Singapore Biennale 2006. Damn cool mannn!

Ok, supposedly, there should be some picture to show you guys how cool the exhibition is but since it is museum stuff, i think i should follow museum room: "No Photography"

I think I run out or words to describe the oozing-with-coolness of this exhibition. My vocab is not that abundant anyway.

So these are some highlights

1)The site of the Exhibition is a big big Tanglin Camp. So there are lot of free open space to utilize and the atmosphere overall is freaky and creepy like in any Korean or Japanese ghost movie. The artists, thus, have more opportunities to showcase their conceptualized works and the scale of the artworks are also magnified. I was totally impressed with the way Charles Juhasz Alvarado - "Escala" made a room into a small table soccer.Another one, Agathe de Bailliencourt - "Occupation Bleue" , brushed all over the room from the floor to the ceiling with zero inch of free-paint space left as if she wants to prove that it is possible to use your creativity to overcome gravitational force.



However, the most wtf piece is "The secret garden" (Takashi Kuribayashi) where the artist turn a 2-storey block into a Jumanji+Alice in the Wonderland (illustration above). Basically, what he/she did is making the second floor a artificial jungle with trees and a small stream. There is a head of a seal emerging from the surface of the stream where as the rest of the body is attached to the ceiling of the first floor. So the seal will look like as if it was suspended between the first and second floor. There is also a hole in the partition between the first and second floor so people can climb up a stair in 1st floor and stick their head into the hole so that they can observe the jungle on the 2nd floor in a middle or a stream at a very very low eye-level that gives them the feeling of how it is like to be a frog. OF course, the first thing they will see will be the seal's head that usually freak them out like most of the things they have seen and will see in the exhibition.
But some artists show that they need more space though. OK. Space would never be enough for creativity. Creativity is the most demanding and greedy form of self-identity.

2)If you are not interested in Arts or think that artists are just freaks who are lucky to have both time and money to waste, you can always engage in a treasure hunt. There are always bowls filled with cool badges in every section. These badge will give the audience the first impression or the significance of the piece so that when the audience go back, just by looking at the badges, they will not forget what they saw in the exhibition. But this fun game has limitation also. We kept asking "where is the bowl" rather than "what does this mean?". Is it bad? Guess it is harmless
This is my collection of badges which is nowhere near complete



Even the palmplet is made to imitate Chinese fake money paper burnt for pass-aways and it smells like one too.



3)Merchandise were cool. Slippers put in a rubber frame so you can hang it on a wall like a picture when you don't use. Masking tape that resembles police tape. OR cool tee with specially designed for this event pattern ( it would be very very funky without the dry and boring advertising words: "Singapore Biennale 2006"). And more free badges: I LOVE IT.

4)Disturbing: I have never been to a place where "Parental guidance" signs could be seen this often. OK, kids, this is arts and arts today is as disturbing as how human beings live. So dun scream if you see a gay man going climax while shouting "Death penalty is immoral" (Brian Gothong Tan - "We live in a Dangerous World")or a transsexual glam rocker (Philip Prophy - "Fluorescent") or Dawn of the dead zombies (Scott Bowe - "Zombie")or Japanese-style sicko having sex with snails(Tang Maohong - "Sunday") . It is so normal normal here.

5)The coolest stuff i found is: the ego-boosting room or new model of OP practice room (Hiroyuki Matsukage - "Star"). There is a mike in the center of the room. When a person stands in front of the mike, he will face a gigantic poster of a crowd consisting of crazy Japanese-looking girl fans. Viewer is to speak into the mike and depending on your volume, soft or loud, inconfident or enthusiastic, he/she will hear the applause coming out from the crowd in the poster proportionally to his/her volume. Speak loud = Mann, it feels like a rock star singing in the stadium. Speak soft = loser, get lost, you do not deserve to be heard anyore. Of course, I spent 10 mins talking nonsense loudly and 5 more mins acting like a J-rockstar in front of the mike. :D


6)There is a small room with messages pinned all around the 4 walls (Otto Karvonen - "Belief Board") And guess wat? I find a message sweetly written in Vietnamese: "Con yeu bo me" meaning "Parents, I love you". SO nice. Wonder who the girl/boy is.

More thing to jot down but it looks like a very long post already. So yup! I am off.
Before that, if you wanna find out about the other artists and their works in Tanglin Camp in SB2006, here are some useful links

- SB2006 homepage's Tanglin Camp gallery
- Descriptions of works and featured artists