No Country: Contemporary Art for South and South East Asia

This exhibition opened from the 10th of May 2014 and runs till the 20th July 2014. It is actually a touring exhibition of what was initially presented at the S.R.Guggenheim Museum NY in 2013. The actual collection is larger then what is shown here. You can view the collection online here. The UBS MAP purchase fund is working on acquiring works from 3 geographic regions - Middle East and Africa, Latin America and South/ South East Asia and as the title suggests this is the South/ South East Asian part.

Norbeto Rodan's F16

The two best works of art that were on display was Norbeto Rodan's F16 and Tang Da Wu's Our Children.

Tang Da Wu's Our Children

You should try to catch this show before it ends since it's free anyway and there is a free shuttle bus from the Singapore Art Museum to CCA at 3pm on Saturdays.

The collection is typical of what a museum will collect and seeing it doesn't spring any surprises. Good works of art though, good blend of video, photos, paintings and installations. But I prefer solo or smaller group exhibitions where you get to see the context in which the art was created and try to understand the art and the artist (not that you can't do that here). Whereas this show is a curated show and you have to get yourself into the mindset of the curator to see how the various art works fit into the exhibition. (and I think there has been sort of a curatorial overload/overuse)

From CCA :
"This exhibition, curated by June Yap, invites audiences to engage with some of the region's most inventive artists. No Country calls for a closer examination of the ways in which South and Southeast Asia's cultures and the relationships between them are represented, proposing a renewed understanding that transcends physical and political boundaries. Grouped according to four themes - relfection and encounter, intersections and dualities, diversities and divisions, and the desire for unity and community- the works in No Country explore the region's complex aesthetic, economic, historical and political territories."

Gillman Barracks as we all know are actually barracks and not recent buildings built specifically for a museum so the acoustics in the CCA aren't every good and as you walk about you can hear the multiple soundtracks from the various Video Art even though they are in separate darkened rooms and that one video art that was in the open. Quite distracting unless the curator wanted to achieve the effect of a noisy native market, then well done.

Points for collectors: Go and catch the art. Interesting to see what the curator is thinking. And with that in mind, your collection should go about with a focus so that you become the curator of your own collection.