Quek (who held 11 one-man exhibitions and participated in more than 80 group art exhibitions internationally), and Irene Hong (President of Art Association Singapore) will be showcasing their art at both event.

For more information
Please feel free to contact me at the following numbers or visit our website at www.singaporeartsstreet.com.
Kindly revert by return before 23 May to secure an exhibiting space.

Lithographs in Paris

2008-05-29T12:31:00.004+08:00

Pablo Picasso & Georges Braque at Mourlot's Centenial in 1952

I was recently invited by a private collector of mine to produce two lithographs for his collection in no other than the world famous former Mourlot studios ( now IDEM)in Montparnasse in Paris. And it could be that I am the first artist from South East Asia enjoying this privilege. Paul McCarthy and David Lynch it seems have made their prints there recently. Asian artists that have made their lithos there are Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Guanyi, Yuen Minjun and Raza from India.

"For more than half a century Fernand Mourlot was synonymous with the resurgence of lithography, a process which would attract under his influence the greatest artistic masters of our times.Under the direction of Fernand Mourlot, artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Miró,Braque, Dubuffet, Léger, Giacometti... enriched their own work as well as contemporary art in general with a new medium of expression, a new realm of experimental possibilities.With Mourlot, and thanks to him, modern lithography took on a personality and found a future." taken from here.

Number-Trance-Face in Hong Kong

2008-05-29T11:48:00.002+08:00

Just got back from launching a show in Hong Kong Expo Centre. I launched my FACES collection there with champagne at 10am in the morning to a private audience.

And I did a live painting exhibit during the show. Attached is a pic. I had to complete it in two hours with little notice and limited material..and i had a limited palate of red, black and white...

Bansky is coming to Hong Kong

2008-04-07T11:23:00.004+08:00

Number-Trance-Face in Argentina

2008-04-03T07:24:00.002+08:00

Number Trance Face

Saturday 29th March 2008
O. Fournier Galleries @ Mendoza, Argentina

A major exhibition of paintings by Rajinder Singh about the numerical equivalent of lovely

(12thFeb 2008) The management of O. Fournier Galleries, a premier art gallery in Mendoza Argentina is proud to present Number Trance Face, a long-planned and exciting new exhibition of paintings by international multicultural artist, Rajinder Singh. This is the first time that paintings of this successful and prolific Malaysian artist, who was recently selected as one of 20 emerging artists to represent Asia by a juried competition in Hong Kong, will be shown in Argentina. The grand opening of the exhibition will take place on Saturday the 29th of March at the O. Fournier Galleries at 12 noon. The President and founder of O. Fournier Mendoza, José Manuel Ortega Gil-Fournier will open the exhibition.

Artist Rajinder Singh’s FACES collection was launched in France in June 2007. The large format paintings of women in Rajinder’s life are painted using numbers that represent the numerical equivalent of beauty. “The exhibition will feature paintings of faces of women who have exerted a strong influence in my life. Wife, sister, actresses, radio jock, author etc..what is in their faces that make them such strong women? What is it that they share in the shape of their eyes, their lips, their noses? Each face is painted using only numbers and mathematical equations as I attempt to ask the question: what is the numerical equivalent of lovely?” says Singh.

“My art practice has always been based on the wonder of the abstract codification of pure thought we call mathematics. I am motivated by the aesthetics of elegant mathematics now in my art as I was as a mathematician in my past. On the other hand I nurture a sceptical viewpoint on the role mathematics play as the inevitable language of choice of science and its prevalence in our lives. My art practice lies within this dialectic – in the contradiction between my two conflicting viewpoints, adopted as the determining factor in their continuing interaction. In FACES, I confront this dialectic. I engage with my experience of the aesthetics in high level mathematics to paint faces of women that stand prominent in my visual history in the hope to question the ideas that correlate the two and the ramifications that might emanate from any tangible success in such an endeavour”, continues Singh.

Rajinder invites his audience to view his paintings through a sieve – a sieve made of mathematical objects that pack a substantial amount of information on the way we might view beauty. He invites viewers to engage not analytically, neither synthetically, but in a way that combines both modes and feel/intuit the correspondence in the aesthetics of the combined beauty of my mathematics and the underlying beauty of my faces.

But most of all he wants his audience to evaluate mathematics and its place in our lives. Is mathematics something necessary for life as “art” and not just “fact” and does its value lie in, as Polkinghorne said, as an “abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe”, or is it the most self-flattering, self-aggrandizing trivia game ever invented?

Rajinder’s paintings are beautiful paintings of beautiful people about beauty, both physical and mathematical. And perhaps the mathematical equivalent of lovely might even act as the perfect sieve to reveal a new dimension to this supreme force of human experience affecting real and lasting transformation in us. Art and maths are but languages through which we attempt to understand that which is ineffable.

About the artist:
Rajinder’s extensive background in Mathematics is the driving force behind his successful art practice. He has been painting all his life. His work has seen considerable exposure worldwide. Rajinder was recently selected as one of 20 emerging artists to represent Asia by a juried competition in Hong Kong. He will be showing in London, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Korea, New York and Argentina in 2008. He lives and works in Singapore.

The nature of intellectual aesthetic experience

2008-02-21T15:11:00.003+08:00

I am a painter with a background in mathematics. I paint what has come to be known as ‘math paintings’. It is one of those unfortunate terms that will dog me forever that say so little about my work. But I do paint with mathematics. I spend months developing complex mathematics related to the subject I choose to paint. I get passionately involved with mathematical definitions, theorems, proofs and numbers that I find exciting and beautiful and that describe a certain aspect of my chosen subject matter e.g. beauty if I am painting faces of women. Once I am done with the research, I use the resultant outpouring of mathematics to paint. I literally paint with mathematics. There is often very little on my canvas that is not painstakingly constructed using layered equations, numbers and symbols.

But why do I do this? I have spent years working with mathematics and I am familiar with the excitement that a good piece of mathematics can generate. There are some proofs and theorems and geometrical objects that I find exceptionally beautiful and I have often experienced a racing of pulse when I stumble upon a great mathematical solution. My reaction to my mathematics is often more intellectual than it is emotional. When I call my mathematics beautiful, I have an aesthetic experience which I choose to call an intellectual aesthetic experience (IAE). An intellectual aesthetic experience is intellectual and is elicited by the mind’s experience of an intellectual object. I paint to construct conduits to tap onto this experience. My paintings and everything that goes into making them are special purpose vessels of the IAE. Does that make any sense?

Why mathematics? Scientific theories can be beautiful. Engineering systems are often referred to as aesthetically pleasing. (Much of what you see in Biennales around the world today appeal chiefly to the IAE, in my opinion). Also, mathematics is not a spectator sport and too many people are turned off by it, thanks largely to our education systems.

To answer this question, I want to spend the rest of this article to talk about the special place that mathematics occupies beside aesthetic experience. First, consider the famous question - “…How are synthetic judgments apriori possible?” which begins Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kant proposes that the objective validity of mathematical knowledge rests on the fact that it is based on the apriori forms of our sensibility which condition the possibility of experience. If we have apriori conditions to sensibility, then we have knowledge that is more than just logical. If we say, ‘It is either snowing or not snowing’ we have an analytic proposition. An analytic proposition is about logical relations and not empirical facts. Its truth rests on definition and logic alone. Empirical knowledge on the other hand is synthetic. It tells us more than mere logical relations. For the special case of apriori synthetic knowledge that is independent of experience, we can have knowledge (more than just logic) without experiencing it. Mathematics is this special case of synthetic apriori knowledge. Mathematics, according to Kant is based on the preconditions of experience itself. So, mathematics is closer to the way we experience than we might like to think.

But in the last 200 years, the above apriori synthetic/analytic boundary was challenged by the introduction of non-Euclidean geometry, as well as Turing’s halting and Godel’s incompleteness theorem. With non-Euclidean geometry for instance, apriori synthetic truth is revealed as simply a logical possibility. And if apriori synthetic truths condition the possibility of experience, experience itself becomes malleable. Once we learn the new preconditions, we are free to change the way we experience, altering its very definition. We see here the finitude of Reason, the central theme to Kant’s philosophy. Nature does not speak to Reason. The ‘other’ is mute. Reason is not the mirror reflecting the light of Nature. We know this because it is incompatible with the very essence of empirical science – that we cannot conduct experiments independent of context. The power of human Reason is not in its universality but in articulating its own boundaries against non-Reason. Mathematics is a special form of dialogue between Reason and the ‘other ‘( non-Reason) and Mathematics allows the ‘other’ to reveal its authoring otherness. Mathematics thus becomes a true counterpart to poetry in that both seek ways to transcend the radical finitude of Reason. Aesthetic experience therefore is a constitutive component of human rationality.

I have outlined (too briefly) how mathematics and aesthetic experience might be related. I hope to continue in part II with an in depth discussion on the nature of IAE.

The Aliya and Farouk Collection

2008-01-22T15:24:00.000+08:00

I had my first ever solo exhibition in Malaysia on the 18th of April 2007. A preview of the paintings was held the day before, unannounced -for the select few revered nobles of the art world, the names of whom are mentioned in hushed reverence in galleries around Kuala Lumpur. It was a somber affair in a big airy gallery in the posher parts of Kuala Lumpur, the twin-tower capital city of Malaysia. I sat in my hotel away from the galley in tremulous prayer, not knowing what to expect.

I walked into my gallery the next day greeted by excited chatter. My stars had aligned. There were five paintings with red dots on them. I was overjoyed. And it was no less than Farouk Khan and his wife who had graced my soft opening with their presence and deigned to set their hearts on five of my larger pieces. The Khans are the most prominent collectors in town, as I came to find out. You cannot talk about the Malaysian art-world without referring to Farouk and Aliya who have, according to many accounts, singled-handedly, turned the fortunes of the Malaysian contemporary art scene around in the last few years.

How can two people have such an impact on a whole generation of artists in a country that rivals Indonesia for its output of great works of art? This was all new to me and I got interested. Farouk and Aliya invited me over to their plush home – a home which could put any gallery and any national art museum in South East Asia to shame. I wanted to be one of the first few to get a preview of Farouk’s much talked about but yet unpublished catalogue of his collection – a cool 600 pieces of the very best of Malaysian contemporary art – and to have a chat about The Khan’s stupendous influence in the Malaysian art world.

I am aware of what is going in Indonesia just now. Buying contemporary art is becoming fashionable. A similar sort of transition is taking place in Kuala Lumpur. The works of new contemporary artists all around Malaysia are gaining reputation and the prices are going up. No more are these artists scorned as they were for the past 10 years. No more is their art considered ‘unmarketable’. A quick review of the going ons in the galleries in Kuala Lumpur will highlight this trend. Whole exhibitions are selling out. Collectors are competing for the same few pieces of art long before exhibitions open.

This is very different from only a few years ago. There was a pressure from the Malaysian “old masters” and the curators and critics failed to recognize the changing face of Malaysian art. They hesitated for a long time to acknowledge the powerful phenomenon of contemporary art. Their position as mentors to public taste made them too cautions; their myopia made them cling for the unchanging and safe hold of the old. Farouk and Aliya lament this failed curatorial process as it inhibited the progress of art in the region. Says Farouk, “…. from the time we started collecting art, the emphasis in the Malaysian art scene amongst collectors was more on pioneer era art and heritage art. There was no movement out of this and, we, from the very beginning rejected the stereo type collecting. The more we got into it, the more we felt that that was the thing to do. Most interestingly was the fact that the contemporary art that was available was of the best art of the period. This was largely due to the fact that institution collections were trapped in the pioneer era and the curators of the day were for various reasons rejecting the contemporary art movement. As the institutions were not collecting, most of the corporate collectors who were very predominant in the Malaysian art scene were also therefore not able to follow the art movement and changes that were happening.”

It took the visionary outlook of the Khans to bring contemporary art in Malaysia to its full and true expression. “We actually felt a sense of deep commitment to ensure our collection became an important collection of the period. We became committed to the task of forming a contemporary collection of Malaysian art which was till then fairly non existent. It amazed us that such a great body of work was available for us to pick up at extremely affordable prices. We have always wondered if whether such an opportunity would have lent it self to us in any other country in the world.”

So what has caused this vacuum in the last ten years? Who has been tightening the noose around the life-energies of a whole era? “The state of art in Malaysia was in the doldrums. There were great artists doing great work but it was being unappreciated. We actually credit our collection to what we term the "failed curatorial process" in the country and in the region. Museum curators and art writers were more important than artists. They were obnoxious and arrogant and in our opinion lazy. In the 10 years of collecting Malaysian art it always amazed us that we never ran into the major curators of the day. It was clear to us that those who were spending their own money were in fact more diligent than those spending the public's money. I have never had any qualms about stating very openly that to a very large extent, the institutional collection of Malaysian art in Malaysia and in the region was not representative of the Malaysian art scene. It was a representation of the "failed curatorial process.”.”

I, for one, am glad for the changing landscape of tastes in Malaysia. I am indebted to The Khans especially for their commitment to the new and exciting art of my proud nation. I can understand what it must have been like for them, alone in their pursuits, hard-pressed perhaps at times in justifying their expensive purchases. It could have been but a fancy -an isolated manifestation of anomaly which might never have become a broad popular movement. Today they own the finest collection of Malaysian art anywhere. I am proud to be part of it.

Painting by Numbers - by Ken Feinstein

2008-01-13T23:06:00.000+08:00

( See www.unprimed.com)

What is a digital image? If it is an image created by the manipulation of digits by a program, then Rajinder Singh’s portraits are digital art. The fact that he doesn’t use a computer is irrelevant. An issue for those who need to protect their fiefdom’s. What is happening is a very complex and dense use of numbers and mathematics. How do we use numbers? What does it say? What can it say? What can’t it say?

The theorist Vilem Flusser has written about how the text as image came to a crisis point in the early 20th century.1 The crisis was came about when the written word became incomprehensible. to make his point, he doesn’t go to Joyce or the Surrealists, but to Einstein. E=mc2, a simple statement that means more than it can contain. How do we understand this? e go back to visual images. Images based on concepts, mathematics and technology. What Flusser calls the “technical image”. An not an image of technique, but an image of technology. Singh’s images are images of both technique and technology. They pile numbers upon numbers, until images appear. The text passes through its own crisis of meaning, coming through the other side as pure image. A face, the face of a woman springs out of the numbers. the theoretical comes back to the human. How he got there remains unreadable, but we don’t care. We have arrived with him to a gaze that looks back at us as much as we look at it.

This gaze is made of numbers literally piled on top of each other. Mapping the face as we do a mountain. Singh asked where can we find the emotion in numbers. This is where it is, in the peaks and valleys of the face. The building up of layers of colour tagged to different number sets. These numbers sets could be stock quotes, flight schedules, scores from the Premier League, the seemly disconnected events, which make up our life. And we turn to the face to se the culmination of our life. We “read” a face for this. The cliche goes that the eyes are the windows of the soul, but the face is the map of experience.

Singh began this collection of faces by asking where is the “lovely” in mathematics. Einstein defined the best scientific and mathematical solutions as the simplest and most elegant. The most elegant is an aesthetic judgement. Here is the art in math. We understand, no we expect the aesthetic judgement in art. The aesthetic helps us define the form of the language of art. Like the rules for the construction of a sentence. Math being among other things the language of science. Yet Einstein is defining the scientific by the artistic. Wittgenstein proved that something can not be defined as a subset of itself. So we have to go elsewhere to define what makes the scientific. The amateur violinist Einstein knows that we have to go to an older system to legitimate the scientific system. If the aesthetic can be used to define science and math is its language than the lovely can be found there. Humming through with Pythagorus’ celestial harmonies. We should never forget that math and music are tied so tightly together that it can be hard to untangle them.

The lovely is not found in the numbers themselves, but in how the numbers are used. The place where the digits are used to create meaning. Many philosophers have agreed that meaning is created by the relationship, the give and take of the conversation. This conversation can be between people or a work of art and a viewer, a book and a reader or even a mathematician and an algorithm. The relational is the core of the artistic experience. It is a conversation each side enters into. Jean-Franзios Lyotard sees this as part of game theory2. Emmanuel Levinas finds G-d there3.

Here we are back to the gaze. the work looks at us knowing that we are looking at it. It is a gaze looking for its return. The return is the play of the game. We set the rules and we engage. It is Lyotard’s conversation. It is the relational. An inclusive act. An ethical act. An act which as draws on in to respond, to finish the conversation. Because with out the other of the viewer, it is just a monologue going out to nowhere. The work calls, we respond. It asks, we answer. We may ask of the work and demand an answer back, but we can not do this with out answering first.

Play, playfulness, things we forget to think about with art any more. As statements like this one are written and as theorists become critics, works are discussed very solemnly. Maybe too solemnly. Singh’s paintings are combining two things that are playful in nature algorithms and painting. Algorithms are an important element in game theory. Game theory drives much of the mathematics being developed today. It is used in creating the probabilities used for forecasting the weather, quantum mechanics and managing hedge funds. But at its heart is the concept of play. Flusser talks about play in relation to the use of an apparatus, such as a computer.4 We experiment when we play. We try it one way and then try it another until we like what we get. This is the way we live in our digital world. Every day as we use our computers more and more we are playing more and more. It has become the nature of how we work. It is the nature of how we create work. It is some thing we have learned from art. It is how we can strive to find the lovely in numbers, art or life. Here is where Rajinder Singh finds his worlds coming together.

1 Flusser, Vilйm. Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Reaktion Books, London, 2000.
2 Thebaud, Jean-Loup and Jean-Franзois Lyotard. Just Gaming, University of Minnesota Press, 1985
3 Levinas, Emanuel. Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, Continuum Internationa Publishing Group, 2006.
4 Flusser, Vilйm. Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Reaktion Books, London, 2000.

Ken Feinstein is multimedia artist & theorist. Both his written and art works address the relationship of the work of art and the audience. He has been exhibited in museums & galleries in China, Japan, Germany, South Africa, Russia as well as the United States. His last solo show was Let A Thousand Videos Bloom at the Chelsea Art Museum, New York in 2004

He is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art, Design, & Media at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore. See www.kennethfeinstein.com

A writeup from Adam Gerard, Brand Champion - Tiger Translate

2007-11-26T21:45:00.000+08:00

Following a recent call for submissions of artwork that reached across the Asia Pacific region, Tiger Beer is delighted to announce that new work by Dr Rajinder Singh (Malaysia) has been selected to join the growing, international body of work that makes up Tiger Translate.

Tiger Translate is a platform to support emerging Asian artists from all creative disciplines including painting, sculpture, photography, graphic design, animation and music. Now in its third year, Tiger Translate consists of a global series of events and exhibitions held in countries from New Zealand to Singapore, from Thailand to the UK, from Vietnam to Denmark.

Dr Singh’s stunning work was in response to the theme ENERGY. As Tiger Beer embodies the energy, colour and variety of modern Asia, artists were asked to visualize ENERGY in the context of contemporary Asia.

For more information, please visit www.tigertranslate.com

Les Fruits de la Vigne

2007-11-15T22:28:00.000+08:00

I am totally chuffed to be invited as the surprise guest artist at Singapore's grandest affair..see attached leaflet. There will be amazing people there that have made a name for themselves from all over the world. It will be a grand night.
See here

An interview with artist Boo Sze Yang

2007-11-12T19:22:00.000+08:00

Early last month, Utterly Art in Singapore showcased artist Boo Sze Yang's amazing exhibition of paintings in his solo exhibition entitled house of God. Utterly art's bimonthly flyer appeared in my inbox on the 1st of October, announcing: "Explore the majesty of the monumental in Singapore artist Boo Sze Yang's fourth solo exhibition HOUSE OF GOD". I gave the flyer a quick glance and liked the pictures of Boo's paintings so much that I decided I must talk to Boo and soon..Here is an excerpt from my email conversation with the artist.

Currently a full-time lecturer in the Fine Art Degree programme at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Boo holds a Master of Arts in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, the University of the Arts London, UK. He has participated in exhibition nationally and internationally, including the Third ASEAN Traveling Exhibition (1993), Singapore Art (1997), the Asian International Art Exhibition (Japan 1999 / China 2001 / Korea 2002 / Philippines 2005), and Nokia Singapore Art (2001) and held his first overseas solo exhibition in Seoul, Korea in 2005. The underlining philosophy in his work is the notion of identity as a “performative” act, where one is engaged in a constant process of identification, de-identification and re-identification. The act of painting itself is performative. In his paintings, the paint builds and destroys simultaneously, concealing as much as it is revealing.

Boo:"I am not a Christian, but I have always enjoyed visiting cathedrals and churches whenever I travel to Europe. What strikes me most is the tranquility and inner peace I feel when I step into these spaces, bounded by monumental columns and huge arches. The interior is usually dim and lit naturally by rays of lights filtering through the vaults and arched windows. Strangely, the more run-down these cathedrals or churches, the stronger it evokes in me a sense of optimism in life. Maybe ruins are often romanticized to imply decline or decay, but I think the moment we encounter ruins, that is when we may begin to learn to act positively towards life. Man seems to act most spirit courageously and human when tragedy struck such as the Tsunami or the case of 911 in New York."

Boo: "House of God is a series of paintings on places of worship (cathedrals and art museums alike), which are executed in a most unflattering manner – expressive, gestural and chaotic, appearing more like ruins then a glorification. Here, the act of painting is central. It is very much like a sparring session between the artist and the image. The painting process is intensive, spontaneous, precarious and re-active. The rendered images are gestures of fleeting moments of our perception of reality - illusive and constantly changing."

Rajinder: Your choice of subject matter - was there any particular reason you chose to paint the interior of churches? What made you choose the churches you painted?

Boo: I was thinking about how we are never able to escape from the situation of negotiating with power and sometimes inevitably have to submit ourselves to it. Life is always about negotiation. Art provides a means to question and think about issues concerning life, faith and death. I do not subscribe to any religion, but I do feel that religion is important as a guiding light for most people.

Rajinder: Any anecdotes you can share with us trying to get permission to paint churches? What was the response of the crowd around you?

Boo: All the paintings were done in my studio using photographs I took during my trips.

Rajinder: How long were you in Europe? Did you paint the paintings for your HOG exhibition all in the one trip there? Did you paint them from photographs?

Boo: I spent 3 weeks in Barcelona, Toulouse, Nice, Venice, Florence and Rome sometime in August 2004, right after I completed my MA in fine art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Most of the paintings were from photographs taken during this trip, one was taken from my trip to Brussels in 2003.

Rajinder: The underlining philosophy in your work is the notion of identity as a 'performative act'. You suggest that the act of painting itself is performative. Can you explain?

Boo: My earlier works basically tries to deal with the notion of identity – one that is constantly changing rather than being fixed. My approach to painting is also constantly changing, so much so that if I were to put all my paintings (1991-2007) together in a show, it would seem to be painted by 5 different artists. What I was interested was the notion that the personal identity is not something that is natural but one that is learned and acted out by an individual. When I think about painting, what one sees or think he sees on a canvas is never obvious and straight forward, but are interpretations performed by the viewer. A dancer performs on the stage; the painter’s stage is the canvas.

Rajinder: I look at your paintings and I feel myself transported. It seems your paintings demand the viewer's participation, for the viewer and the work to let go of themselves and meet. I am in your painting; in one of your churches and I want to look around the corners; behind the pillars. I want to interact with the work. A relation is established between the work and the viewer. The paintings are created in the exchange – somewhere between the artist, the painting and the viewer. I feel that the artistic process, the 'performance' in your painting plays a role in this exchange. Can you comment?

Boo: I suppose when we encounter an image that is ambiguous or less definite, it starts to demand more attention from the viewer to make sense of what he/she is seeing. The encounter becomes more intense and pleasurable as the viewer become more ‘involved’ in deciphering the image. What I have done is to make “suggestions” and create impressions; the viewer will have to complete the picture.

Rajinder: When I am in a church, a remarkable change takes place in me, however subtle. The cool somber and hauntingly quiet atmosphere of churches invariably forms a connection within me to the deep mystery of life without it taking the form of the frightening unknown. There is of course the knowledge that I am in a holy place, a place of worship for thousands for uncountable years. Looking at your paintings I experience the same quiet serenity. How have you managed this? What is it in the way you have painted your painting in expressive, gestural and chaotic brushworks that captures a moment if not more of lingering spirituality?

Boo: Not too sure how to answer this question but I think what I tried to do is to capture a moment of my experience. To me, that is what a painting can only do. What we see depend a lot of what we know and already experienced. What the painting does was to trigger the viewer’s memories of a particular space. The incompleteness and ambiguous quality of the images in the painting helps to maximize viewer’s participation. In this case, you have made the painting ‘complete’ by performing your role as an active viewer.

Rajinder: "The rendered images are gestures of fleeting moments of our perception of reality - illusive and constantly changing." There is no movement You are painting a 'still' scene. What changes? Are you referring to gradual sense in which we develop a relationship with a space over time?

Boo: Unlike a photograph which is capable of freezing a moment in time, our eyes are constantly mapping out the space we are encountering. Our relationship and experience with the space around us is constantly changing, is actually never still, unlike in a photograph.

Rajinder: Optimism and hope are two adjectives associated with your HOG paintings. Where lies the connection?

Boo: I was speaking about the ruins-like images of the cathedrals which I have painted. To me, the encounter of ruins somehow is capable of triggering the positive spirit in human. Just like whenever disasters such as the Tsunami struck, humanity seems most ubiquitous.

In the making of FACES….

2007-11-07T14:31:00.000+08:00

In June this year, I launched a new collection of paintings in France. It was a terrific opening - a testament perhaps to the love affair that the French have with art. The paintings are now showing in Malaysia and Singapore and, with the help of my wonderful agent, the exhibition will travel to Korea, Shanghai, Hong Kong, India, Argentina and New York over the next year.

I remember well where my journey began with FACES. I was on holiday in New York and I had for the first time in a long while the opportunity once again to immerse myself in the genius of Salman Rushdie. A sentence in his book “Fury” had such an effect on me that I spent the rest of my vacation getting worked up about it. My wife tells me today that I turned into my insufferable introverted self on holiday.

“What is the digital equivalent of lovely, he wondered. What are the digits that encode beauty, the number-fingers that enclose, transform, transmit, decode, and somehow, in the process, fail to trap or choke the soul of it. Not because of the technology but in spite of it, beauty, that ghost, that treasure, passes undiminished through the new machines.” I was consumed by Rushdie’s use of the words ‘lovely’ and ‘number fingers’. It sparked off my initial sketches and ideas on the mathematics of beauty

My art practice has always been based on the wonder of the abstract codification of pure thought we call mathematics. I am motivated by the aesthetics of elegant mathematics now in my art as I was as a mathematician in my past. On the other hand I nurture a skeptical viewpoint on the role mathematics play as the inevitable language of choice of science and its prevalence in our lives. My art practice lies within this dialectic – in the contradiction between my two conflicting viewpoints, adopted as the determining factor in their continuing interaction.

In FACES, I confront this dialectic. I engage with my experience of the aesthetics in high level mathematics to paint faces of women that stand prominent in my visual history in the hope to question the ideas that correlate the two and the ramifications that might emanate from any tangible success in such an endeavour.

When I returned to my studio, I started working on my ideas for a new series of paintings. I knew that beauty is the motivating factor for mathematics. Truth is its goals. Mathematical truths tell us something about our reality. It can tell us something about beauty. How can I garner my experience of beauty and elegance in mathematics to explaining beauty in general? How can I do this thru my paintings?

After years of agonizing over these questions and with two intervening separate series of paintings entitled ‘Symbiosis’ and ‘source_code’, I started working on ideas stemming from subjective simplicity, fractal geometry and factor analysis to paint my FACES series. The most important idea in FACES is the purest and rarefied thought in the abstraction in relation of relationships that is coded into the mathematics behind faces. These ideas are used to build powerful and compact mathematical objects which embody the beauty in both mathematics and the faces of women I have known in my life. These are then used to construct my FACES series of paintings.

I invite my audience to view my paintings through a sieve – a sieve made of mathematical objects that pack a substantial amount of information on the way we might view beauty. I invite my viewers to engage not analytically, neither synthetically, but in a way that combines both modes and feel/intuit the correspondence in the aesthetics of the combined beauty of my mathematics and the underlying beauty of my faces.

But most of all I want my audience to evaluate mathematics and its place in our lives. Is mathematics something necessary for life as “art” and not just “fact” and does its value lie in, as Polkinghorne said, as an “abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe”, or is it the most self-flattering, self-aggrandizing trivia game ever invented?

My paintings are beautiful paintings of beautiful people about beauty, both physical and mathematical. The suffused beauty of my paintings takes precedence over any intellectual legitimacy that I may claim for them. And perhaps the mathematical equivalent of lovely might even act as the perfect sieve to reveal a new dimension to this supreme force of human experience affecting real and lasting transformation in us. Art and maths are but languages through which we attempt to understand that which is ineffable.

- Raj (Web: www.unprimed.com
Artblog: http://sightoracle.blogspot.com )

Art world Power List

2007-10-27T07:20:00.000+08:00

Top: Francois Pinault (owner of Christie's)
Sixth: Damien Hirst

See here

Mathematics - most self-flattering, self-aggrandizing trivia game ever invented?

2007-10-26T09:45:00.000+08:00

I found the following ambigram and an inspiring little essay on the equal sign in mathematics by John Langdon. I thought I would share it with you.

MATHEMATICS

Mathematics is a coded language through which we can assure the gods that we are not unaware of what is going on around us. Or it may be the most self-flattering, self-aggrandizing trivia game ever invented. The English philosopher Bertrand Russell seems to have seen these two points of view. He said that mathematics "possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere... yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show." He also wrote that math "may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true."

We have found about a zillion ways of dressing up the equals sign. You can put x on one side and (-b ± √(b2 - 4ac)) / 2a on the other. You can put E on the left and mc2 on the right, or 1 on one side and 1 on the other. You can add (5 + 5 = 10), subtract (5 - 5 = 0), multiply (5 x 5 = 25), and divide (5 / 5 = 1). Do with numbers what you will, it all comes down to the equal sign. The rest is symmetry.

Did human beings always know that they had the same number of digits (!) on both their right and left hands? I prefer to think that one day, shortly after the dawn of Homo Sapiens, one individual came running back to the cave with that exciting discovery. "How obvious," we think. "E = mc2 !" "How obvious," the gods think.
"There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will," said Hamlet. There is an order to the universe, and starting with the person who discovered the symmetries of the extremities, continuing through the present with formulators of theories about "string," galactic bubbles, DNA, dark matter, chaos, particles, and white holes, we human beings understand some percentage of that order. "Divinity," as Shakespeare wrote the word, with a lower-case d, could be interpreted to mean "divine-ness," not necessarily as "God." And what could be more divine that the fact that sunflowers, Norfolk Island pines, lizards and snowflakes use the same system we do?

The Taoists must have felt that human beings are part of that system. Their observations of nature guided their principles and their approach to life. But their focus was as much on the concept of opposition as on the idea of equality. The Taoists may or may not have been impressed that 5 = 5 or that 2 + 3 = 5. Symbolically speaking, they would likely have focused on the fact that the numbers in question were on opposite sides of the equal sign. Observing the sun and the moon, man and woman, night and day, they concluded that opposites are equal, and in balance.

The graphic inspiration behind the equal sign is not terribly well disguised: two separate elements of identical length in close juxtaposition - two things that are equal. The gods may have been satisfied when we realized that things that appear to be different can actually be the same. We can hope so, as we haven't progressed much beyond that theme.

Every specific proof depends on that symmetry. Every piece of art in some way responds to the concept of repetition and variation. Things are different, yet ultimately the same. Chaos, according to the Bible, is what preceded Creation. What follows is its opposite - order. Is chaos, then, equal to order? Yes, in that they are the two states in which we can imagine the existence of all things. Does order depend on awareness?

In any case, mathematics is our security blanket. As long as we have it, we can feel that our lives make sense - rough-hew them how we may.

MATHEMATICS ambigram and essay, Copyright John Langdon 1992, 1999. All rights reserved. See www.johnlangdon.net

Does beauty play a role in evolution?

2007-10-23T12:08:00.000+08:00

Q:Does beauty play a role in evolution?

When choosing a wife, almost all men prefer beautiful women, and the standards of beauty seem to be universal across races and cultures. So I assume the preference to beautiful women is in our gene. How did we get to this?

A:What an excellent question. Something I have wondered about for many years. The short answer to your question is YES.

Before going further we need to consider what is meant by "beauty". This is always a bit awkward when it comes to modern human beings. But it is this definition that is what you are asking. As you noted, there does seem to be a universal sense of beauty. Ultimately beauty seems to be defined by symmetry.

A useful overview of the issues of female beauty can be found at
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology/b103/f01/web1/ekanayake.html
This also discusses a little about the waist to hip ratio issue.

But how did we get to this?

There are a couple of theories. One main principle is that a when selecting a mate especially within in human populations one key feature is the ability to nuture and protect the young. The classic example is the waist to hip ratio of a woman probably says something about her ability to carry off-spring.

But with regard to more subtle issues, particularly of facial features, the connection is less clear. One aspect of facial beauty (also of body beauty overall) is symmetry. There is some evidence to suggest that symmetry of body indicates the level of health of the individual. One major health factor for many animals is what the parasite load of an individual is.

A key piece of research related to this can be found by Anders Pape
Møller

"There is considerable evidence for secondary sexual characters in a wide variety of organisms reliably reflecting levels of parasite infections (Møller 1990), and studies of a diverse array of plants and animals show that parasites render their hosts more asymmetric and hence less attractive than unparasitized individuals (Møller 1996). This is also the case in humans: Men throughout the cultures of the
world value female beauty higher than any other attribute, but the importance of beauty is the highest in cultures with serious impact of parasites such as malaria, schistosomiasis and similarly virulent parasites (Gangestad and Buss 1993). "

the orginal source is at
http://www.mindship.org/moller.htm

With regard to the specifics of facial beauty of females ( and possibly males too ) there is an excellent list of scientific papers located at:
http://digilander.libero.it/linguaggiodelcorpo/beauty/

Aspects of facial bone structure also may allow for subconcious measurement of symmetry of a person and be able to get a sense of how healthy they are. There was a series on the BBC about the human face that may provide even more insight and this can be found at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/humanface/index.shtml

However all is not lost. Here is an easy to read article from NewScientist magazine that suggests that being ugly at may be a useful reproductive strategy
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991239

Also from newscientist there is some evidence that beauty wins out over youth in the partner selection game of life
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9999940

But in conclusion it is likely that male(or female) perception of female beauty is a result of evolution to suggest something about the overall health of person. Beauty is selected for because it gives the greatest chance of healthy off-spring in the most efficient way.

________________________________________
Q: The answer and comments are very helpful. But they haven't completlely quieted my inquiring mind yet.

I don't how much I should believe the parasite theory. It doesn't sound very convincing.

My biggest question is for woman's facial beauty. It is easier to accept men's preference to women's figure beauty, such as the right waist/hip ratio, because it is biology relevant. But in our time, facial beauty has nothing to do with a woman's ability to bear healthy children.

People mention facial symmetry, but symmetry and beauty are two different things; it may be true that most beautiful faces are symmetric, but only certain symmetric faces are beautiful. It is not hard to find perfectly symmetric but unattractive faces. I think symmetry is just a (overly) simplification of beauty that scientists
make, so they can measure and quantify.

Is it possible that our preference of woman's facial beauty (assuming it is in our gene) is just a fossil feature that was formed during a certain period of evolution but has no biological relavance of the present-day human?

A: Female facial beauty is a very interesting issue.

You are correct, attractivness(or beauty) is not simply dependent on symmetry. There have been various studies that look at skin complexion also. I recall a study once that indicated a preference for certain facial types that females choose which their view of attractive men changes depending on where they are in their menstrual cycle.

You also state that " But in our time, facial beauty has nothing to do with a woman's ability to bear healthy children." . It seems that hormone levels have an influence on how subcutaneous fat is distributed in the face.

This idea is discussed in an article by Natalie Angier at
http://fig.cox.miami.edu/~bhoward/bil150/Man_woman.html
Discusses a number of studies in relation to faces including babyfaceness here is a little quote from the article " By the Perrett scenario, social skills like cooperativeness, honesty and gentleness proved generically desirable in the early stages of human evolution. Because such nurturing traits are associated with femaleness and juvenileness, the appeal of the feminine, youthful look became
pansexual, and helped to counter such standard engines of sexual dimorphism as competition between males."

Some typical features are the cheek bones, though it turns out not to be neccessarily bone but rather the distribution of subcutaneuous fat.

Your last comment about 'a fossil feature during a period of evolution' is the key issue. It is possible that these features evolved at a time before language/speech had evolved and provided a means of communicating their health status.

An interesting article by Jürgen Schmidhuber analysed facial beauty using fractal geometry. The abstract states that " They yield a short algorithmic description of all facial characteristics, many of which are compactly encodable with the help of simple feature detectors similar to those observed in mammalian brains. This suggests that a face's beauty correlates with simplicity relative to the subjective
observer's way of encoding it."
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/locoface/newlocoface.html

So there could well be a gene (or more likely several) in our brain
that sets up a recognition of beauty/attractivness.

There is also a site that does a geometrical analysis of the face at
http://www.beautyanalysis.com/index2_mba.htm
That is worth investigating.

I think that you would find these books useful in your investigation of this topic. Summaries and reviews are available from the links provided:

The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
by Naomi Wolf
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0385423977/
Argues that standards of beauty are thrust upon society through the media.

Survival of the Prettiest : The Science of Beauty
by Nancy L. Etcoff
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0385478542/
"Survival of the Prettiest argues persuasively that looking good has survival value, and that sensitivity to beauty is a biological adaptation governed by brain circuits shaped by natural selection."

I am currently unable to escape the notion that standards of beauty change over time, which might indicate that, in addition to any evolutionary or genetic basis for beauty, we are conditioned to find certain people beautiful. Also, some people differ in who they deem beautiful, though norms can be documented.

For example, compare voluptuous film stars and "pin-ups" from the first half of the 20th century, to "Twiggy" or Goldie Hawn in the 1960's, to today's Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. The further one travels back in time, the more variety in the standard of beauty one will discover.

Bombshells: Jayne Mansfield
http://www.bombshells.com/jayne/gallery/color/index.shtml

Swingin' Chicks: Twiggy
http://www.swinginchicks.com/twiggy.htm

Sports Illustrated: Heidi Klum
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/features/2002/swimsuit/gallery/heidi/6.html

Women also prefer handsome men, though this has been downplayed in mainstream culture. My own theory suggests that men don't want to be seen as ornamental and have to measure up to a woman's standards, so he compensates for his looks with money, job, etc.

Women today strive for the "hanger" look that fashion models possess.Men and women alike don't immediately recognize or understand the reason behind the very slim look (especially unnaturally slim or "boyish" hips on a female) comes from the fashion industry itself where women are paid to be walking hangers. Clothing must drape a
certain way, and clothing is the number one priority. Therefore the clothing takes precedence and a designer won't want a woman's natural features such as breasts, hips, etc. "marring" the line a dress would have when on a hanger.

In the survival of the fittest, biology would dictate that men seek women without very slim hips because of their inability to properly carry children. But the media today has heavily influenced society in what it believe is the "right" and "good" way to look. Thus Marilyn Monroe is being called "fat" today (a misnomer when you are comparing a "human female" with a "female hanger")and Courteney Cox (who is
gaunt, drawn and feeble looking) is seen as the embodiment of health and good fortune.

The only other theory I hold is that slim women are seen as weaker by males and thus easier to dominate. Larger, more robust women are seen as "masculine" and therefore a challenge to the fragile male ego. Items such as high heels and corsets were/are also used to keep women subdued. A woman can not outrun an attacker in high heels and heels as well as corsets present harm to the bones, back, legs, and internal
organs.

Beauty still is in the eye of the beholder. I personally don't believe "beauty" is evolutionary but the concept of beauty as maintained and fed by the massive media surely is. If we were looking at things from a survival standpoint, beauty doesn't save your life in and of itself, but a "beautiful" woman would be more protected, such as a fine item or an "ivory box" (to quote from E.M. Forster) would be protected. Thus woman is seen as thing, as ornament, while man continues to be
seen only as instrument.

Women's desires for a Brad Pitt over a Michael Douglas are often ignored, and this we have media rife with images of morbidly obese, old, balding, "ugly" men often paired with slim, young, "beautiful" women.

The question is, why has evolution/men continued to ignore women's desires? And why aren't more attractive men seen from a biological standpoint as having stronger potential children and virility?

Taken from here.

The Function of Beauty

2007-10-22T10:04:00.000+08:00

The Function of Beauty

According to Kant, beauty has no function beyond the pleasure it generates. As much as this view influenced philosophical discourse, it did not satisfy natural scientists and social and cultural researchers.

Beauty and sexual selection.
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) sought to answer the question: how has natural beauty been acquired and what is its purpose? He rejects the idea that beauty in nature is a merely arbitrary outcome of physical forces. Darwin believed that the beautiful colors and diversified patterns we see in butterflies, moths, fish, birds, and other creatures must be beneficial in some way. In The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), he presents the theory that beauty is a result of accumulative sexual selection. Studying mating rituals among various species, Darwin concludes that the animals' splendid decorations, their pomp and display, could not be inconsequential, and that it is impossible to doubt that the female admires the beauty of her male partner. This contrasts with the traditional view expressed by Burke (1767) that beauty is feminine, while the sublime is masculine.

Kant states that only humans are capable of appreciating beauty. Darwin insists that the origin of the ability to notice beauty (and appreciate it as such) is the same for animals and humans. Yet he agrees that humans' perception of beauty is far more complex than that of animals and involves cultural values and traditions. He examined courting customs in different cultures and confirmed that beauty plays an equally central role in choosing mates, in spite of cultural differences.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) concurs with Darwin as to the origin and role of beauty in human life. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud asserts that there is no doubt that beauty originates in sexual feelings, and that all forms of pleasure are related to sexual love. According to Darwin and Freud, the function of beauty is universal, but the variety of its manifestations coheres with cultural relativism. Tattoos serve as a beautifying means in one culture and are condemned in another. The Makalalo women used to pierce their upper lips and place a ring in it. Piercing, until recently regarded as esoteric in Western culture, is now commonplace in Western society. Facial hair (beard or mustache) is thought to enhance masculine beauty in Western culture. While the American Indians considered facial hair vulgar, they appreciated long hair for men. However, the passion for beauty and the readiness to suffer to achieve it are similar in all cultures.

Naomi Wolf, an active feminist, denies that this is true. She rejects the idea that beauty answers genuine, universal needs. Beauty, according to Wolf, is a myth created during the industrial revolution and used ever since by men to manipulate women for their own interest. Beauty, she holds, is not universal and is not a function of evolution. The readiness of women to suffer in order to achieve the false ideal of beauty indicates the dominance of men and confirms male manipulation. Thus, according to Wolf, the female suffering for beauty is not a genuine product of evolutionary forces (1991). Camille Paglia criticizes this kind of feminist approach for concentrating on images of beauty of the last century and for failing to encompass a broad historical view. Paglia places the origin of beauty in ancient Egypt (1991).

In contrast to Wolf's position, Nancy Etcoff argues that beauty is a powerful and genuine element in everyday life. She agrees with Darwin that beauty influences sexual choice, but she goes on to argue that it influences all aspects of life from early childhood on. Beauty is not the result of political or economical manipulation, but rather the other way around: due to its strong impact, beauty is used as a means of achieving political and economic ends. Beauty, according to Etcoff, is not a product of a certain period in history; its origin, rather, lies in human nature itself (1999).

Beauty and art.
Art was traditionally considered a source of beauty; some even argued that natural beauty is subordinated to artistic beauty. Plato, however, separated art and beauty into two independent concepts: real beauty reflects truth, while art is a deceiving imitation of nature. Aristotle, by contrast, held that good art is beautiful and that, therefore, the two are inseparable: a good work of art is a beautiful work. The Aristotelian aesthetic tradition prevailed for centuries, but it was the eighteenth century that gave rise to the idea that creating beauty is the essential purpose of art.

Kant holds that good art is beautiful, although it differs significantly from natural beauty: a good work of art is a beautiful representation. A representation can be beautiful even if its subject matter is not beautiful. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) argues that beauty is the essential feature of art, and natural beauty is a reflection of artistic beauty (Aesthetics, 1835). In this view, beauty reflects intentional creation, not incidental results of blind, natural forces. The poet Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) associates art with freedom and beauty: we arrive at freedom through artistic beauty, since it is a product of intentional, free choice (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795). The comparison between artistic and natural beauty led Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) to the observation that life and nature imitate art far more than art imitates life or nature. Art is the creation of beauty; life and nature constitute its raw materials (The Decay of Lying, 1894). Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) similarly states that the sense of natural beauty is a derivative of artistic beauty. Beauty of nature cannot be explained unless one regards it as the work of a divine creator. Beauty, according to Croce, is a synonym of intuition and expression, and these refer to the artistic form. The content of the work is beautiful only when wrought into form.

Robin G. Collingwood (1889–1943) defines art as an attempt to achieve beauty (Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, 1925). However, his viewpoint did not gain influence in the twentieth century. The prevailing analytical trend preferred, it would seem, clear-cut, definable notions and has not been conducive to the study of the paradoxical nature of beauty, its ambiguous logical status, and the endless disputes over matters of taste. Thus, beauty has been dismissed as a vague and insignificant concept and considered irrelevant to art. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) remarks in this analytical vein that beauty is an odd word that is hardly ever used (Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, 1938). John A. Passmore states that there is something suspicious about the notion of beauty, and that artists seem to get along quite well without it. He associates beauty with kitsch and bourgeois art (1954).

The association of beauty with superficiality and tranquil bourgeois life stood in contrast to the revolutionary spirit of modern art and the general atmosphere between the two world wars and after. Detaching beauty from art became common practice. According to Curt J. Ducasse (1881–1969), there is no essential connection between art and beauty. Art is an attempt to express feelings, and artists may intend to create or express ugliness in their work (The Philosophy of Art, 1966). Nelson Goodman (1906–1998) argued that many of the best paintings are, in the most obvious sense, ugly. Beauty, according to Goodman, is a vague and deceptive concept, while art is a kind of language that has no essential bond with beauty (Languages of Art, 1968). The influential and much-discussed institutional definition of art presented by George Dickie (1974) similarly bypasses the notion of beauty.

Mary Mothersill strongly criticizes the wide neglect of beauty and its detachment from art. She argues that the idea of beauty is indispensable and taken for granted in art criticism, because although critics do not explicitly refer to beauty, the idea is implicit in their criticism (1984). Mothersill's analysis of beauty reflects a change in approach. By the turn of the century we witness the growth of a renewed interest in various aspects of beauty. Wilfried Van Damme examines the anthropological perspective of beauty (1996). Eddy M. Zemach defends the objectivity of aesthetic properties and their empirical testability (1997). James Kirwan studies the history of the concept in order to illuminate the experience of beauty (1999). Peg Zeglin Brand examines the role and significance of beauty in social life and in relation to gender (2000). Lorand offers a theory of aesthetic order that revives the connection between beauty and art (2000), and Nick Zangwill rethinks the metaphysics of beauty (2001). These and other contemporary studies confirm that beauty is central to human experience in spite of its neglect in the discourse of the last century. The genuine vitality of beauty is bound to intrigue the reflective mind and inspire further investigations of its nature.

Taken from here

A Case For Beauty

2007-10-22T09:17:00.000+08:00

A Case For Beauty

by Jan Cannon

For some years a discussion has been going on among a number of people interested in ceramics and the visual arts about whether or not pottery should be considered an art, along with the "Fine Arts" of painting and sculpture. Before determining whether or not pottery is capable of artistic expression, we must first know exactly what "art" is. The American Heritage Dictionary defines art as "the conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium." Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, recognized the central role of beauty in art when he noted that art's primary function was to ". . . educate the perception of beauty."

Beauty is a quality rarely addressed in contemporary art, although considering artistic works in relation to beauty would lead to a more universal means of appreciation and a more enduring aesthetic. It would also diminish the susceptibility of museums and galleries to fads and the commercially motivated quest for the "new." Some people object to such a criterion on the grounds that it is too subjective, but I argue that any other method of evaluation is too variable and egocentric to be of real value. Beauty, as a manifestation of pure consciousness, synonymous with peace, love and joy, is the true basis of our being and the one constant of our existence.

Difficulties in determining what is genuinely beautiful, or art, arise from the tendency to rely on the intellect. Instead, intuition should be the primary faculty used in creating and appreciating art. The rational faculty, of course, may be appropriately used in making art and I do not mean to imply that intuition is in conflict with reason--just that the rational faculty comes more into play in the expressive, as opposed to the perceptive, aspects of the creative process. Consequently its role is secondary to that of intuition in making and evaluating art. Even though using intuition may be an uncomfortable prospect for many, because it is beyond the proof of the intellect, the creative worker or critic who ignores this faculty does so at the risk of aesthetic irrelevance. Referencing aesthetic creations to an absolute quality such as beauty, using the faculty of intuition, seems a more practicable and reliable method for deepening our understanding of creative works.

Contemporary artists tend to emphasize technique and process, frequently at the expense of beauty. Critics similarly overlook beauty in their attempts to understand and appreciate artistic works. Although considerable skill is employed in the making of much of today's "art," and much energy is spent analyzing it, the undervaluing of beauty renders it ultimately unsatisfying. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his essay on art:

"The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation, from the work of art, of human character,--a wonderful expression, through stone or canvas or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature."

He observed in the same essay:

"As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker. High beauty is no longer attainable by him in canvas or in stone, in sound or in lyrical construction; an effeminate, prudent, sickly beauty, which is not beauty, is all that can be formed; for the hand can never execute any thing higher than the character can inspire."

Emerson felt that ". . . genius left to novices the gay and fantastic and ostentatious, and itself pierced directly to the simple and true." In his view, the traits common to the highest works of art are ". . . that they are universally intelligible, that they restore to us the simplest states of mind, and are religious." In contrast, much contemporary work seems overly narrow and personal, almost algebraic. Values are assigned to symbols and the initiated decode the works and proclaim the experience art. This is not art; it is mathematics without discipline. Others attempt philosophy or social commentary in their work. Such themes are completely inappropriate in art and are better served in other ways, such as by designing or flying space shuttles, writing essays or letters to the editor, or by making financial contributions to worthwhile causes. It is sad that so many people have abandoned beauty for such superficial attempts at intellectual legitimacy or social relevance when beauty, one of the supreme forces of human experience, is so capable of affecting real transformation in the human being and society.

The conceptual approach to art is further limited by its dependence upon narrative. To the degree that a person is engaged by narrative or reasoning in experiencing visual art--whether in trying to answer a question posed by the "artist," or in trying to place the piece in reference to some other piece, or by any other intellectual consideration--to that degree the possibilities for a true artistic experience are limited. True artistic experience takes place prior to intellection.

Pottery's freedom from the necessity of narrative is one of its greatest strengths. It can exist simply as line in relation to line, as texture, as dynamic volume, as color in relation to color; it may even be utilitarian. This, of course, is not to say that anything with an identifiable reference is flawed. Reference to natural imagery, for example, may simply be an excuse for a line or color or texture. An artist, as nature's agent, has a right to these designs and is wise to study them. Artists surrendering to nature will find their work becoming an act of that great original force rather than merely an abstraction of it.

Clay has tremendous potential for artistic expression and is capable of communicating the great aesthetic themes as well as any medium. Minerals made plastic by water and shaped by a human hand, hardened by air and fire, existing in, and at times containing space; that these, the most basic elements of creation, can affect a transcendental experience is truly magical.

We are in the midst of a process that is so much larger than we can imagine. I think, for all of the seeming importance of contemporary art and ceramics, that history will not take notice of much of the work being made now, unfavorably or otherwise; much of it being so profoundly insignificant. That alone which is beautiful will last, its place secure in the stream of thousands of years of culture. May we revel in the perception of that great Beauty from which we have come.

Taken from here