National Gallery Singapore extends its OUTBOUND series with two new commissions by Haegue Yang and Yee I-Lann
Singapore, 28 November 2019 - National Gallery Singapore has added two new commissions to its OUTBOUND series. Inaugurated in 2018, OUTBOUND invites accomplished artists to create works for different spaces within the Gallery, to provoke critical reflection, curiosity and playfulness in our visitors as they traverse the building beyond the exhibition galleries, while shifting perceptions of what might be considered art.
Dr Adele Tan, lead curator of OUTBOUND said, “OUTBOUND is an artist-centric, process-driven commissioning initiative that seeks to consciously activate the manifold latent spaces at the Gallery, and letting these artworks provoke fresh and critical engagements with our audience. The artists have drawn inspiration from the Gallery, from its architecture, to national narratives, and art collections, and its rich contextual siting within Southeast Asia, while also bringing their own distinctive practices into play. The Gallery is truly excited by this generous spirit of mutual creative journeying that has also yielded new trajectories for the artists’ oeuvre.”
Haegue Yang explores ideas of hybridity in which the real and the faux, natural and artificial, past and present encounter each other in a multi-sensorial experience
Located at the City Hall Foyer at Level 2, Forum for Drone Speech - Singapore Simulations by Haegue Yang (born Seoul, 1971) is inspired by the Gallery’s architecture and its connections to Singapore’s colonial past and diasporic society. The sculptural faux marble base alludes to the City Hall Foyer’s actual marble decoration and plays with the neo-classical architecture of the City Hall Wing (former Municipal Building) where Singapore’s self-governance was first declared. The base is crowned by a ribbon of wire mesh containing a selection of holographic prints of black and white archival motifs from the building’s history. These include images of British sculptor Dora Gordine’s[1] multi-ethnic bronze busts once displayed in the City Hall, and Italian sculptor Rudolfo Nolli’s[2] architectural decoration of the former Supreme Court building. The images are accompanied by artwork labels which playfully appropriate museological language, interweaving factual introductions with Yang’s subjective readings of them. Forum for Drone Speech - Singapore Simulations draws attention to museums as spaces in which objects are continually rearranged and reinterpreted to envision alternative narratives, provoking questions on identity, belongingness and engagement.
The platform also hosts three of Yang’s sculptures, two from her iconic The Intermediates[3] series combining the craft of weaving with synthetic industrial materials, and one of her seminal sonic sculptures, Sonic Swell, made from countless bells. Materials such as bells and turbine vents evoke movement and sound, preventing the works from remaining as static museum pieces, while actual sound elements are also present in the installation. These include birdsong, recorded in the demilitarised zone (DMZ) during the historic Inter-Korean summit in 2018, and a speech by humanoid robot Nadine[4] in six languages played from two speakers with a colourful LED display.
Forum for Drone Speech - Singapore Simulations expresses a sense of that history and the present are in flux, and is emblematic of Yang’s distinguished and seductive sculptural language. Its visual abstraction of her research on the Gallery’s architecture, Singapore’s historical figures and events and eloquent association of these diverse elements suggest a metaphor for the country’s culturally and ethnically diverse social fabric.
Yee I-Lann expresses contemporaneity through indigenous material culture
Situated at the foyer near the Holding Cells on Level 1, Former Supreme Court Wing, Tikar-A-Gagah is a collaboration between Yee I-Lann (born Sabah, 1971) and 25 women weavers from the land and sea indigenous communities in Sabah, Malaysia. The weavers are from the Dusun and Murut communities of Keningau district led by Julitah Kulinting, and the Bajau Sama DiLaut community from Semporna led by Roziah Jalalid. The artwork took over 18 months to realise, and celebrates the craft heritage and material culture of Sabah’s indigenous communities while extending the discourse on contemporary forms of art in this region. This is also the first large-scale weave by Yee together with her collaborators.
The giant double-sided mat (tikar in Malay) features traditional motifs, a knowledge passed down from one generation of weavers to another through an oral lineage, as well as contemporary weave motifs conceived collaboratively by Yee and the women weavers. The front side of the mat is made by the Bajau Sama DiLaut weavers and includes bright-coloured motifs related to their seaborne way of life such as Nekiutan (lobster) and Sambulayang (houseboat sail). On the reverse side is a natural bamboo weave by the Dusun and Murut weavers which includes motifs such as Nantuapan (people coming together) and Pinungoh Nandayunan (hill ridges without end). The contemporary motif called Mansau Ansau (to travel without knowing where you are going) emphasises the co-invention between Yee and the weavers.
In Tikar-A-Gagah, we also see Yee continue using the image of a table to represent bureaucracy, power and control. This is an extension of Yee’s practice in photo media, where she critically engages with Southeast Asia’s post-colonial history through the registers of gender, geopolitics and indigenous visuality.
Other works under the OUTBOUND series include Nowhere by Jane Lee (born Singapore, 1963) located at the City Hall Foyer at Level 4. This installation, festooned with mirrored tiles, simultaneously reflects and fragments Lee’s monumental painting Raw Canvas first displayed at the 2008 Singapore Biennale on the facing wall. It explores the illusory nature of what constitutes our reality, and serves as a spiritual reminder that the only real thing in our lives is the fleeting present. Gary Carlsley (born Brisbane, 1957) and Jeremy Chu (born Singapore, 1973) have transformed the stairway between levels 4 and 5 in the City Hall Wing into an immersive enclosed ‘garden’ with The Regency Made Me Blind. This work features digitally composited images of five colonial botanical gardens in Southeast Asia -- Hanoi, Manila, Bogor, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. The work references the lingering colonial legacies and narratives in this region and in Carsley’s native Australia, while also urging visitors to contemplate various aspects of labour, authorship, democratic access and even spiritual encounters.
Curated as an ongoing series, each three-year season of OUTBOUND will progressively unveil original, site-specific installations by leading contemporary artists in the Gallery’s public spaces, responding to the buildings’ unique architecture. OUTBOUND adds to the Gallery’s steadfast commitment to collaborating with artists, which has included public art installations at the Light to Night Festival and the Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden Commission series
For more information about OUTBOUND, please visit www.nationalgallery.sg/outbound
[1] The sculptures of important female artist Dora Gordine reflect her interest in the multi-ethnic composition of Singapore’s society and were previously displayed in the Municipal building (now City Hall).
[2] Rudolfo Nolli was in charge of the architectural decoration of the former Supreme Court building and other architectural and sculptural projects in Singapore, such as Tanjong Pagar Railway Station and a pair of lions for the Bank of China. While his decorations refer mainly to Western architecture traditions, some of his sculptures, such as the lion, refer to Asian traditions.
[3] The Intermediates, featuring extensive craftwork, arouses an awareness of a new hybrid sense of time and place. Just like how different cultures have both fundamental similarities and individualities, the artworks explore folk concepts that have their own identity, but also a certain universality at the same time.
[4] The humanoid social robot Nadine was developed by the Institute for Media Innovation at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. It recites a scripted monologue in a neutral voice stripped of any accent.