Arts Picks: Uncanny Cuteness and Who Is Weaving The Sky Net? shows, No Flash: Third Eye podcast

Uncanny Cuteness

Could the cat videos on your Instagram feed actually be works of art?

That may be a step too far, but the “minor” emotion of cuteness is suggested to be one of great social and political importance in this Tang Contemporary Art exhibition, which brings together eight artists from six countries and territories.

For a while now, cuteness has been growing in prominence in the art world, particularly after the popularity of Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara’s big-headed and sulky figures.

Even rarefied academia has paid it serious attention. In staging this exhibition, the gallery was inspired by American cultural theorist Sianne Ngai’s compilation of essays The Cute (2022), in which the instinctive “aww” is analysed as cute art’s “deverbalising effect”.

Ngai also parsed the inherent violence in cuteness, which maims and embarrasses the subject. On the flipside, it is able to capture states of rebellion in ways that are more palatable and hence more powerful in capitalist societies.

Decide for yourself if these vaunted ambitions are achieved here. Indonesian artist Jonathan Hadipranata’s anime children, whose mouths are taped, certainly have a mixed effect otherwise impossible in more realist depictions.

Where: Level 6 Delfi Orchard, 402 Orchard Road
MRT: Orchard
When: Till Dec 7, 11am to 7pm, Tuesdays to Saturdays; closed on Mondays
Admission: Free
Info:

 str.sg/LdG5

No Flash: Third Eye Podcast

Sing Lit has been given some very public boosts recently, from

poems on MRT trains

to

slogans on Uniqlo T-shirts

.

Here is one for the more adventurous. Six Singaporean authors have spun stories that are magnificent, mysterious and macabre, each reimagining one artwork in the National Gallery Singapore’s collection.

In Malaysian artist Zulkifli Dahlan’s ink on paper blotches in an untitled work from the 1970s, artist-musician Bani Haykal discerns an immortal jellyfish.

Filipino artist Hernando Ocampo’s Dancing Mutants is taken literally in Lisabelle Tay’s story with the blurb: “It began with sap, leaking from her nose then her ears and her eyes.”

Recordings of all six stories have now been released on platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts, imbued with edginess by Mervin Wong’s original scoring and sound design.

The project, No Flash: Third Eye, is Season 2 of the gallery’s effort to find new ways of engaging of works in its collection. The first season, No Flash: Unstill Life (2021), found more than 2,200 listeners in Singapore, Malaysia, India, Britain, Germany and the United States.

The other four authors involved this time are Diana Rahim, Manish Melwani, Wen-yi Lee and Ng Yi-Sheng.

Where: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Luminary
Admission: Free
Info:

str.sg/Cwf6

Who Is Weaving The Sky Net?

Weaving becomes acts of resistance and reclamation in Yeo Workshop’s latest exhibition, which fits very well with the art world’s general turn to textiles, previously relegated to the domain of “craft”.

The eight artists assembled in the space express their desire to be the architects of their own lives.

For instance, the organ-shaped bags by Hannah Woo – winner of the inaugural artist award at Frieze Seoul in 2023 – are objects of defiance, created after discovering that one of her kidneys had shrunk abnormally in 2019.

In Iranian artist Leila Seyedzadeh’s collaged fabrics,  she collapses geography so New York’s East River runs through Tehran’s Alborz mountains, capturing her own immigrant journey.

The exhibition’s title is borrowed from the writings of Vietnamese physician Nguyen Tuong Bach, whose ideas about human beings’ agency are influenced by quantum physics and Buddhist thought.

Where: 01-25, 47 Malan Road
MRT: Labrador Park
When: Till Jan 5, 2025; 11am to 7pm, Tuesdays to Saturdays; noon to 6pm, Sundays; closed on Mondays and public holidays
Admission: Free
Info: 

str.sg/C5Tb