Representing 3-Dimensionally

The first major member’s show of Sculpture Society (Singapore) (SSS) is simply called the “Sculpture Society (Singapore) Exhibition 2006”, no buzzword is used and no specific theme is prescribed for the artists. Straightforward it may seem, one could, however, still be slightly troubled by some of the unsettling points here. Foremost is the word “sculpture” – what kind of “sculpture”? Traditional? Modern? Postmodern? The word “Singapore” is placed in an awkward pair of parentheses. Is this a hint that the element of “Singapore” is not essential? Should one take it into account when viewing the show? Or is it merely indicative of the exhibition’s and the society’s geographical location? What if the show was Sculpture Show “Africa”, or “Indonesia”? Would one have less trouble in trying to envisage what would one sees in the show?

It could be just my personal anxiety, although the issue of artistic identity had been a specifically troublesome one for local artist. While not everyone is interested in or concerned exclusively about this, the subject is essential in that it is capable of providing channels for the understanding of how art embodies and displays recognizable aspects of our selfhood, community and nation. However, our predicament seem destined from the beginning. Marco Hsu, writing in the early 1960s shortly before our independence, aptly illustrates the situation in A Brief History of Malayan Art:

“Malaya is often called a cultural desert: is it that bad in reality? This is definitely a question worthy of debate. What an Englishman may regard as his cultural heritage, are probably the excellent literary works, Shakespearean theatre, as well as paintings in the National Gallery: these of course cannot be seen in Malaya. What a mainland Chinese may regard as his cultural heritage, are perhaps the Chinese cultural artifacts, the abundant literature, and the refined and graceful paintings: this cannot be wished for in a maturing Malaya. What a mainland Indian may consider as his cultural heritage, are the ancient Buddhist stupas, caves and Hindu temples; the art, sculpture and architectural splendour displayed in them, as well as its glorious epics and poems, music and dances: these cannot be claimed as Malaya. If one uses such criteria to measure Malaya, then we can only conclude that it is indeed a cultural desert.”[i]

It is ironic that our seeming “cultural poverty” is in fact an effect of our cultural diversity. But this anxiety will quickly slip into a newfound confidence as we soon embrace the nation’s miraculous success in terms of economy. The acceptance of western culture is legitimized as alternative and strategy for the process of modernization necessary in nation building. In an article of year 2001, local art critic Lee Weng Choy writes:

“Singapore imagines itself not just as taking the best from the East and the West – the inheritor of great traditions and the latest technologies – but, by offering itself as the paradigm of “New Asia,” Singapore stakes a claim as the vanguard of the next stage of capitalism. Singapore is the all-appropriating agent, modernity’s idealized tabula rasa…”[ii]

From language to food, popular culture to the fine arts, the clash and negotiation between traditions and modern western influence become an integral part of our life. It is characteristic that our cultural products are often blended with both local/traditional and western/foreign elements, and is almost always a bid of a “hybrid”. The fact that it is “hybrid” can set us feeling uneasy, as we are used to modernism’s demand (which we inherited through colonialism) for “originality” and cultural purity. In Modernity In Asian Art, John Clark observes that,

“Because many parts of Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were forced to redefine themselves via their reaction to contact with, and often depredation at the hands of an “other”, the forms of modernity its cultures adopted seemed to many Euramericans to be derivative, secondary, disingenuous and inauthentic. The zone of autonomous cultural energy which drove their adaptations was ignored; their own developments and re-positionings of “other” forms were forcibly concealed beneath the iron mask of Euramerican ignorance.”[iii]

At this juncture, the trends in postcolonial thinking come in timely to provide sets of alternative ideas to counter the western, hegemonic discourse. Homi Bhabha’s belief in cultural heterogeneity and the "subversive effects of hybridisation", for example, suggests solutions for issues closely related to our cultural condition. He suggests that cultural hybridity or "linguistic multivocality" is capable of intervening and dislocating the process of domination through re-interpretation and re-deployment of received discourse. From there, critical attention can be forwarded towards the "agonistic space" which exists on the borders of difference, along the edges of alterity, where cultures meet[iv].

Even thou visual arts as it is practice here may seem to be derivative from the west, but as Kwok Kian Chow points out in Channels and Confluences, that “in the Singapore context where there had been a strong presence of Chinese migrant culture, it should also be mentioned that, according to ancient texts individual creativity in China can be traced back to the fourth century.”[v] He proposes that “personal expression is universal where brushes and paints are but channels for individual enunciation.” I often think it is no mere coincidence that creation myth from different cultures should have much similarities, that the world of human existence have to begin with sculptural acts by the hand of a personified god or deity may have something to do about the universal, human’s instinct to project will upon materials he could manipulate.

As the SSS Exhibition gathers thirty-two artists from three generations, the 3D works on display may perhaps offer glimpses into the complexity of the local art traditions and offers the opportunity to examine issues of our artistic identity alongside the connection we have with western legacies.

According to Marco Hsu, the story of sculpture in Singapore begins with mainly monuments produced by foreign sculptors. While there are some local carvers and idol makers who work on images of gods and headstone of graves, their works were however, “cannot be said to have inherent artistic content”. Only until after “waves of artistic influence emanating from Europe…reach a few young artists after the war,”[vi] that we began to see examples of realism sculptures done by local sculptors such as the late Ng Eng Teng, formal advisor of SSS, in around the 1950s.

More than 50 years later, realism is still being practiced by the members of the SSS today. Wee Kong Chai’s colossal Self-Portrait made in the 1970s, Chern Lian Shan’s recent monumental Smile of the Statesman, Toh Khiam Hock’s Rhino, and John Cheung’s The Descent of Man all belong to this trend. But while the early sculptors may have been inspired by western models, realism is not a purely western invention. It is a universal artistic idiom traceable in the arts of many cultures in their expressive need to represent life. Wee Kong Chai’s shift in practice from painting to woodcarving after his return from a 5-year stay in France in the 60s is a respond to the changing landscape of Singapore as he finds the subject for painting became limited. This is also indicative of his intention to redefine a personal artistic idiom and to reinstate his own cultural heritage into new forms in the context of the then (and now) changing reality of our country. The humble images he created through carving trees found in local areas give the work its iconic marking.

Writing for the catalog of the exhibition Sculpture in Singapore in 1991, local art historian TK Sabapathy confesses that he has “leaned towards texts on sculpture in the Anglo-Saxon critical tradition” in order to offer ways for the explanation and understanding of local approaches in practice of sculpture, as there was “an absence of discernible critical enterprise or an extant body of writing on art”[vii]. Drawing mainly from Herbert Read and Rosalind Krauss, Sabapathy presents the dichotomy between a tangible art form endowed with emotive prowess supported by Read, and the constructive possibilities brought by the dematerialization of the art object in a new, “expanded field” affirmed by Krauss. 

In the same article Sabapathy suggests that Han Sai Por’s renditions of nature-inspired abstract forms echo the ideals and values proclaimed by Read. Included in the SSS exhibition this year is Sai Por’s Seed Series. Her vigor simplicity invites the desire to touch and is plumped with sensational quality. Situated at the waterfronts amongst patches of green in the open space, her monumental seeds are almost beautifully realistic, although her works are generally discussed in terms of abstraction.

Abstraction is at the core of modernism in western art arrived from grounds of avant-gardism, originality, and absolute artistic autonomy. Works of Michael Ong and Chang Wei seemed to reflect this tradition in their pursuit of pure form through specific materials. Chua Boon Kee and Sim Lian Huat too, are involved in abstraction. But whilst Michael Ong and Chang Wei’s renditions are endowed with formal aestheticism, the cultural reference in the later two works however, provides other basis from which they could be understood and appreciated. Boon Kee’s rhythmic creation is evocative of two ancient ladies as it is adapted from the Chinese hieroglyphic “Shu Nu” meaning “gentlewoman”. Sim Lian Huat’s Spring Grass is made of small pairs of ritual objects taken from superstitious ceremonies of the local Chinese. In these cases, the adaptation of modernism is then only partial, including Han Sai Por’s deep devotion to redeem the local, tropical sensibilities, their efforts may even be seen as resisting modernization.

Other artists who draw upon cultural idioms and ethos are Sun Yu Li, Ho Chai Hoo, and Tan Sock Fong. Sun’s noble naiveté in Swimming Together derives from Chinese archeological symbols which he sees as original and containing universal elements, Chai Hoo's Sin expresses Chinese and Buddhist ethos through simple forms, while Sock Fong combines western glass-art technique with Chinese poetics.

Another group of younger artists, other then making contacts with culture or tradition through the tangible forms, are more concerned with the tactical employment of “objects” to reflect and articulate life experiences in the contemporary, “postmodern” environment. The postcolonial theory we briefly mentioned is inseparable from the postmodern condition where modernist certainties and logics are said to have collapsed. Upon discerning “the fading of the logic of the monument”, Rosalind Krauss developed her influential notion of “expanded field” where the ideas in sculpture is expanded and opened up to be inclusive of other disciplines that were formerly excluded from the Western hierarchy of the fine arts. In this expanded field, practice is no more defined in relation to a given medium, but is in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms for which any medium is used.[viii]

In order to articulate and express in terms of the complex and the diverse, we could perhaps see the younger artists’ move into such an area as evolutionary and strategic. C.K. Kum’s installation of empty gunny sacks with other readymades in Sagacity 2005 make ironic our state’s present day splendour with our humble coolie history. Chua Aik Boon’s seeming playful manipulation and jargon disarrangement of familiar places in his photographic Untitled (Landscape) is symptomatic and indicative of the ahistorical and the ephemera of our city. Sai Hua Kuan’s spatial creation invents new visual experience and deviates one from the mundane and constraints. Shiah Chyi Yun’s How I records moments of choreographed self-performance to monumentalize and replay memories she treasures. Wang Ruo Bing’s Pava video installation conscientiously captures the living atmosphere found within our everyday life. Agatha Hutton’s installation raises environmental concerns. The site-specific works by Oscar Ng, called Shucks, evokes immediate feminist sentiments as the female torso sits disserted within a window-display setting, ironically decorated and beautify by painful thumbnails inserted onto her. Tan Yen Peng’s Life . Still is her futile attempt to reconcile the lightness of being with object fetish. Jeremy Hiah’s unorthodox style and irony is characteristic of his works. The shadow installation here is disturbing and intriguing; is it a pseudo tribute paid twice removed from his subject of revered, as he parodies Britain’s Jack and Dinos Chapman’s parody of Francesco Goya’s traumatic images from The Disasters of War?

There are other important works that defy straightforward definitions or categories. Yeo Chee Kiong, Tay Swee Siong and Donna Ong’s neo-sculptures are exceptionally emotive. Swee Siong’s time-based For A Human Consequence explores notions of the transient and impermanence. Chee Kiong’s life-size, black image is tactile yet virtual, it calls attention to the fluid nature of perception as the dark figure moves intermittently within the impossibilities of the table surface. On the other hand, Donna Ong’s meticulous Cube Cave is both bewildering and enchanting. Her transparent, deserted foreign lands invite viewers to pry into her minute world, while dismaying them with her hidden secrets told through the absence of her presence.

Baet Yoke Kuan’s Seed, unlike Han Sai Por’s, can be seen as psychic manifestation of social restriction and repression. Lim Soo Ngee’s Tropical Garden conveys poetic sentiments through his carefree assemblage of the mixed-objects. Victor Tan’s unassuming expressionism results as the show’s most mesmerizing and captivating form which visual power is beyond words. Wee Hong Ling’s unique Prayer House No 1 emanates quiet but powerful mysticism with her primitive minimalism. Chng Seok Tin’s Diversity Series I: No. 1 to No. 9 is more than mere sculptures, as she inquisitively and humorously presents us the polemics of definition, interpretation, and identification.

Others such as Daniele Shavia’s mysterious stone-carving reminds us of the forgotten and the archeological, while Lim Guan Huat and Lee Ee Guan attempt to narrate personal believes and life experiences through symbolism.

The cultures and histories of a society is always changing and shaping, it is therefore impossible to articulate identity in one single story. The art that emerges beyond the changing conditions should be viewed as pieces of a broader dialogue to provide insights of the possibilities for different identities. As the British cultural theorist Stuart Hall puts it,

…what the nation “means” is an on-going project, under constant reconstruction. We come to know its meaning partly through the objects and artifacts which have been made to stand for and symbolize its essential values. Its meaning is constructed within, not above or outside representation.[ix]

To continue providing platforms for the finding and findings of local stories, SSS artists must go on to articulate through representations, but not from singular viewpoint, rather, they will represent it 3-dimensionally.