Save Our Souls! Two of Singapore's irrepressible young artistic talents are combining to unleash their latest output on an unsuspecting public! Kai Lam and Jeremy Hiah, both former classmates at the LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, active members of The Artists Village and longtime artistic friends, will be launching their Sell-Out Show (and so we all hope it will be!) to display Jeremy's fascinating interactive paintings and Kai's wry look at globalization with his installation of politicians' portraits.
The two have been frequent collaborators in performance, installation and video art in the latter half of the 1990s. Graduating in the same Diploma in Fine Arts batch in 1995, they entered the army together and emerged artistically unscathed to participate in the New Criteria VI show at the Substation in 1998. The next year saw them performing at the Festival der Geister with Jason Lim in Berlin, and belonging to the core group of young artists responsible for reviving The Artists Village from the end of 1999 with projects like the Post-Ulu show (1999-2000), Artists Investigating Monuments (2000), Bye Bye Albert (2001), Bali Project (2001) and Pulau Ubin Art Camp (2001). The current show, S.O.S., is also staged under the auspices of The Artists Village.
Jeremy Hiah's latest paintings take their inspiration directly from life in the 15th century! From his readings in art history at art school, Jeremy was acquainted with the work of quirky Flemish master Hieronymous Bosch who painted surrealistic fantasies in the late 1400s long before Salvador Dali. The painting Ship of Fools which hangs in the Musee du Louvre in Paris is the illustrious progenitor of Jeremy's Transportation of Fools series. As in the original, Jeremy's paintings are populated with earthy, offbeat, occasionally rude and downright weird characters engaged in trivial pursuits and dalliances, one reason perhaps why the Singaporean artist finds affinity with a medieval master. Unlike museum masterpieces, Jeremy has designed his paintings to be interactive. The audience is required to press buttons and twiddle switches in order to experience the full import of the works, which have built-in mechanisms for movement, light and noise generation in order to delight and amuse. This practice also hearkens back to early European mechanical marvels such as automatons, clocks and music boxes which engaged the viewer in more than a static, visual sense.
Known for his work in performance art, Jeremy seeks to remind his audience that his degree is, after all, in painting. The Transportation of Fools series depicts fantastical journeys taken in several modes of vehicular transport. The mobile elements add to the impression of the hustle and bustle encountered during frenetic travel e.g. shuffling animal legs in The Run Away Train and No Worries Tank, flapping wing in Flying Cab, rotating wheels in Ship of Fools. A moving milieu of passengers parades before your eyes in Black Birdy and The Run Away Train. Blinking and flashing lights add to the visual excitement, particularly in Launching Space Dolly; the noisy paintings cannot help but grab attention, particularly when you hear a bomb drop or guns retort in Ship of Fools, a quacking sound in Black Birdy and are serenaded by A Little Night Music in Flying Cab.
Aside from the viewer actually coming up to the painting to activate buttons, rather than maintaining a respectful distance as if the art were unduly sacred, the pictures are interactive in several other ingenious ways. Champagne for My Cat and Dog mimics the cocktail banter at an exhibition opening by connecting the two paintings with walkie talkies through which two viewers can converse across a room. The same device allows you to talk across carriages in The Run Away Train. You can indulge in singalong karaoke using the microphone in No Worries Tank. And your modulated voice can blare from the speaker should you harangue The Ship of Fools. The interaction he seeks with his audience may thus be greater than in his recently concluded two-year series of performances Aliennation, where he found people afraid to be approached by him, let alone come up to him voluntarily (not that you could honestly blame them if Jeremy was covered in luminous paint and squirming and evolving before their eyes).
Like Bosch before him, Jeremy mocks the frivolous pursuits of humanity around him, especially in his own Ship of Fools, where bespectacled Singaporeans busy themselves in mysterious meaningless activities in an aimless voyage. His paintings are also peopled with the bizarre and the grotesque, such as the disembodied human organs in Flying Cab, the cheery flying chaperones of Black Birdy and ultra-cool black-bespectacled animals in No Worries Tank. Jeremy's Theatre of the Absurd is however far from the dark prognostications of Bosch on human foibles. Dressed in pretty multicoloured hues and kitsch ornamentation, Jeremy's brand of 'naïve pop' (which can be traced to the early Artists Village style of Vincent Leow and Wong Shih Yaw) is above all bright and humorous, and may want no more than to proclaim the exuberance of its existence.
Kai Lam Hoi Lit intends to illustrate an increasingly intertwined and interdependent world through a network of caricature clown like portraits, of approximately 20 pieces. The colourful renderings representing local and foreign statesman, derived from drawing, collage, photomontage and photographs will be presented on thick card, and arrayed on the wall or on wooden panels in the gallery. However, the portraits are not exact replication of specific political figures but generic representation. (Politicians are roles taken on by people and changes like the climate. However, they all have the same role to play.) The politicians will be arranged in suggestive juxtapositions, linked with a web of lines, as if in a family-tree to suggest imaginary relationships, and text derived from the acronym S.O.S., such as Sorry Old Soul, Slave Of Sobriety or Smelly Old Socks, in humorous and nonsensical commentary. The landscape of the installation will be completed with buildings and elements of a global city and hub, likely to be drawn from cardboard cut-outs, and panels of imaginary state crests with absurd motifs, which would 'dignify' the installation with quasi-symbols of statesmanship.
For Kai, politicians are perhaps the most prominent and public human representations of his current thematic concern, globalization. They feature in the news daily, set global agendas, are constantly jet-setting, affect lives internationally with their policies and generally encroach into our consciousness through the media, even if they are perceived to be of little personal relevance. Public images ripe for an irreverent examination, perhaps. This fascination for the power of the image was observed in Kai's previous installation at The German School, Anthrax Rocks - I Love Islam and Islam Loves Me (Dec 2001), where portraits of Hong Kong movie stars were altered by addition of a beard and Islamic headgear. This subversion of popular public images with a superposed Middle Eastern image was an indictment of cultural stereotyping brought about by the heightened security worldwide following the September 11 attacks on America. In the current installation for S.O.S., Kai will use humour to leaven the often-grim visages of politicians, lightening the seriousness and pomposity often associated with holders of high office. In this way, he matches the playfulness of Jeremy's paintings, setting the tone for an engaging exhibition of fun and amusement.
Kai's preoccupation with globalization manifests itself as his alter-ego, Mr.Globe, during his performances. Sheathed in the cover of a plastic globe swathed around his head, with holes for eyes and mouth, the curious Mr. Globe wanders around like a masked revolutionary, trying to recruit converts to his mysterious cause. In Mr. Globe's Junk Service (Jan 2002), the revolutionary for a 'junk lifestyle' served French Fries peppered with grounded spices on a plate with toy guns as a symbolic 'aggressive' act of product promotion. Cocktails induced a 'stupor' in his audience so they would 'unconsciously buy' the products, which in this case was his 'revolutionary consumerist slogans'. These slogans from public advertisements, TV programs and news coverage were then read out as a 'global manifesto' to comment on how consumer products are being promoted to gain a false social value. Being an artist, Kai's concerns with globalization have in actuality less to do with economics or politics, then the creep of multinational culturalism, such as the proliferation of artists' residency programmes allowing artist travel and similarities in artistic practice, and epitomized by the spread of fast-food chains and consumerist values.
Ultimately Kai's artistic work is about "the daily life experiences of the self as an autonomous entity based in a pluralistic urban environment." His practice focuses on "intermedia art… specifically to combine the performance art medium and video art medium as an artistic practice. This is to explore the possibility of cross-disciplinary functions in the art-making process and to try to discover new visual art language through the artistic activities that I am involved in." As an objective, his work aims "to promote self-reflection and the possibility of art practice [to be used] as a cultural consciousness and positive action upon reality; and to promote contemporary art as a vehicle for social awareness, and as a form of self-realization and empowerment for the individual."
Pwee Keng Hock, 03/06/02
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