Paintings at the Exhibitions

Saturday, 23 January 2016

Curators.

This is a good read about Curators.

Taken from the above article.
"One thing that's bound to annoy any museum curator is other people abusing the word for what we do. In a world where department stores talk about "curating" their shoe selections or whatever, people think that curating just means choosing nice things. But this is only half of it. Our real job as museum curators is to look after artefacts from the past, yet also to be the repository of knowledge about them, to be expert, to have spent 10000 hours immersed in the subject. Curating isn't just a matter of taste. It involves building up real knowledge of the items in your care. As the world gets quicker, and shallower, and bite-sized, retaining our ability to take a deep dive into history is more and more important."

The term is often loosely used. And if you look at the above opinion by Lucy Worlsey, chief curator, Historic Royal Palaces, many of the art curators in Singapore don't fit the definition with really superficial knowledge of the shows they are asked to curate.

Just like the term art collector. Whence one has one or two paintings of value on a wall, you are bestowed with the title art collector. The definition of collect is just to bring or gather things together so the word collector is correctly used. But there is more to it to earn the title of art collector, which along with collecting has to be an aficionado too. Or maybe we should use the term aficionado more?

My 2 Cents.

Light + Shadow - ANTZ

This exhibition is held from 22nd to 24th January 2016 at Art Outreach over at Gillman Barracks.

It was an interactive show where you place objects in front of a projector to form images/ scenes on a screen. Interesting fun thing, not really fine art but in line with Art Outreach's objectives.

Singapore Contemporary Art Show 2016

Went down to the first edition. Interesting. Not as big as Art Stage but still works of good/decent quality. Supposed to plug the gap between Art Stage and Affordable Art Fair. Think it does. Definitely better quality than AAF. But I felt Singapore Art Fair 2014 had better quality. You can check out TodayOnline, Straits Times, Channelnewsasia and other news websites to see how they rank the fairs, including Art Apart Fair. (Been to previous editions, only so-so, thus go only when you are feeling art starved.)

I think that the organisers of SCA are working hard and I think have committed to 3 years at least and the next edition should be better. They have set the date for next year already. Just hope that Art Week doesn't move before it. And it's good to have another fair in case Art Stage pulls out. Heard some talk about it, dunno if it's just to get NAC /EDB to continue with their grants.

Anyway back to the Art, posting some art which caught my eye:

Ng Woon Lam's work

Ng Woon Lam

Mendez Big and Small Art Company Booth

Leo Liu

Park Jin Won

Katsutoshi Yuasa

Syagini Ratna Wulan

Hendra Hehe Harsono

Yoga Mahendra

Chun Kwangyoung's small work, 50x72.7cm

A Gallery HK

Tokuhiro Kawai

Tung Yue Nang

Hwang Seon-Tae

Randy Li

Catch the show if you can. You can buy a ticket online: 1 for 1 ($30), so it works out to $15 per person only. Hope we get a bigger and better curated exhibition next year. Maybe they should jump on the bandwagon and also do a show with a strong South East Asian push, supported by other galleries from Asia than international. But should have a strong SEA flavour. Then we really can get many people coming to SG during this period and Singapore is the go to place for SEA art especially during Art Week.

Thursday, 21 January 2016

Art Stage 2016 - Part II

Just a few more pictures of interesting works from Art Stage 2016. Haven't headed over to the Singapore Contemporary Art Fair yet, but will head over tomorrow and on Saturday. Asst Prof Ng Woon Lam from NTU's ADM will be having a book launch tomorrow over at the Singapore Contemporary Art Fair, will definitely go check it out.

Anish Kapoor

Navin Rawanchaikul

Robert Zhao

Takashi Kuribayashi

Chou Ching Hui

Shinnosuke Tojo

Ploenchan Vinyaratn(Mook)

Fernando Garcia Vasquez

Piyarat Piyapongwiwat

Chun Kai Feng

Jennis Li Cheng Tien

Sung Chul Hong

Norberto Roldan

Do try to catch Art Stage!

Wednesday, 20 January 2016

Art Stage 2016

Only managed to do the left half today. Rather interesting. Walkways are narrower. More galleries or bigger gallery spaces? Not complaining. Gives us more works to see. Will just post a few interesting pieces which I saw. Not comprehensive though.