The Three Second Recap of Things I Saw This Week1. Takashi Kuribayashi's Trees for Imaginarium at 8QSAM. An installation of cut up sections of a real tree, encased in glass boxes and reassembled, from leaf to root.
2. aSita, at the Queen Street pop-up gallery space, Artspace@222. Group exhibition exploring negation of whiteness (Homa Shojaie, Alison Wilson (whose Wessex Estate studio I'd visited once on an ArtWalk) with Dominic Fonde, Marc Nair, and a few others. Small, self-contained, with dance performance was by Syv Bruzeau, the butoh artist (single ticketed performance on Friday, I went in on Tues and merely saw the video of her careful, some might even say mincing, needlepoint footwork. Footwork makes me hold my breath.)
3. LASALLE graduation show: I can't say the Fine Arts show impressed except for some Japanese abstracts and Tinu Verghis's performance art / video installation with her skin and dress of rice grains, and the Media arts was a bit of a mixed bag (but not unsophisticated) but the Design show (comprising interior design, product design, design communication (mostly graphic design) and fashion/textiles) was full of interesting surprises (but is my surprise also condescending -- because such pleasure one takes in viewing a graduation show should simply be delight or pride that our young people are doing so well -- surprise implies low expectations...) Picked up a bunch of name cards: would love to give work to these students if I had an event to plan.
4. Among the many excellent things they do TAV has since 2011 been administering Art Residencies on Pulau Ubin; I dropped in at this year's post-residency artist talk. In part for the art but in part because I wanted to see the TAV Hindoo Road headquarters -- I do wish I had the income to afford the lease on a shophouse in such a colourful district (for to be perfectly honest I don't generally like artists talking about their works -- that is to say I quite like hearing about the technical process of creating their work and I even like background colour and context, but I do dislike any kind of attempt to present me with their interpretative angle on their work. Likewise I find I avoid openings not simply because the art disappears as backdrop to socialising, and I have nothing to say to the artists but platitudes that neither they nor I believe.) One or two interesting moments, including two songs by Inch Chua. Exhibition proper to come.
5. Boo Junfeng's 2010 feature film 'Sandcastle', free screening (first of a series) by Flamingo Flicks, The Commons at The Working Capitol (second visit -- I also want a working space here!) Rather well done (it doesn't suffer from the attempt to explain to a Western audience) and deftly edited but the screenplay could have been much tighter. But it was a sensitive, personal film, without exaggeration and manipulativeness and overt tearjerk moments, and fits particularly well with the present wave of national nostalgia about that era of Singapore history. The two ladies beside me were wiping away tears at the end. (It is also a pleasure to hear so much Hokkien spoken, maybe especially for my generation, who are still familiar with the language in daily life but the first generation to have been discouraged from speaking it, even, perhaps, the first generation where many had half-pinyin names tagged to traditional surnames.) Also, a clandestine drive to Johor with a senile grandmother sneaked out of a nursing home and the attempt to recover family history which recalled the madcap drive to Wales in Saffy's Angel.
