The legacies of history

Baston ni Kabunian, Bilang Pero di Mabilang (Cane of Kabunian, numbered but cannot be counted). Photo / Supplied

The Singapore Art Museum occupies a corner of the municipal quarter of British colonial buildings in the city. Resplendent in white, it is three storeys high with a wide street frontage and two wings coming off a central courtyard. Forming an axis with the National Museum of Singapore, both are at the start of Singapore's shopping street, the luxury mall-filled Orchard Rd.

Until 15 years ago the museum was the St Joseph's Institution, a Catholic boys' secondary school. The building, relatively unchanged, has the hallmarks of equatorial design: long corridors with thick square columns and rounded arches, deep walls and small rooms with high ceilings.

Possibly not the best structure for a gallery, especially for new art that tends to be large and might need to spill out, it at least is not generic, unlike many new galleries.

The exhibition I recently visited, which covered three floors in the north wing, was the second APB Foundation Signature Art Prize, a regional competition for the visual arts.

Bigger than the inaugural event three years ago, this incarnation covered more countries, had twice the sponsorship funding and a larger finalists' exhibition, including Greg Semu from New Zealand and New Zealand-Australian video artist Daniel Crooks.

If nothing else, art competitions are useful for the profile they can give to artists, and as contemporary art competitions go, the Signature Prize is up there. A little bit beefier, say, than the Auckland Art Gallery's Walters Prize, it has more money (its three runners-up each gets $10,000) and it has the benefit of a wide reach, being open to artists across the whole of Asia and the Pacific.

To get the regional coverage, the museum uses a nominators' system, where art professionals from each country with knowledge of their contemporary scene can choose up to five artists each, based on career status and a single work exhibited in the past three years.

But what tended to get nominated was slightly conservative, a sort of institutional art, giving a somewhat narrow impression of what is understood as contemporary.

Subsequently, the art journal Art Asia Pacific, in reporting the competition, queried the independence of some of the nominators. And I was perplexed to see that the two New Zealand nominators, Susan Cochrane and Ruth McDougall, are resident in Australia.

In itself this shouldn't be a concern, but their list was a slightly wobbly take on our contemporary art scene - except for Semu.

In the end it didn't matter so much. From the initial take of 130 artists, the jurors - five heavyweights from the international art system, including Japanese uber-curator Fumio Nanjo - chose a great line-up for the 15 finalists in the Signature show, notable for its variety and coverage, representing 14 countries from Pakistan to New Zealand.

They also chose artists making Big Statements about their region, dealing with serious political concerns, mainly around each country's legacy of colonial or imperial history.

Vandy Rattana, for example, exhibited a suite of photographs of the Cambodian countryside.

Each image depicted a circular water feature in the landscape, taken from the same viewpoint. They are known in Cambodia as "bomb ponds", large craters, now filled with water, which were the catastrophic result of the illegal United States bombing during the Vietnam War. Each pond is a record of terrible damage to people living there, an unremarked feature of the war's legacy until this work.

Malaysian artist Chang Yoong Chia mapped a history of colonialism in an intricate collage made from thousands of postage stamps, while Kyungah Ham, one of two South Koreans in the show, produced a suite of tapestries on the theme of separation between the Koreas, Needling whisper, needle country.

Her designs were montaged from digital sources that she managed to smuggle to tapestry-makers in North Korea, who sewed the panels then returned them, at some risk, back across the border.

Probably the most testing work, I found, came from New Zealand-Samoan photographer Greg Semu, with his suite of nine light-box photographs, the result of a residency last year at the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Noumea.

The images, quite raw in their depiction of a feast, took the form of tableaux using actors and props that recreated iconic paintings from Western art history, re-read through Kanak politics and culture.

Called The Last Cannibal Supper ...'cause tomorrow we become Christians, these are tough images and were talked about at the opening, appreciated for their directness and humour. In the central Da Vinci-inspired photograph, a severed human hand appears on the table, while a pig stands in for the human dinner. A naked "Gauguin-esque" woman is also among the group and the artist himself stands centrally, as author of the event and aligning himself to its politics.

Semu's images synthesise museum dioramas and displays into a type of political theatre, convincing because he has managed a seamless, almost cinematic veracity in the settings. I think the suite of photographs is an important statement about our Pacific heritage and should be taken up by a national institution here.

Given Singapore's reputation for harsh censorship in the arts, I was interested that the museum could include this work.

Only this year, the museum had to block a piece from the Singapore Biennial because of sexual content. Apparently this sort of official intervention happens less frequently than in the bad old days of the 1990s. But I noted that the second part of Semu's title,'cause tomorrow we become Christians, didn't make it to the extended label.

The second significant feature of the finalists' work was the importance the juror-curators gave to art that showed traditional art-making skills: painting, drawing, carved sculpture. (You would need to visit the museum's annex for more vanguard art, where a survey of Singapore's senior performance and conceptual artist, Amanda Heng, is showing). Signature featured a lot of hands-on making, such as a red splatter painting by Pakistani Imran Qureshi or Aida Makoto's painting of traditional mountainscapes built, on close inspection, of drawings of stacked dead bodies of the ubiquitous Japanese salary men.

Against the trend of other cutting-edge artists from his country, Chinese artist Yang Xinguang's installation Thin was the most craft-like, with wooden carvings made from branches taken from farms in northern China. He used an agricultural axe to create the basic shapes. Leaning against the gallery wall, the five sculptures looked like magnified brittle bones.

Though it might have seemed predictable for a local to get the $10,000 People's Choice Award, Singaporean Michael Lee's computer-rendered architectural designs focused on a subject closely affecting his fellow citizens.

Of all the arts, architecture has had the most visible role as ideology in Singapore's politics and culture, from the imperialism of the colonial buildings, such as Raffles Hotel or the Governor's residence on Fort Canning Park, to the role the new architecture of globalisation plays, such as Lord Foster's recent Supreme Court building or the waterfront development around the innocuously named Marina Bay Sands, a "look-at-me" piece of civic hyperbole for the rich.

Lee, instead, draws on the dystopian visions of post-Soviet paper architects Brodsky and Utkin, and imagines a Singaporean architecture that has feelings. His designs are humanistic, wayward visions for a more environmental and thinking city.

As for the grand winner, and the $45,000 first prize, the jurors chose Rodel Tapaya from the Philippines. Was it the best work? Personally, I think art competitions are rather irrational in the way they insist on ranking works that, at a certain level of quality, can't really be compared.

My favoured works were a short film by renowned Taiwanese video artist Chen Chieh-jen, on the difficulties Taiwanese women encounter trying to get a visa to enter the United States, and a real-time video on site by the other Korean artist, Kim Jongku, a filmed landscape at floor level made of small ridges and piles of steel powder formed into calligraphy.

Nonetheless, Rodel's winning painting seemed popular. Called Cane of Kabunian, numbered but cannot be counted, the 6m-long painting incorporated Bontoc tribal myths from the north of the country in a complex composition combining brightly coloured animals, people and flora around a dominant central figure, a white and spotted dog.

My companion at the exhibition exclaimed that it looked like a Bill Hammond painting, and we were both reminded of Henri Rousseau, with his images of dreamscapes filled with entwining trees and animals.

Later in the day I saw the exact painting I had in mind, Rousseau's War or the Cavalcade of Discord, 1894, across the road at the National Museum in an exhibition from the Musee d'Orsay collection.

Dream and Reality contains a swag of paintings by Monet, Cezanne, Pissarro, Courbet, Manet, Degas - and van Gogh's Starry Night. It is on until February 5 - another good reason to visit Singapore.

* Richard Dale visited Singapore courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Exhibition

What: 2nd Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize, Singapore

Where and when: Singapore Art Museum, to March 4