Enter Into Art Garden

Vicente Delgado’s “Around the Day in 80 Worlds”. Photo credit: Ogilvy Public Relations for Singapore Art Museum.

Vicente Delgado’s “Around the Day in 80 Worlds”. Photo credit: Ogilvy Public Relations for Singapore Art Museum.

The immensely popular Art Garden returns for a 4th year to the Singapore Art Museum, bringing ingenious artworks that sublimely provide superbly immersive experiences I liken to a perfect union of Ai Wei Wei’s lusciously tactile “Sunflower Seeds” installation in the Tate Modern in London and Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies” that spans around all walls, from floor to ceiling, in the basement gallery at the Musee De l’Orangerie in Paris.

Step into French artist, Julien Salaud’s “Stellar Cave II” and find your self transported to the UNESCO World Heritage listed Lascaux caves in south-western France, famous for its Paleolithic caves paintings of animal herds stone age men had been inspired by the arrangement of stars in the sky to draw.

Only Salaud does one better in creating this art work: he brings the animal constellations into his darkened cave, magically weaving their splendidly inter-locked forms within complex webs of countless yearns of simple white thread. And by setting these mythically alight in an aura of azure blue, he mesmerizes you with a night sky that sublimely twinkles beyond the brilliance of a star spangled clear night covering Australia in spring time.

And if some of your nights have been haunted by harrowing dreams, French artist Stephane Blanquet’s “Glossy Dreams in Depths” will drive your persistent fear of them away. Just lie on his comfy bed in a cheerily decorated child’s bedroom and be swiveled away to confront the nasty hologram conjured demons that dominate your nightmares.

If that does not fully cure you, Blanquet prescribes a second dose: just walk through your childhood wardrobe to confront those eerie 3-dimensional creatures creeping through all the dark corners of your fertile mind.

Then celebrate your victory by softly whispering, loudly shouting and melodically singing into the microphone set up in Mojoko and Shang Lang’s “Incredibly Magical Expanding Room”. The walls will elatedly break into dance – conjuring up a riot of ever changing psychedelic patterns, so reminiscent of the multi-hued wallpapers that were ever so popular in the 1970s.

That will set you in the mood to impishly curl up with Singaporean artist Sandra Lee’s “The Enchanted Garden City”, where she sets your expansive imagination adorably alight with well-loved fairy tales delightfully peppered with her uniquely Asian twists.

You get to meet Rapunzel in a splendor of Indian sari letting down her ever flowing endless locks to her prince charming heroically riding his majestic elephant, a sarong kebaya-ed Little Red Riding Hood walking through the lushly green dense forests dotted with HDB blocks to get to grandma’s, whose friendly neighbour is the Old Woman who lives in an antiqued Chinese shoe!

Do not let the creatively Singaporean-spiced fairy tales lull you to lullaby land though. You have only just scratched the surface with your entrance into the best ever Art Garden exhibition yet.

Instead let Lee’s take on how the East marries the West in Singapore pump you up for yet more equally enthralling works of art by Dawn Ng, Vicente Delgado, Sun Yu-Ii and the students and staff of the National University of Singapore Architecture School.

Children will also adore the fantastic hands on activities and fun-filled animated short films as they while their lazy school holiday afternoons happily away.

Where is Art Garden 2013 brilliantly installed in the Singapore Art Museum? Why, at 8Q, which sits at 8 Queen Street, Singapore 188535.

Adults unaccompanied by children will be delighted to know that this exciting event only ends on 1 September 2013, well after the local schools’ 2nd academic semester begins towards the end of June.

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