How the different parts of Asia view each other, and their historical and contemporary relationships, provides the focus of the fifth Singapore Biennale, which opened on Thursday at the Singapore Art Museum. Atlas of Mirrors (until 26 February) features works by 63 artists and collectives representing 19 countries or territories, all from or based in Asia, with 49 new commissions. The biennials’ creative director Susie Lingham, a lecturer at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and the former director of SAM, led a team of four regional specialists at the museum as well as four outside curators hailing from Singapore, Malaysia, India and China.
“Singapore is a corridor between the two Asias,” Lingham says. “The influence is mutual, not one way…intertwining not just cross-cultural.” After a focus on the Southeast Asian contemporary art in the last edition, this year’s sought a broader but still specific footprint. Lingham says: “There is a notion of international that I contest: just because there is a focus on Asia doesn’t mean it’s not international.”
Several standout works emphasise how the intimately local can resonate globally, particularly for artists from this island of immigrants. For Sonicreflection, Sinapore’s Zulkifle Mahmod built a loudspeaker out of woks, that most Pan-Asian of utensils, that broadcast Mahmod’s recordings taken from the public spaces frequented by the country’s growing Vietnamese, Indonesian, and other recent migrant communities. Endless Hours at Sea, the Dutch-Filipino artist Martha Atienza’s videos of oceans, some projected upon water in a dark room, explore the relationship between water and humans, particularly the Philippines’ overseas workers.
While the main SAM building houses cheerier works, the museum’s adjacent 8Q annex houses a succession of heavily political art exploring Asia’s violent past and present, such as Htein Lin’s map of Myanmar made from soaps similar to ones he carved while an imprisoned dissident. Adeela Suleman portrays the harshness of her native Karachi through exquisite traditional miniature paintings, while Bui Cong Khanh’s traditional Vietnamese jackfruit timber dwelling is riddled with military imagery. Films by Wen Pulin and Zang Honghua document the often violent early years of Chinese performance art.
Offsite at Singapore’s Peranakan Museum, the Cambodian former emigrant Marine Ky incorporates the surrounding exhibitions dedicated to early Chinese immigrants to British Malaya with Setting Off, which draws upon Asia-wide historical traditions of textile prints and patterns. Found traditional objects, swatches and globes made from Peranakan lace, Khmer motifs and other Asian textiles descend through the museum’s atrium.
Sakarin Krue-On’s A Tiger Hunt uses the rural performance tradition of his native Thailand to explore how cultural heritages are fading under the twin glares of digitalisation and urbanisation. Ambition and curiosity drive the rural young to the cities, but they often return disillusioned, says the biennial’s assistant curator John Tung. Fading history also informs the enormous dual mirrors of the Singaporean collective Perception3’s There are those who stay/There are those who go, facing off across the site of the former National Library and a beloved culinary hawker centre. Protests surrounding the library’s 2005 demolition “galvanized a movement in Singapore, against demolishing heritage, and repurposing old buildings became the new trend,” Tung says.
The biennale was accompanied by several new shows at gallery district Gillman Barracks. The NTU Centre for Contemporary Art celebrated its third year with the exhibition Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spacial Practice, based on the practice of Singaporean architect William S.W. Lim. Fost Gallery launched Portals, Loopholes and Other Transgressions, a new solo show of local star Heman Chong, while Arndt opened Gazing on Identity, a solo project by Indonesian favorite FX Harsono. Yeo Workshop debuted a book about Singaporean exhibition history, and Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore opened Alex Secton solo show Pygmalian.