SingartUnearthing Our Natural Side
When I was a little girl, over 40 years ago, the estate I lived in was surrounded by forests. A great way to while the time involved exploring its undergrowth and climbing trees to get a better view of wild hatchlings in nests or to pluck fruit ripe on the vine.
Now my nieces and nephews spend their time cruising on their ipads or in front of the television watching video on demand and ramming their x-boxes: in 1 generation of 48 years of nation building, Singapore has moved from natural past times to a high tech lifestyle.
To enjoyably foster a renewed interest in what truly constitutes our island under the sun and the planet we live in, the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) has brought together a motley crew of pan-Singaporean artists to touch base with our dormant side. The pleasantly surprising result is its current exhibition “Unearthed”.
Starting with this swing of things is Twardzik Ching’s “Real Estate”: it literally indicates what constitutes the true foundations of Singapore’s current urban and built up environment. Ching digs up a sizable plot of land from SAM’s front lawn and exhibits the soil, along with its turf, within; allowing us to observe the colours, textures and detritus forming the earth itself.
This propensity to excavate for urban development has, over the years, resulted in the exhumation of many burial plots across the island. Regina de Rozario’s “Reel/Unreel” video focuses on one such plot – the Bidadari Cemetery. She maps and documents the sites psycho-geography; sweepingly tracing its lush green spaces from the humble ground up to the heavenly sky – leading us in meditation on the cherished past and the equally cherished present to moan the losses we inevitably suffer in our pursuit of a better tomorrow.
A second foray into the loss of yet another historically significant burial plot is Post-Museum’s “The Bukit Brown Index”. This time it focuses on the crushing losses we suffer through the redevelopment of the Bukit Brown cemetery into a housing estate that will be bisected by a highway. Gone will be a massive site where significant pioneers of Singapore lie buried and where endangered floral and fauna dwell. And so, homeless spirits will forever haunt.
Will what virgin land we have left go these ways to the dodo too? So asks Ang Song Nian’s “And Now, Like Sleeping Flowers”. This series of scenic photographs are blithered by a tree stump in a densely wooded area, a hollow clearing in primary forest, a brick wall cutting through lush greenery – all insidious signs of our insistent encroachment; which Ang bemoans by strewing through these photographed landscapes ‘spirit money’ used during Chinese funeral processions.
Gone the way of the dinosaurs too is our Singapore River’s significance as a busy economic hub in our country’s pioneering history. Today, it is mainly seen as a place plied by tourists in bum boats: with the option to wine, dine and unwind by the waterfront.
To reclaim the river for Singaporeans, Debbie Ding’s “Here the River Lies” invites us to may out its psycho-geography by placing cards along her map of its winding route with scribbled personal stories. Thus, we will build a treasure trove of collective history of OUR Singapore River.
Another crucial loss our elderly generation bemoans is our natural connection with the waters surrounding and running through our island. So Donna Ong attempts to rekindle our love for the tranquil ocean surrounding us with “Landscape Portraits: A Beautiful Place Nearby” by ingeniously using humble nails, screws, nuts and bolts to create a mysterious grotto of corals, replete with faint metallic clinking mimicking the sounds of marine fishes greedily feeding.
To awaken our Singaporean psyche to the still to churning waters running through the island, Charles Lim’s “All Lines Flow Out” captures on video surprisingly grotto-like vistas of Singapore’s cityscape as he adventurously sails down the city’s myriad complex of large man-made drains and canals.
Han Sai Por further rekindles our island connection with water with her “Flow Through the Land”: a fluid almost celestial rendition of an imaginatively crystal clear river energetically winding its way through a ruggedly hilly starkly black paper pulp terrain. The natural outcome of this insistent push of nature’s fluids down gravity’s pull is succinctly captured by her generative “Water Erosion”.
Reinforcing Han’s emphasis of the eroding force of water is Frayn Yong’s “Terra Firma”; a landscape of pencil-lead sky scrapers gingerly resting on a bed rock of ground down powdery graphite. Thus, it gravely calls attention to the fragility of our concrete jungle – it stands constantly exposed to the sweep of natural forces; be it flash floods or tsunamis.
Genevieve Chua’s “Ultrasound” series of paintings extends this motif of the life threatening quality of water yet further: she brings to our minds countrymen who have sadly chosen to end their lives by drowning in Bedok Reservoir.
Yet, by this overlaying of an ultrasound scan over persistent images of cascading waters, Chua also brings to our minds a further but even more vital idea: water is also the primary giver of life – that of a baby’s in its mother’s womb.
Chua’s scientific approach in her artistic homage to the natural world brings to mind an aspect of our Singaporean identity: our persistent need to study, control and reconstruct it. Hence, we get Isabelle Desjeux’s “1000 Rubber Seeds & 1 Mutant”; an installation which draws upon our vanished colonial history of growing rubber in Singapore.
Desjeux invites us to closely observe the rubber fruits through different lenses to better understanding that in science, the researcher gains in-depth knowledge of an organism by studying its mistakes, or mutants; which is in utterly complete polarity to our Singaporean propensity to highly prize success so much that we marginalize the mistakes we make.
Extending Desjeux’s use of nature as a metaphor to creatively represent our national psyche is Jennifer Ng’s “Pulling at Grass to Make It Grow”. This installation draws our attention to the fact that tender young blades of grass that grow too quickly too soon will end up too thin to be any good; as would the energetically worn out overstretched students in our current rigorous education system.
Tapping into Desjeux’s fascination with our scientific approach to perceiving and studying what is left of our natural environment is Robert Zhao’s “Animal Traps” series, collected under his fictional research platform, the Institute of Critical Zoologists.
Zhao uses actual traps to highlight the fact that an effective device is derived from the hunter’s intimate understanding of the behaviour of the animal he wants to catch: thus, asserting power and control over it’s life – as we do when we lay a rat trap or pull out a can of insecticide.
This, in turn, brings to mind the hunting of animals endemic to Singapore during the British colonial era. This partially stemmed from Sir Stamford Raffles and William Farquhar’s attempt to document the island’s unique fauna and floral by preserving them taxonomically. Today, they form the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity (RMBR).
Lucy Davis’s “Nanyang Meadows” is composed from bundles of wheat used, in 1887, to stuff one crocodile in the RMBR collection. This deployment of a European crop with a tropical reptile symbolizes the contemporary pastoralisation of Singapore – like road and place names; such as ‘Nanyang Meadows’ at the National Technological University.
Picking up Davis’s fascination with animal taxonomy is Ezra Rahman’s “Ouch!”; which is a collection of miniature ‘animal fossils’ sculpted from the dead skin he had scraped and peeled from the callous and soles of his feet. The process of fashioning these ‘skeletons’ from skin built up from bearing the weight of his whole body begs us to ask what we, as Singaporeans, choose to cast off or value, and why.
That we are a nation still very much in its infancy in reusing and recycling our throwaway to save our planet from environmental degradation inspired Stellah Lim to fashion “Abandoned”: she coats discarded costume jewellery with black enamel paint and sculpts them into artworks evocative of natural forms like seeds, vines, stalactites, stalagmites and human entrails. The resulting poignantly beautiful works of art call us to rethink our desire to discard the old and out-dated and own the new and fangled at a drop of a hat.
Get involved! Reconnect with our natural side at the Singapore Art Museum, 71 Bras Basah Road, Singapore 189555. The uniquely Singaporean exhibition “Unearthed” runs till 6 July this year.
