Arts Picks: Yee I-Lann and Pratchaya Phinthong at SAM, movement session at National Gallery

Yee I-Lann: Mansau-Ansau

Two South-east Asian artists have solos at the Singapore Art Museum, connected by their active engagement with the communities they are working in.

The bigger show is Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann’s Mansau-Ansau, meaning “to walk and walk” in the language of the Kadazan and Dusun peoples of Sabah.

It is an engaging journey through the quiet fabulist photocollages challenging power and colonialism that Yee is best known for. But the three-room show also contains surprising encounters with other larger-scale media.

One of the first encounters is a vertical silk triptych, an apocalyptic portrayal of three classes of society rendered with inkjet print and batik techniques.

In Yee’s critique of power, colours swirling and cracking, the powerless mob is compared to the parasitic banyan, and the wealthy to the carnivorous pitcher plant.

The strips of cloth combine features from Malay costumes kain panjang and kain sarong, themselves class-based, with its suggestions of inseparability and mutual reliance of various strata in power relationships.

Power dynamics is once more Yee’s subject as she works with women in Sabah’s Kampung Song-Song to weave makeshift mats from deconstructed cardboard boxes.

In a room centring on her weaving collaborations, these are draped over chairs to reclaim what Yee sees as a crucial tool of foreign power through administration. The decolonisation process begins from herself – and a table in her room appears in multiple works here. She seems adamant on grinding it down or sending it flying.

But before entering the gallery, there is already playfulness, as well as real, subversive power, in a herd of water buffaloes which stares at visitors in the corridor.

Yee has collaged photos of these kerbau, usually placid, so they gather on streets signified by orange cones in an act of political defiance. Singapore is the only South-east Asian country without buffaloes, Yee notes.

Where: Singapore Art Museum, 39 Keppel Road
MRT: Tanjong Pagar
When: Till March 23, 2025, 10am to 7pm
Admission: Free for Singapore citizens and permanent residents; $10 for tourists and foreign residents
Info: str.sg/Fv75

Pratchaya Phinthong: No Patents On Ideas

Thai artist Pratchaya Phinthong’s No Patents On Ideas, also at SAM, is less flashy – just five works in a dark room that slopes gently skywards.

Pratchaya wants visitors to think about Singapore’s invisible power and a constellation of elements here is aviation-themed, including a central encounter under a screen made from nylon fabric used for stunt kites.

This screen alternates between two projections. The first is a still of an F-16 fighter jet crossing Thai airspace in Udon Thani – possibly a Singapore aircraft, given the two countries’ longstanding military agreement.

These hidden systems of power and wealth exchange are also referenced in a subsequent screensaver of falling banknotes that mimic Singapore’s meteorological patterns.

But Pratchaya also shows that interactions between countries can be rehabilitative, such as in his Nam Prik Zauquna (2015), in which he commissioned a community of widows in southern Thailand to produce 1,000 bottles of chilli paste for Singapore migrant workers.

Some of the bottles are displayed here in two pyramids. A new project also sees him working with villagers in a Laos village, who fashion spoons from unexploded ordnances.

Pratchaya has got them to create anonymous discs with a mirror finish instead, dispersing them around Singapore so people can relive some of the villagers’ uncovering of metal from ground – albeit in a much less lethal form.

Where: Singapore Art Museum, 39 Keppel Road
MRT: Tanjong Pagar
When: Till March 23, 2025, 10am to 7pm
Admission: Free for Singapore citizens and permanent residents; $10 for tourists and foreign residents
Info: str.sg/8FJC

Body Translations; Material Transformations

Artists Yanyun Chen and Sonia Kwek are conducting a two-hour session at the National Gallery Singapore that gets participants to respond to two works through movement, sound, drawing and rattan-weaving.

In doing so, they want to guide people to reflect on the relationship between art, life and pain.

The session is inspired by Malaysian sculptor Raja Aziddin Raja Shahriman’s Killing Tools (1994) series, in which automobile parts are forged into weaponry that take on silat poses; and Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak’s monumental sketch Smiling Body (1997), depicting her own figure as a life-giving vessel.

Where: Level 5, Supreme Court Wing, National Gallery Singapore, 1 St Andrew’s Road
MRT: City Hall
When: Dec 7, 2 to 4pm
Admission: Free
Info: str.sg/eEoR