Snippets: Gillman Barracks, Dec 2014

When most exhibition spaces in Gillman Barracks closed during year-end, Singaporean galleries Fost and Yeo Workshop extend a neighbour’s welcome by staying open. A new visitor’s disappointment is soothed when viewing Amsterdam-based Xue Mu’s astonishing works in the latter space. Thin black cloth with moon images are suspended from the ceiling, its folding screens-like arrangement actually referencing the Monoceros constellation. The surprise continues when observing its wall prints, as the unsettling moon pictures are revealed to be microscopic snapshots of bath foam in a black tub. As Jesse van Winden’s catalogue essay states, “(t)hey are reconstructed constellations of another order, of the personal subconscious and the collective conscious, like meta-Rorschach imagery in the white cubes of contemporary art.“

“A Childish Nothingness 2014” series of photographs mesmerise with its juxtaposition of objects on a tactile background. Use of an advertising-grade technical camera render captivating pictures out of toys, shoes, and bananas on marble tiles. One greyscale ‘Moon Map’ acts as the literal vanishing point and background for dead stuff and a crumpled roll of white ribbon, the meta-composition translating scrap into pictorial markers. Onto a different critique, the red and blue golf ball in ‘Ball Etc’, attracts visual interest and isolates one’s perception of colour. Shadows cast in these images emphasise the materiality of things seen from a top-down perspective; the artist also displays such three-dimensional and seemingly incompatible objects within Perspex boxes. Pacing between print and physical object, perspective breaks down and the essence of things are all that remain.

Deconstructing the medium of film is the apparent approach for Yang Fudong, whose four video installations are exhibited at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art. Visitors enter a room embellished with dark flowery wallpaper, where varying screens and photographs present the same actress in action. Multiple projections of “About the Unknown Girl – Ma Sise” explore the notion of posing for the camera, but its large-scale documentation feels more like peeking into the concealed archives of a stalker. More straightforward is ‘On the Double Dragon Hills’, a fascinating black & white sequence made from the footage of ‘Blue Kylin’. Human industry and mechanical power describe process actions at a stone quarry, as strategic edits ensure visual interest is sustained across two channels, its depicted arduous movements emitting a drone despite the silent projection.

Undeniably the exhibition highlight, ‘The Fifth Night (II) Rehearsal’ shows the output of seven monitors connected to seven cameras shooting seven different scenes simultaneously. Muted characters pace about a movie set which backgrounds overlap, as the occasional dramatic event punctuates the night time silence. The obvious viewfinder and grainy images (a monitor fails towards the end) emphasise the “preview film” and the aphorism “真假流露”, two concepts mentioned by the artist in an insightful 2012 interview. Fudong’s deep knowledge of film-making, presents itself via the experimentation of technical aspects like lenses, angles, and tracking speed, as narrative becomes the reason, and not the basis, to advance camera motion. “What is reality?” In this case, a Malaysian art enthusiast sitting in a Singaporean gallery space watching Chinese produced artworks.

– Xue Mu, excerpt of interview with Kris Dittel, “Instead of Going Against… Going Within”, 2014