Arts Picks: Smell art at National Gallery Singapore, Goh Beng Kwan exhibition
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Wear art at the Gallery Wellness Festival.
PHOTO: NATIONAL GALLERY SINGAPORE
Gallery Wellness Festival 2023: Art Connects
How an artwork looks is relatively straightforward, but what of its smell? Scentopia Singapore has a custom answer: Beauty lies not just in the eye of the beholder, but the nose too.
As part of the Gallery Wellness Festival 2023, the perfume company/tourist attraction will help participants create specialised scents as they meditate on works of art at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS).
While looking at a painting, one is encouraged to imagine the damp of alluvial soils or fill in a personality quiz that serves to gauge one’s temperament – all with subtle consequences for the resulting bottled fragrance.
By incorporating smell into art appreciation, founder of Scentopia Singapore Prachi Saini Garg wants perfumery itself to gain more recognition as the next frontier of art, not unlike visual art that engages the eyes and music for the ears.
In its second edition, the wellness festival is organised by NGS and runs till July 9.
Scentopia Singapore wants to tell you how art smells.
PHOTO: NATIONAL GALLERY SINGAPORE
Other activities include a self-guided “mindful art walk” designed by art therapist Lee Sze Chin that challenges participants to follow their instincts in deciding where to venture and relook spatial relationships.
Visitors to the NGS can drop in any time in the basement to create headgear using colourful paper or join a music jam with strangers.
For $15, those who want a souvenir can also purchase a “Relak Buddy” personal stress reliever – a cute rectangular red blob of a creature with little stumps for limbs. It is a squishy joy, and be warned, heavier than you would expect.
Where: National Gallery Singapore, 1 St Andrew’s Road
MRT: City Hall
When: Till July 9, various timings
Admission: Free and paid
Info: www.nationalgallery.sg/gwf2023
Goh Beng Kwan: Time & Again
After The Rain (2006) by Goh Beng Kwan.
PHOTO: STRAITS GALLERY
National Gallery Singapore’s 2021 exhibition Something New Must Turn Up focused on second-generation artist Goh Beng Kwan’s collage works.
An exhibition by Straits Gallery presents a more “comprehensive” look at the Singapore artist’s oeuvre, including six “New Era” abstractions painted by Goh during the pandemic.
Curated by Arielle Lau from works in a private collection, Goh Beng Kwan: Time & Again is a journey backwards through Goh’s artmaking.
Lau has arranged the works in a way that first takes viewers through a tunnel of the artist’s newest and brightest pieces, uncompromisingly abstract canvases in turquoise and lime green with shimmers of gold.
Goh supposedly took inspiration for these from the colourful clothes that he observed young people wearing.
The sightline is then expanded to a vista of South-east Asian landscapes that are only winkingly discernible, painted between 2010 and 2019.
Taking pride of place in the room are Goh’s creations during his STPI Residency in 2006, including After The Rain (2006), a mixed-media work made from pigmented pulp pieces. These were arranged using the “water collage” method, which entailed floating material onto the surface of the work.
On the mezzanine floor are smaller-scale experiments by Goh during his schooling years in the 1960s – some in their original frames – and his tributes to Western abstract expressionists Joan Miro, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.
Understated gems are the black-and-white photo etchings, made by pressing ink over casts of Goh collages. These offer a different entry point to his florid idiom, the stark monochrome lending his tropical vision a certain gravitas.
Where: Straits Gallery, 05-38 Northstar@AMK, 7030 Ang Mo Kio Avenue 5
MRT: Serangoon
When: Till Sunday, 11am to 7pm
Admission: Free
Info: str.sg/iUia
Otis Carey live painting at Capella Singapore
Otis Hope Carey will be painting a wall mural nestled within Capella Singapore in Sentosa from Sunday to June 29.
PHOTO: CHINA HEIGHTS GALLERY
Australian artist Otis Hope Carey is a surfer, but it is not waves he rides in his paintings, but air.
His works take a topographical view of currents, using the traditional dot and line method of Aboriginal artists to create scale through repetition of small parts.
He will be painting a wall mural nestled within Capella Singapore in Sentosa from Sunday to June 29, using symbols dated over 50,000 years old belonging to the Gumbaynggirr, an Aboriginal Australian people.
A proud Gumbaynggirr man himself, Carey says: “I use the symbols in a way that fuses my spiritual connection to the symbols and the ocean together to create a two-layered pattern on the wall.
“Painting outdoors such as murals gives me a huge sense of freedom and expression to better allow the work to flow out of me like the rhythm of a gentle breeze from the wind.”
Carey’s works have been showcased in art galleries in Sydney and internationally. He also collaborated with director Taika Watiti to create the cloak worn by Chris Hemsworth in the opening scenes of Thor: Love And Thunder (2022).
Where: Capella Singapore, 1 The Knolls, Sentosa Island
MRT: HarbourFront
When: Till June 29
Admission: Free
