Arts Picks: Robert Zhao, Burmese artist duo Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu at Singapore Art Week
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Singaporean artist Robert Zhao Renhui's Seeing Forest exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum is part of Singapore Art Week, which runs from Jan 17 to 26.
PHOTO: ROBERT ZHAO RENHUI
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Seeing Forest by Robert Zhao Renhui
Fresh from representing Singapore at the Venice Biennale in 2024
His work – executed since 1998 under the playful semi-fictional moniker of the Institute of Critical Zoologists – has always been a painstaking exercise in making visible the teeming animal life
In the secondary forest near Gillman Barracks, he observes species of kingfishers, cobras, nightjars, drongos and owls. His observations are noted in his sleekly designed two-volume catalogue for the exhibition and are offered to the viewer without the “perils” of outdoor exploration – although Zhao’s scientific and aesthetic displays will have the viewer question his or her modes of seeing.
Those who caught Zhao’s immersive installation Albizia (2023) at the Esplanade can look forward to a development of similar themes in Seeing Forest.
The highly anticipated return show, curated by Haeju Kim, is a must-see at Singapore Art Week, which runs from Jan 17 to 26.
Zhao’s fans or the quirkier variety of nature enthusiasts will want to seek out two more of his exhibitions around the island. At Gillman Barracks, ShanghArt will present The Divine In The Trash Stratum (Jan 11 to Feb 23), which opens with a series of photographs of various creatures on a fallen Albizia tree trunk.
Also ongoing is 5 Albizias, which is showing at Punggol Regional Library and will travel to other regional libraries throughout the first half of 2025. With marvellous synchrony, the Albizias documented in the exhibition come from Tampines, Punggol, Jurong and Woodlands – reflecting each of the library venues.
The fifth Albizia is from the Maluku Islands, in Indonesia, where the tree is native.
Where: Singapore Art Museum, Gallery 3, Tanjong Pagar Distripark, 39 Keppel Road str.sg/4CQu5
MRT: Tanjong Pagar
When: Jan 15 to May 18, 10am to 7pm
Admission: Free for Singaporeans and permanent residents; $10 (adults) and $5 (concession) for tourists and foreign residents
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Tun Win Aung & Wah Nu – The Squares
Burmese artist duo Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu’s work from the Thousand Pieces Of White series is showing at Richard Koh Fine Art.
PHOTO: RICHARD KOH FINE ART
For 15 years, Burmese artist duo Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu have been collecting artefacts – from newspaper clippings to a portrait of assassinated independence hero Aung San – and whitewashing them in a nod towards erasure and censorship.
The ambitious Thousand Pieces Of White series is meant to run up to 1,000 objects, a dizzying personal and political archive that paradoxically foregrounds the ephemerality of memory. The project is especially poignant at a historical moment when Myanmar’s civil war rages on close to four years after a military coup.
See a fraction of works from this ongoing project by the Yangon-based artists at Richard Koh Fine Art, one of numerous galleries around the island showing South-east Asian artists during Singapore Art Week.
On show are once-censored Burmese magazines painted over in white acrylic as political material gets redacted into minimalist geometric abstractions. What gets disseminated in these works are not so much political messages as the stutters and ellipses in public discourse under authoritarianism.
The Squares, curated by Louis Ho, also features a palimpsestic work in which the husband-and-wife artist duo intervene into the censored scenes of 1973 film Tender Are The Feet by Burmese director Maung Wunna, who is Wah Nu’s father.
Where: Richard Koh Fine Art, 01-26 Gillman Barracks, 47 Malan Road str.sg/FpyF
When: Jan 11 to Feb 15, 11am to 7pm, Tuesdays to Saturdays (except public holidays)
Admission: Free
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Unfettered Brush: The Art And Writings Of Tan Joo Jong
Explore the efferverscent, child-like spark in Singaporean artist Tan Joo Jong’s Chinese ink works at the NUS Museum.
PHOTO: NUS MUSEUM
The name Tan Joo Jong (1951 to 1984) might not be familiar to even art enthusiasts today, but an ongoing exhibition at the NUS Museum shows how the late Singaporean artist might have been recognised as a pioneering figure in Chinese ink, if not for his truncated life.
Tan, who was an autodidact in Chinese ink, created distinctive paintings that exude an effervescent, child-like spark while skirting at the edge of what some might perceive as juvenile. Rather than seek a spirit of liveness in his birds and fish, Tan preferred the harsh line, rendering his creatures comically and endearingly flat.
In works with human figures – Tan travelled to Bali and lived with Indonesian artists in the 1980s – the artist is not derivative of his forebears’ styles, such as Cheong Soo Pieng’s lithe figures. Tan’s humans are almost avian, a curious caricature and a minimalist study of bodily form.
In an interview with The Straits Times in 1983, Tan – who studied geography at Nanyang University and went on to become the art editor of Chinese daily Sin Chew Jit Poh – said that “no school could teach art”.
His idols were Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh – revolutionaries in modern art – and their influence can be glimpsed in his bold and idiosyncratic brushwork in both ink and other mediums.
Unfettered Brush, made possible by a loan from a private collection, is not technically on the official line-up of Singapore Art Week. But it makes for a worthy excursion in search of a lost ink artist at the sidelines of the festival, which celebrates other ink pioneers like Lim Tze Peng
Catch Romania-born Singaporean artist Delia Prvacki’s solo
Where: NUS Museum, 50 Kent Ridge Crescent str.sg/9hgk
MRT: Kent Ridge
When: Till June 30, 10am to 6pm, Tuesdays to Saturdays (except public holidays)
Admission: Free
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