It was announced on the radio that Salma Hayek, in preparation for her role as Frida Kahlo, shaved her upper lip so that stubble would grow back. Frida Kahlo of that strange masculine beauty, unibrow and mustache in every self portrait. Unfortunately, Salma's stubble wouldn't go away and she has to keep shaving it away now. I'm sure that her beauty advisors will tell her to wax or melt. Still, it's enough to make a girl worried for her. (Edit: apparently she waxes! but the mustache is there to stay. Terrible news.)

Anyhow, that thought about Salma popped into my head when I saw this notice about Mexican art being shown at SAM. From now till 2010, and yes, that includes paintings by Frida.

QUESTION: What exhibition would you like to see in a museum?
and the people say...

Ashley: YSL's life or Irving Penn's photography

Samuel: The use of Toilets

Joy: That Chinese contemporary artist who did the red shiny statues of Mao

Lena: The evolution of cartoons

Charmian: Dance

Sharon: Replicas of old European buildings, replicas of site-specific artworks, like The Umbrellas
by Cristo and Jeanne-Claude, dust-bins and phone booths from around the world

Kelvin: Samurai and ninja (like New York's new Samurai museum), war history, food, quirky furniture, weird inventions

Amelia: Christian Louboutin, Coco Chanel's life, the history of Vogue

And I say: For a museum exhibition design project in school, I chose to "curate" all the love letters of men not generally known for their lovability or lovingness, like Hitler and Napoleon. But right now, I think I would FLY to a museum this saturday if it brought in dollhouses/ Lucian Freud paintings/ replicas of film sets / Damien Hirst.

Interesting to know what people would pay to see--tells a lot about them.

This is the poster image for the Singapore Art Show 2009, which looks no different from the Top Creative Directors poster at all the MRT stations: happy mug shots, titles. Its intention is, I suppose, to surface some faces that are usually hidden behind their art. Also to show that artists come in all ages and types, and although are usually characterised by large glasses and kooky hair, also can look perfectly ordinary (ordinary breaks the mold, how ironic).

Going to the Art Show opening alone, I was surprised to see so many people I knew. Prof Eileen Reynolds had a painting, Song had a photo series, ADM faculty were milling about, the photo students were there. Cynthia Koh and Patricia Mok were there too. But no viscommers. No designers.

Are Art and Design so separate that they have different fan bases? If I live my life as a designer, am I signing away time that could be spent on art? Is my art so useless in this country that I have to resort to selling design instead? Design to me is Art's practical sister, resembling her slightly in face but with none of her charming whimsies. So could I be happy with this practical sister, when I long to elope with the other one?

More than anything else I felt while browsing the Art Buffet in SAM, I felt a bright shade of envy. I envied the artists who had won spots in the galleries, the artists who pursued time for their craft, the artists who had spent money on paint and printing and possibly incomeless weeks of work. I wasn't particularly blown away by any piece. But the feeling of envy blew me into two.

There is one Art Show exhibit I have to see: Jane Lee's solo exhibition at Old School. I helped her once at the last Biennale, and will never forget the sight of her anchored to her scaffolding. It was the sight of someone a hundred percent swallowed by the intensity of her own vision. I knew the feeling. I miss it. Sooner or later I know I won't want to keep creating things that are other people's visions.

Dead sea scrolls. From the unusually packed queue going into the arts house I was expecting a setup of caves and Israeli music, maybe re-enactments of Moses writing books and them being copied. What we did see of the dead sea scrolls was this:

Five of these small framed fragments, to be precise, each as small as a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. (Whereas the words on the exhibition panels were strangely very very big. Point size 96?) There was a lot of information on the various copies of the Bible. But I felt not enough was made of how amazing it is that the Bible was copied accurately over thousands of years. The dead sea scrolls were found in a relatively recent time. Finding that these earliest copies of the Bible books matched later copies word for word proved that no mistake had been made by the scribes who painstakingly copied them out. That does wonders to prove the reliability of any historical text.

How painstaking? Haha. This quote has inspired us to try. I mean it.

In the activity room: people copied out entire chapters of the Bible. If we got anything out of this exhibition, it's to try copying out the entire Bible over the course of a year. For what, we shall see. It can only be a good exercise. Here's to dimmed eyes and chests and bellies knitted together!

I like going to museums alone because I like to do my viewing at a personal pace, without minding if I'm going too fast or dawdling behind. So I went alone to a Story of the Image, a very extensive collection of old and new work from Antwerp, and absolutely failed being alone.

The collection is so vast and varied: Anthony Van Dyck, ancient etchings from printing houses, down to modern installations like Joelle Tuerlinckx's slide projections of meaningless dimensions and Honore d'O's Tant Pis (I don't care), which is an 800-page book of contextless images. So vast and varied, that I had to pick up a Visitors Guide for the first time in all my lazy gallery visits.

The exhibition is like a lecture on universal art history, not just Antwerp's: there are the old masters who told you what you're supposed to learn through their narrative paintings, and there are the new masters, who leave everything open to interpretation and revolve around themes of meaninglessness. But without knowing this, one is left to wander in a maze of seemingly randomly selected works spanning a few centuries.

Berlinde De Bruyckere, In Flanders' Fields

Marlene Dumas *this work is not in exhibition

I found a museum guide (or it could have been a history professor) giving a private lecture to a group of students, and I latched myself on to them rather obviously. If they hadn't been at the tailend of their visit I would have been their constant stowaway.

There is just too much, but too much of good things, and I will have to go back for the free guided tour. Sometimes you really have to find out the story behind the image. Who wants to go with me?

My foundation drawing professor has always told me to explore many other styles. I tend to go into style phases that last half a year; pencil portraits of sulky introverts, line drawings of intertwined heads and elbows, symmetrical drawings of complex patterns. It never occurs to me to draw in different styles in the same month, and I never go back to what I did before.

When I looked at Wu Guanzhong's work, however, I did some quick label-memorizing and noticed that he painted in different styles across the years, going back and forth. He flitted through the history of Western art thoroughly, doing impressionism, abstract expressionism, even Egon Schiele, and good old realistic oil landscapes. Sadly the collection at SAM (though it is the largest collection of his in the world) does little justice to his ability as an oil painter, and I could only see his real skill as thumbnails online:







But at the same time, he found his way with the chinese brush.



When I looked at these, I wondered why he bothered with the rest. These houses sing. They warble with little mouths and make light "pop"s. And his consistent palette of brilliant jewel-toned greens and fuschias is fresh in chinese brush painting. With no offense meant at all, some of his abstract ink paintings could be turned into Topshop skirt prints, they were that fresh.


I guess it comes down to the age-old question of what art is. Studies and copies, even good studies, of another artist's work--not art. What Wu Guanzhong achieved with the chinese brush was something purely Wu Guanzhong. What an artist does has to be unmistakably his. His person in it, an original soul. Singing houses.

captaincream has a second branch! www.yesterday.sg (click!)

I saw some interesting things this weekend. There were the socks with one ear each,
men pretending to be menacing at the toy festival,

women sipping cocktails while perched on chair backs,

and boys nervously trying the same,

and the perfect yellow room to lounge around in.

LB was psyched about Verner Panton because we are quite the furniture folk, always testing seats in ikea and muji and wishing we needed them. He resonated in particular with these yummy yellow hammocks, and the man himself when he said, "I have to exaggerate to make a point." It's a designer's dream, to influence an era the way Panton influenced the look of the 70s. Or perhaps the 70s influenced him. How does design culture sweep into everything and meld with music, popular thinking, technology? Check out www.vernerpanton.com, it has redundant sound effects and animation overkill but an interesting presentation of the environments he designed.

The toy festival at SAM was disappointing for me because I imagined there to be themed rooms with tin toys, collectors' Barbies, traditional toys like pick-up sticks and the like. Instead there were mostly men's toys, meaning action figurines and comics. If I were a kid brought to the toy festival I would have been rather bored. The poster and press ad said nothing about such a targeted festival. Still they did have free popcorn and costumed figures walking around, and for $50 lb picked up a very cool mp3 player that transforms into a robot.

If anything could lure me to go to the states, it would probably be to go to their toys 'r'us.

As part of my life ambition to live large, I refuse to go to town. (until ion opens with a huge uniqlo, that is)

This is what I want to do this weekend, starting today:

1. take my international friends (hello ann! welcome back joeun!) to peninsula because it is dark, musty and full of good stuff like band tees, stickers and guitars
2. brotzeit with the classmates i miss
3. national museum for Verner Panton, to see the environment exhibit and if it's really all cushy
4. night picnic at fort canning, on the fake grass and to steal timbre's live music
5. toy festival at SAM on sunday, with free comics and hopefully to pick up some ancient toys
6. sunday market at haji lane for "pre-loved" items, how i adore euphemisms
7. scrapbooking with all the photos i've been printing on my new very cheap home printer

too busy having fun to look for a proper job.

DONNA ONG will be exhibiting at the Night Festival, in the National Museum. This photo from the museum's website of her piece, The Crystal City, looks suspiciously like Secret, Interiors:Chrysalis from the Singapore Biennale three years ago. We'll just have to see it to know.

I was a fan when I first saw the Secret, Interiors series. Just installations of objects in a room, right? But her architecture background comes through in the meticulous detail of every arranged object, and ordinary things come alive (below).


Then I heard that she was actively sharing her life testimony in christian art communities and especially to art students- she has lupus, an autoimmune disease that hasn't prevented her from pushing herself because she knows that her talent was given to her as her life's purpose. I heard this from my friend in animation who also has lupus. It's a condition where the body's immune system fights its own tissues, and although treatable, people who suffer from lupus have to refrain from physical exertion and sun exposure. As lupus is hereditary, childbirth is not encouraged. The installation shown above was a reference to this.

And then after all this, when my admiration for donna ong was peaking the admire-an-artist scale, I found out that she's my dad's cousin's daughter, which makes me related to her! I was at a wedding dinner sitting with these distant family cousins and feeling bored, when they started talking about their artist daughter. I'm skeptical whenever I hear that somebody's daughter is an artist, because we know how parents think the world of their sketching children. But then I heard the name "donna", and it occurred to me to ask this very distant uncle of mine, "Donna? Donna Ong?" And it was, and they pointed me to her table, and pulling my dad along I went like a little starstruck fan to say hello and introduce myself.

The best part is Donna is very nice. She looks younger than she should be and talks like she's still an art student, rather than an artist who has made it to numerous biennales worldwide. I've never met her again because our families don't gather at the same gatherings. So I'm still a fan, not family, and I'll be looking out for her work next weekend like a fan.

Jakarta Biennale 2009

Steve McCurry has contributed extensively to National Geographic, his most recognisable work being the Afghan Girl (below). We went to the asian civilizations museum to pay homage to his craft, and it made me remember how i once wanted to be a photojournalist. I would hide in the second storey of the MGS library with all the National Geographic books and imagine myself travelling, travelling. Today I don't know what became of that dream. It got lost sometime when everyone began acquiring SLRs and making emo photoshoots of themselves. Sometime then I decided I wouldn't be tied to a camera.


But a photograph like this makes me regret being childishly anti-mainstream. This was my favourite photograph in the exhibition. Somehow, by trick of coincidence or craft, McCurry is able to capture entire seas of monochrome with one focused spot of color. Blue streets with blue doors and blue clothes, and sudden red scarves. The only way is to "wait", as he put in his writeup, wait for the moment when the composition comes together by itself, wait "and the soul will rise."

He sees himself not so much as a photographer, but as a traveller, an insatiable explorer, who merely shares what he has had the chance to see. But not all of us see the same things, though we may travel much. I think the difference is in his piece of advice for aspiring travellers/photographers: "Acquire humility."

In the lobby was a Canon-sponsored competition for just about anyone who wanted to be like McCurry and capture the "Unguarded Moment". There were good shots and bad shots, some unfocused, and some taken out of family albums. But the photographs that made me saddest were the well-taken shots of tribal people. They were exotic, they seemed to boast a travelling eye, and perhaps ten years ago they would have caused no small stir in any photojournalling community. Yet today's jaded generation looks at them and sighs, "Typical." We have seen so much that it is harder to move us. What is one richly-adorned neck? What is one wrinkled tribesman? We have never come close to even touching the culture of another, and yet in our seen-it-all city we dismiss all this as visuals we think we already know.

Somehow McCurry manages to capture what we have already seen in ways we have not. It is not just about photographing a costume, or a man of another ethnicity. It is about revealing something about the costume in relation to the day the child wore it, it is about the weather and smell of someplace strange; it is not merely framing, but storytelling. It is an approach that will tell us something surprising even if it was a photograph of our own neighborhood.

The legendary, the amazing, the only: Felice Varini live and touchable in Singapore.

I love this piece: Hair Salon. Everything is made to look like a mirror reflection, but it's not.

Finally: Jane Lee/ Raw Hand. This was the massive work I helped with. Okay, only for a thousandth of the entire work, and to little effect, but I touched it.

Many more photos and videos of nice things. But I'm too tired from the last two days to really comment.
I just read through what I wrote, and realized that a lot of the appeal in these works comes from me being able to touch them. Visual people like to touch things.

And auditory people are very affected by sound. When I was tired in Mongolia, I had to tell my mother, "Please don't talk tonight." And now, there isn't even any music playing, because I can't bear to let just anything be heard. Unwanted sound kills the tired auditory learner.

Yawn.