SINGAPORE – A persistent light drizzle put a damper on crowds at arts cluster Gillman Barracks, but about 100 people – toting umbrellas and wearing ponchos – still congregated in front of a makeshift stage to watch art pioneer Tang Da Wu’s performance on Jan 20.
Tang, a rock star in Singapore’s art scene, played only a bit part in the one-hour work, Our Children.
He opted to cede the space to 20 young volunteers, who had rehearsed this new iteration of his struggle with filial piety and cultural transmission over the past month.
Compared to the more performative 2017 version of Our Children – the collaborating art school students acting out synchronised motions – Tang’s brief on Saturday was decidedly more vocal and chaotic.
In front of a large tapestry depicting the pastoral idyll of a goat suckling its kid, the young volunteers debated questions like “Where is the father?” and “What is the real cost of love?”
They trapped themselves in woven threads, forced their peers to declare their stand on issues and fought jealously over milk, accompanied by the angry twangs of an electric bass.
At parts, the presentation was slightly on the nose, beginning with a mime to the gospel No Charge by American singer Shirley Caesar. A boy tries to charge his mother for errands run, only to be told that she has borne and raised him without such calculation.
Yet, the rain and wet tarmac made actions like kneeling before a parent more brutal, requiring more unjustifiable submission.
At the end, Tang, who made his thanks in front of organiser Art Outreach’s space, looked pleased with the more focused, ambivalent homage to this natural dialectic between the old and the young.
The tapestry, along with five other works from private collections to do with the parent-child relationship, remains on show at Art Outreach.
Gillman Barracks’ other exhibitions also made the visitors’ trek worthwhile, including an impressively curated show of 15 works from the Pierre Lorinet collection, themed Rough; and a solo exhibition of Myanmar artist Htein Lin, titled Reincarceration.
Rough, at 22 Lock Road, is so called because of the raw and unrefined feel of the selected works, a theme that curator Edward Mitterrand says finds its echo in the more rugged surroundings of the barracks.
The bold creations by leading contemporary artists are split zonally and tagged helpfully with QR codes by Art Outreach that provide their context.
Greek artist Jannis Kounellis’ oddball sculpture-canvas of steel, metal, painted wood and wax finds a sleek echo in the shaped canvases of American artist Blair Thurman, recalling the curvatures of car parts and racetracks.
Across the room, the violent brush strokes of Colombian artist Oscar Murillo initiate a conversation about displacement and conflict in the Global South with the equally abstract and similarly weighty Soya Yooya, stitched together from charcoal jute sacks by Ghanaian Ibrahim Mahama.
Other pieces include Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei’s bent steel rebars, commenting on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake; Vietnamese artist Danh Vo’s pottery depicting torture scenes from the Middle Ages; British artist Thomas Houseago’s mythical mask; and two plaques by influential Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, famous worldwide for his participatory installations.
Over at Richard Koh Fine Art at Block 47, curator Louis Ho pays tribute to Htein Lin, who was thrown into prison once more by the military junta in 2022, after his six-year jail term as a political prisoner in the 1990s.
His visually arresting, whimsical strokes compound the darkness of incarceration. In some cases, the human figures behind bars look like they can be taken apart, conjoined to their thorny surroundings.
But viewers will also find an abundance of resistance in each portrait: a suite of drawings was begun on tamarind sweet wrappers he found in prison, while in another, the artist’s head grows roots and branches that escape the confines of the prison cell.
A large-scale installation of alms bowls, constructed in the manner of rosary beads, makes an argument about how Buddhism has been used by those in power and its continued potential for healing and resistance.
View It/Our Children by Tang Da Wu
Where: Art Outreach, 01-06 Gillman Barracks, 5 Lock Road
When: Till Feb 4, 11am to 7pm daily
Admission: Free
Info: str.sg/fLDD
View It/Rough and Reincarceration
Where: Gillman Barracks, 22 Lock Road and 47 Malan Road
When: Rough – till Jan 28, 11am to 7pm daily (until 1pm on Jan 27); Reincarceration – till Feb 3, Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10am to 7pm
Admission: Free
Info: Go to str.sg/CU93 and str.sg/yKzg
Correction note: An earlier version of this story said artist Htein Lin was arrested and jailed in 2002. This is incorrect. He was jailed in 2022 and released after three months. We are sorry for the error.
