Titled Chimera as an umbrella for works that are visually beautiful and infused with a unique aesthetic, the works nevertheless contain undercurrents of anxiety. Referring to Greek mythology, which describes a chimera as a hybrid creature composed of the parts of multiple animals, the works in the show are of a hybrid nature, infused with a touch of fantasy and imagination while engaging with the issues of our time.

One needs only enter the venue with the installation by Indian artist Sheba Chhachhi to immediately get the flavor of the show, but the curator’s excellent comments and elaborations on the works deepens visitors’ insight and understanding.

Chhachhi’s fascinating installation, owned by collector Amrita Jhaveri, is titled Winged Pilgrims: A Chronicle from Asia. When the bird flu gripped the world and was followed by bird culling in an effort to contain its spread, the artist went back to the past of myth and legends, when lessons were learned and solutions found through parables and the like.

Drawing parallels between ancient and contemporary time, she thought of how the bird flu would have been easier to contain without globalization. With great poetic power, Chhachhi fills the walls with 10 light boxes featuring landscapes and stories taken from traditional art and contemporary photographs. Birds, known as the first messenger of history, are seen gliding over the landscapes, drawing the course of culture that spread across Asia.

In parallel, Buddhist monks traveled all over Asia teaching, preaching and writing narratives and poems as evident in chronicles revealing the exchanges between China and India and other parts of Asia. Their role is indicated in the five cloaked figures in the center of the installation, each holding a light box in their imaginary hands.

Using time-honored art forms like batik, the Indonesian video artists group Tromarama upgraded them with binary code, a visual language befitting our time. Their video installation Extraneous from the collection of Arif Suherman shows 210 batik panels, each hand inked, used for the animation of a pair of blinking eyes that they say suggest the gap between the Internet and the real. “In the Internet and social media people feel close and connected, but when meeting face-to-face they appear cold and aloof.”

To draw inspiration from their own culture and to meld it with popular images of the present is Entang Wiharso’s hybrid figurative works in aluminum that recall the images in stories from the Majapahit era, or are reminiscent of the reliefs at Borobudur in Central Java while also referring to the popular leather puppet theater. Melded with today’s images of superheroes, teddy bears or Mickey Mouse, the Over Power – Comic Book series from the collection of Don and Mera Rubell evoke a sense of illusion, something which hovers between the tangible and the intangible.  

Japanese artist Tabaimo’s Midnight Sea from collector Toshio Hara is a video installation that, according to the collector, uses the human body and the sea to represent the dichotomy between reality and the unseen world beneath it. As one enters the space where projections of waves break against the black surface of the sea, one experiences a sense of fascination and of unspoken fear, wonder and apprehension at the same time. Gradually forms and organisms resembling coral or aquatic plants emerge with a strange creature moving in between. It could be a jellyfish, or a wig of white hair.

In Japanese, the word kaminoke refers to hair that grows on the head. It can also mean a supernatural spell or an ailment thought to be caused by spirits or deities. In addition, the artist has explained that a wave is a metaphor for age-wrinkled skin, and in turn, a wrinkle is a metaphor for ripples on the surface of the water. Midnight Sea can therefore be seen as a metaphor for the human body or troubled subconscious, poetically reaffirming the intimate relationship between humanity, nature and forces that we cannot apprehend with our rational mind.

Pakistani artist Hamra Abbas criticizes religious hegemony through her installation: Please do not step. Surrounding a carpet of woven paper with Muslim patterns are four paintings on the walls, each consisting of two parts, a Biblical scene and a Koranic scene. Distinct religious texts derived from the Bible and the Koran reveal that they are almost the same. Entering the space one is first stirred by the white carpet and then to immediately see the paintings on the wall. A very narrow margin between carpet and the paintings makes it hard to read the texts, suggesting the limited space that organized religion allows its members to reflect upon.

The metaphor of a carpet is also used by Rasjid Rana to reveal brutal violence bubbling just under the surface of refined society.  Appearing like a beautiful Pakistani carpet, Rana’s Red Carpet IV is actually made of hundreds of tiny images brought together using tiny photographs of torn or dismembered animal flesh he had taken in a slaughter house.

One would be forgiven if at first sight Filipino artist Patricia Eustaquio’s Psychogenic Fugue from the collection of Marcel Crespo appeared like a mosquito net, like one used over beds in olden times. But, the artist’s delicate piano cover of crochet, swathed over an absent piano, is in part an homage to music, once considered the highest in art that has lost its supremacy to the visual arts. Interestingly, while crochet, embroidery and the like used to denouncingly be relegated to “craft” or “female art”, its elevation to the contemporary by Patricia Eustaguio reminds us of how notions of art inevitably change over time.

Perhaps the most spectacular after Sheba Chhachhi’s Winged Pilgrims is Li Hui’s evocative installation of red transparent light streaming like in a red fog, evoking a sense of the transcendental and the sublime. The artist quotes Zen Buddhism to describe his indescribable art.

“When two kinds of energies collide, a new energy emerges. I am always searching for those two different kinds of energies that can express my emotions and my understanding of the world.”

There are a dozen more worthwhile works in the show, like Yayoi Kusuma’s Statue of Venus Obliterated by Infinity Nets, and Sex Obsession, Lee Yong Baek’s Broken Mirror, Donna Ong’s The Sixth Day, Tomoko Konoike’s Chapter Two: Giant and Alfredo Esquillo Jr.’s The Thomasites Were Here.

The Collectors Show: Asian Contemporary Art from Private Collections Chimera
Jan. 14 to March 25, 2012
Singapore Art Museum

Popular

Is Indonesia really ready to embrace dual citizenship?

Palm oil plantation-less mills lead to increase deforestation

Prabowo inaugurates construction of Majapahit palace replica