+ strange past
Lee Weng Choy was born in KL in 1963. Shortly thereafter, his family moved to New York, and after that, to Manila. He went to the US for university and stayed there for over ten years. When he came to Singapore in 1992, he got involved in the arts and civil society very quickly. He joined Sharaad Kuttan and Sanjay Krishnan, who were then the editors of the NUS Society journal Commentary. They all quit Commentary when the NUSS management scrapped the issue that dealt with the performance art controversy of 1994. The issue eventually got published independently as the book Looking at Culture(1996). He has taught part-time at LaSalle, NAFA, Temasek Poly. In 2000, he joined The Substation as one of its Artistic Co-Directors.
strangemessages talks to Weng Choy about Amanda Heng, Zai Kuning, Life!'s arts coverage, the mythicised "man on the street" and "literary betrayal".
+ in conversation
When did you first encounter art? What was your first artistic experience?
I really can’t remember. As a young child I liked to draw. Professionally, it was relatively late in life when I became invested in the visual arts. As a student, it was math and science, then philosophy and literature, then the visual arts. Although, when I was about nineteen, I had decided to become a writer. At first I tried my hand at fiction. But now I have no delusions of producing novels; it’s the essay I enjoy writing most these days. By my early thirties it became clear to me that my life’s vocation would be writing art criticism.
Your favourite Singapore installation/exhibition so far.
While I often write about how this or that artist or artwork is a favourite, I can’t imagine singling out something to be THE favourite. I can’t imagine it working that way, once you’ve had so many encounters with art over so many years. So let me discuss two works, which I’ve written about, that are among many favourites: a performance by Amanda Heng, and an installation by Zai Kuning.
Amanda Heng was part of a triple bill in the September 2000 session of [names changed to protect the innocent], The Necessary Stage’s platform for experimental performance. An audience of around forty gathered at the theatre company, and, escorted by staff, ambled towards the nearby Parkway Parade shopping and hawker centre. I’m sure that many, like myself, while not terribly eager with anticipation, were curious about what was going to happen. Since the piece was part of the series Let’s Walk, there was an expectation that it would involve, obviously, some walking. (In an earlier piece, Heng, with the aid of a mirror, walked backwards around the LaSalle-SIA College of the Arts with a shoe in her mouth.) I think it’s safe to say that everyone was surprised, when we arrived at the busy hawker centre, to find Heng laying pink table cloths on the normally unadorned, plastic-coated table tops. Some of the hawker centre crowd must have been wondering what this woman was doing; I am certain no one knew her as a “major” contemporary artist. And then the two groups of people recognised each other. The hawker centre crowd saw “us”, the just arrived art audience, and we saw them, as alreadythere, already looking. Some of the art audience began sitting down. Heng finished covering tables, and proceeded to serve food. She asked a member of the art audience to cut through her t-shirt and retrieve a packet. Inside which was some money, and she repaid members of the audience the price of admission for the evening’s performances. Finally, she led us back to The Necessary Stage, laying a long strip of red carpet on the ground for us to walk on.
For me, that moment of arrival at the hawker centre revealed so much that is at stake in “looking” in art. The audience sees itself looking, and sees another “audience”, this one unmarked as an audience, let alone an “art” audience, which then also sees itself looking. It was a moment where a slightly odd gesture of “adding value for the consumer” -- an unexpected gift or present -- is revealed to be a work of art, and both the art audience and the hawker centre crowd see this transformation happening then and there. A fine moment that cuts between -- yet at the same time welds -- public and art spaces, everyday objects, moments and crowds, and the complex game of looks, frames and privileges that is art.
Zai Kuning’s A Tree in a Room was presented at Sculpture Square in early 2004: the work is made of a six-metre-long trunk, sourced from a lumber yard, placed in the middle of an otherwise bare room of the chapel-turned-art gallery of the former Methodist Church. The trunk had been sawed in half, and Zai hammered nails around the circumferences of both halves, and with wire “stitched” the tree back together.
A Tree in a Room makes reference to an earlier tree trunk that Zai had installed on the campus of a theatre school, which was co-founded by the late Kuo Pao Kun. Pao Kun had commissioned the first tree piece some years ago, but because of problems with the installation, it was eventually removed from campus.
Arguably Singapore’s most important cultural figure, Kuo Pao Kun is highly regarded (and by a wide constituency -- artists, activists, the general public, as well as by many senior government officials) for his plays as well as his leadership in civil society. He was detained without trial for four years in the 1970s, for allegedly being a communist. More importantly, he is the only person in Singapore to emerge from detention to become an even more influential public intellectual. He continued to be critical of state policy, although his subsequent plays are marked by an allegorical sensibility in contrast with some of his early agitprop works.
Zai has said that the new work at Sculpture Square is “the best way for me to remember [Pao Kun]”. As Zai has told me, he isn’t interested in making pro-environmentalist statements with the work (not that he’s unconcerned with local or global eco-politics). Rather, the work for Zai is a form of dialogue, taking up certain themes and tropes that Pao Kun employed in his plays, such as Silly Little Girl and the Funny Old Tree and The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole. But perhaps the most compelling reference that Zai makes is to Pao Kun’s play, The Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral.
Descendants unfolds as a nameless narrator contemplates on the figure of Zheng He, the Eunuch Admiral of fifteenth century Ming China. Zheng He commanded the largest known fleet of the day, and over the course of seven expeditions spanning twenty-six years, his imperial armada explored Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean. The play is not quite a monodrama, as the narration is haunted by distant voices and conversations.
“I have come to realise of late that dreaming has become the centre of my life.” And then, just a bit later, we hear the narrator say, “Yes, each night, through my own fear and uncertainty, I discover more agony in him, more respect for him, and more suspicion of him.... the more I discover, the more I am convinced that we were related, closely related -- so closely related that I had to be a descendant of the eunuch admiral.”
In one chapter, the narrator informs us of the particulars of the life of eunuchs: “There are 999 rooms in the Imperial Palace in Beijing ... among the 999 rooms, so they say, there is this very special chamber in the Palace where, in the olden days, all the cut and dried penises of the eunuchs were kept ... The most interesting thing about this chamber is that all the boxes of penises ... were not stacked or stored ... Instead, they were all hung, or suspended, in the air from the ceiling.... Now, when they first enter the Imperial Palace to join the eunuch service, they begin at the bottom.... Then, as they are promoted ... their penis boxes, commensurate with their new status, also will be raised to higher levels.... According to one record, there was at one time as many as 10,000 eunuchs behind the walls of the Forbidden City. Fancy, hanging 10,000 penises packed in boxes, suspended in this chamber ... What a sight! What an interesting network?”
“Now, I’d like to share a funny thought with you.... don’t you think it looks like the organisational chart of our companies or departments? What I mean is, don’t we look like a network of pricks?”
In the next chapter, our narrator is troubled by a certain historical speculation. “As you know”, he says, “when a eunuch dies, his family or colleagues are obliged to reunite his treasure with his dead body. They must put it back exactly where it belonged. And I mean, physically touching the cut-off base as if it was a re-connection.... there were records saying ZhengHe died in Calicutta in India, or on a ship on the way back from his seventh and last expedition ... Now if that was true, then how could he possibly have had his treasure put back in place?”
Part of the power of Descendants lies in the intimate connection between the figure of Zheng He, and Pao Kun himself. The picture one gets of the Eunuch Admiral is complicated: this powerful servant is a compromised and pathetic man. Or, rather, if he is, it is also because he is us -- and this “us” is not simply the middle-management who prop up Singapore Incorporated. Zheng He, the castrated servant, is all of us, even the most sophisticated of critics of the system. Ong Keng Sen, one of Singapore’s best known theatre artists, who directed the English version of Descendants, has remarked on this connection between Pao Kun and Zheng He; as has the Chinese theatre critic, Lin Ke Huan, who interprets the play to be a crystallisation of Pao Kun’s inner debates with himself.
Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral, if it is not already recognised as such, will become acknowledged as one of the most significant works of art to have come out of the Singapore condition. Its portrait of castration and impossible suture is truly haunting. It is this image that Zai Kuning brings us back to with his nailed and wire-stitched Tree in a Room.
In response to Yi-Sheng’s claim in a Today article that international critics liked the Biennale, you said to him: “your contention that the biennale was loved by all international experts sounds as reliable as Donald Rumsfeld’s claim that Iraq had WMD”. This question is twofold: what are your thoughts on the Biennale and its accompanying hype, and how far has art criticism come in Singapore?
I’ve written a number of pieces both previewing and reviewing the biennale. If your readers are interested in my opinions on the exhibition, may I just refer them to my piece in kakiseni.com, entitled, “Don’t Look Before You Leap: not looking at the Singapore Biennale”, which is dated September 28, 2006.
As for the Yi-Sheng comment, let me provide some context. Yi-Sheng, as you mention, wrote an article in Today, and I responded to him in the arts community e-group. Cyril Wong, in his final editorial as a Substation employee for our online mag, cited my comment. But it’s taken out of context. It sounds as if I’m disparaging the Singapore Biennale, when I’m not.
Yi-Sheng wrote: “Now the whole shebang’s over and it’s safe to say it was a critical success: I had the chance to meet jet-setting critics who’d been to every biennale from Marrakech to Manhattan, and they were usually impressed by the art.... So, hooray! We won the experts over. But, what about everyone else?”
My point was to say to Yi-Sheng that he should hold off declaring that we won the (international) experts over. Sure, a lot of visiting journalists have praised the exhibition in their reports, but that’s a far stretch from claiming ALL experts loved it. Talking to a few visitors does not establish his claim. I myself have heard several criticisms of the show -- by international visitors. And what of local opinion? Expert or otherwise? Yi-Sheng makes a slip between international endorsement and local approval that is problematic. I think it’s fair to say that the local arts community has responded with ambivalence to the show. And Fumio Nanjo, the Biennale’s Artistic Director, has said a number of times that shows like these are meant for local audiences.
There’s something else at stake. As Yi-Sheng suggests, there are experts and then there are other audiences. It’s of course much more complicated than that. One should consider the history of the role of art criticism, or expert opinion, and how that has changed significantly in Europe and America over the last 100 years. In our part of the world, there has been less impact from expert discourses on the reception and consumption of art, and that’s in part because we don’t have authoritative institutions. For instance, there’s no university art history department in this country. And the Singapore Art Museum is not well respected as an authority on matters of art by many of the local writers and artists that I know and work with.
So, what is the role of expert opinion offered by art critics? I’d say the job of the critic isn’t to be right, but to be interesting and to inspire interest in art. She aims to create a certain intimacy between the reader and the contexts and background of a work of art, and her own encounter with that work. But a successful critic does not convince the reader so much as generate understanding of her interpretation and perspectives.
I believe that art “works” by being a conversation. Artists themselves may have conflicted relationships to what’s written about their work, but that’s besides the point. The social function of art is to ask its publics to contemplate, reflect and engage works of art. Criticism plays an important role because it becomes the historical record of these thoughts on art.
Lastly, art criticism in Singapore? Again, I’ve written on the topic several times over the years. We lack institutions, we lack publications, but we’ve got some pretty smart people writing these days. I’m a big believer in the public sphere. Fragmentation is fine -- there are webzines and blogs popping up all over the internet like fungus in the tropics. But it’s not good enough. There should be a mix of dispersal and centralisation. It’s the tension between the two that’s required. We need some writing platforms in this town that function like a common public sphere that matters to wide sections of the arts and civil society communities.
In an article Zadie Smith wrote for The Guardian, she talks about writers who often betray themselves, letting the truth slide away in favour for a familiar phrase or thought, some word or thought that came too readily in hand. Do you think this sort of “literary betrayal” is prevalent in the arts scene today?
This kind of betrayal perhaps is more prevalent today than before, since there is greater competition or pressure than ever to be “famous” or get attention. But the danger of betrayal has been around as long as writing has. What I might add is that writing is never about the individual as such, but the individual as a social being -- a writer is using a language that is always already out there. Invention is improvisation with borrowed tools. The best writers spend a lot of effort not taking for granted these borrowed tools. But for too many writers, clichés structure their thought, even as they claim to break with convention.
Your thoughts on Life!’s arts coverage. Do you see its poor coverage of the arts as symptomatic of a larger Singaporean sense of cultural apathy?
I’d like to be hopeful here. I once taught a course at LaSalle called “Art and Politics”. I wanted the students to take charge of the course from the first day of class. It was to be an experiment in “democracy”. After a couple of weeks, I should have changed the course title to “Art and Apathy”. To be fair, however, the problem was as much with me as with the students. Democracy isn’t just about having choices -- as in fifty flavours of ice cream -- but having certain institutions and structures in place, so these choices matter. I didn’t provide an adequate structure for the students in the first place.
There are many signs that Singaporeans aren’t completely apathetic. On Friday, the 26th of January, Tochi, a young Nigerian was hung for allegedly trafficking heroin. Several bloggers have expressed their dismay with the execution (see, for instance, Alex Au’s blog, www.yawningbread.org). That’s a sign of people speaking out. But of course the mainstream local media have largely ignored the issue, even though it’s gotten considerable international attention.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that one should refuse to give in to apathy. Rather than just complain about Life!, one can try to do something about it. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not like everyone isn’t already very busy, but a number of us are working on developing an alternative platform. It may take some time before it’s realised, but it is timely that the arts community itself takes matters into its own hands, and tries to develop its own public sphere, rather than be held back by the people at SPH.
Our online magazine at The Substation cannot serve as this alternative. It remains too small scale for that -- at the moment, anyhow. But it’s still an important part of the whole picture. In Feb, I’m convening a forum in the arts community e-group that will take place only online; I wonder how that will unfold. What both projects have in common is the desire to bring diverse perspectives together for critical reflection. What both address is the need for a widely shared public sphere for Singapore arts and civil society.
What would you say to someone who, with no prior knowledge of, or experience with the arts, attends his first art exhibition/play/poetry reading/dance performance? Do you sometimes feel that the arts community -- both artists and the critics -- tend to over-complicate matters and lapse into solipsism? Do you think this contributes to the disconnect between the arts and “the man on the street”? Is the disconnect between the arts and “the man on the street” a necessary characteristic of the arts?
Have you ever watched the financial news on television? Here’s something that gets a whole lot of airplay on the mainstream media, but, to me, at any rate, it’s incomprehensible, inaccessible and unapologetically elitist. Is the mythical “man on the street” up in arms about this? Or what about the jargon of the medical and legal professions?
My point isn’t to defend specialist discourses as deserving to be specialist. But to highlight that while the arts is a specialist discourse, it functions differently from other such discourses. Why are “we” more quick to feel excluded by art? What is it that we demand of art’s public accessibility? Is it simply because it’s publicly funded? As if big business isn’t hugely subsidised by public monies. Perhaps it’s because today, we hold art up to some kind of democratic ideal.
Some background: hundreds of years ago, art was a product of elite society and was closely tied with religion, and elite society communicated with the impoverished masses through religious institutions. That was the social context of art and the “man on the street”. I’m grossly simplifying of course -- and a caution flag should be raised.
But let me get on with my argument. Somehow, unlike with financial discourse, we expect there to be greater public access to art. But there is, actually. While experimental art is still not seen as mainstream, it is hugely popular worldwide. The whole biennale phenomenon is evidence of this.
So, my first point is that there are lots of specialist discourses, but art is exceptional in that it gets so much flak for being one. Two: contemporary art is actually hugely popular; not in every instance, not every small or medium-sized indie art space, but as a whole, it’s popular. And while more needs to be done, contemporary art does, as a whole, contribute to the democratic ideal.
Next item: your notion of “prior knowledge”. But even popular culture requires prior knowledge. We all know the drill of those triumph-of-the-will action movies, perfected by Sylvester Stallone. First part, hero gets humiliated/defeated; bulk of the movie, the character is in training; final third, he triumphs in the ring. Sure, this structure draws on traditional drama -- in some perverse way. But we don’t enter a Rocky movie without prior knowledge. We ourselves have been trained to view this stuff as entertainment. Each new pop icon derives from prior knowledge, and so on. You have a huge entertainment industry that pumps out this prior knowledge, saturating every form of media with it.
It’s not unfair to ask that prior knowledge is required of any consumer of any form of culture. It’s just that in today’s society, we seem to resent art for requiring this, and forget that it’s also required in mass entertainment -- that there are huge financial interests that put a lot of money and effort into training consumers to consume mass entertainment.
Apart from these differences, art also tends to challenge prior knowledge, whereas mass entertainment tends to reaffirm it as cliché. Generally speaking, art is harder to engage than mass entertainment (not that there aren’t exceptions -- popular film can be great art, for example).
I don’t see the disconnect between the public at large and the work of art as necessary. Personally, my goal is to bridge these divides. But the way I do this is different from the way popular culture operates. Writing art criticism is a way of doing it -- one writes at different registers: for specialist audiences, and for wider publics. It’s also important to consolidate a sense of commonality within the arts community, a point I keep reiterating. To create an intellectual tradition that becomes a heritage for the future, and so on. I try to do this consolidation in a way that doesn’t make the arts community seem like an exclusive club, but an inclusive and open community.
Lastly, in terms of over-complicating things and being solipsistic. Sure, there are self-indulgent artists and writers, et cetera. But that’s not in the nature of good art, which is multi-layered, subtle, intelligent but also resonates emotionally, and offers many points of access. Obsessiveness can be a very compelling and attractive element of a work. There’s nothing work with solipsism per se. And I think the job of art is to engage with life’s complexity. Mass entertainment, in contrast -- and again, this is a generalisation -- typically over-simplifies life.
The job of the critic is to create access to complexity. Good art demands effort, but it also rewards that effort. And I think the mythical “man on the street”, if you take away the myth, and address actual people -- well, in my own experience, at least, I’ve never found a person whom I couldn’t find a way of speaking to, of creating access to complexity. It just takes effort, contact and commitment.
+ strangeworkGame Theory, by Lan Gen Bah."Last September, we did an exhibition of paintings at The Substation by Lan Gen Bah (or LGB as she's known), called "Game Theory". Here's the front of the invite card (which is part of the work, sort of); there were two versions, a black on white, and white on black."
+ What's next ?
"We are revamping The Substation's website -- hopefully it will be ready after Chinese New Year -- and in my online magazine editorial I'll be outlining The Substation's plans for the year."
