On Joo Choon Lin's machines and Angie Seah's sounds

The RAT has been rather preoccupied with theatre and dance shows these past few weeks, missing out on some nice exhibitions and talks (anyone take a video or photograph of the heckl—sorry, intervention—at last week’s NAFA talk on the death of painting?) as well as the first weekend of the Singapore Writers Fest (er, does being part of a panel discussion on reviewers and critics count?). But I finally managed to check out two solo shows over the weekend—Joo Choon Lin’s Resolution Of Reality at Hermes and Angie Seah’s Primal Screams at The Substation. Woot.

From Joo Choon Lin's Resolution Of Reality.

Old school technologies—dot matrix printers, manual SLRs, CRT TVs, gaming consoles—are reexamined in Joo’s show at the third floor of Hermes, which marks a departure from her previous works—or at least the ones I’ve seen. The familiar raw-edged, playful, occasionally cartoony stop-motion videos have undergone a refinement of sorts. It’s still seen in "Vapourised By Sunrise", a stop-motion video of Styrofoam replicas these old school things disintegrating in a pool of acetone; and remnants of said objects are also hanging in one corner. But Joo seems taken her preoccupations with visual representations a step further. The idea of nostalgia in relation to technology is something that was mentioned in the short handout (and given the presence of the aforementioned objects, the most obvious entry point). But I found myself much more interested in the acts of interference Joo employs to bring up questions regarding image. Multiple transpositions occur, for example, when an (inkjet?) printer “prints out” a shiny, reflective sheet that reflects its surroundings—all of which is captured and seen as a looped video on a TV screen. Elsewhere, you have a video of wood “bleeding” ink in dialogue with another video of a printer “printing” “wood”, and a liquid projection of a wood grain surface is seen on top of a heap of plywood planks. The two-dimensional end result of the videos effectively flatten the image—which is the opposite of what the show’s centerpiece "Multi-Tiered Falls" aims to do. The sculpture is essentially a dot matrix printer hung upside down printing sequential landscape images—a “waterfall” if you will. It’s supposed to be a continuous flow of paper, but it seems they only switch it on upon a viewer’s request. Apparently it’s too noisy in the story—but said noise is rather integral to the piece’s completion, methinks. The addition of the grating noise, I suspect, would provide a logical link to the brashness of Joo’s previous “fun”, quirky rough videos. But in silence, it still works—there’s a serene sparseness to Resolution Of Reality that I kinda like.

From Angie Seah's Primal Screams.

In contrast to the somewhat zen-like feel and its technological investigations of Joo’s show was Angie Seah’s Primal Screams, a more freewheeling exhibition of drawings and paintings on paper coupled with three performances (with Kawai Shiu and Mohammad Riduan last week, and Aya Sekine this week). Here is artmaking of the, well, primal kind, of emotions translated into layers of colours and textures on paper, mostly abstract but with the occasional figuration of a heart or a brain, and occasionally morphing into “monsters”, she says. This translation is perhaps more evident in the performances (I wanted to catch the one last Sunday but had to sneak out for my panel discussion next door)—pure emotion as bodily reaction—the creation of soundwaves.

Angie Seah testing out her makeshift paper horn for last weekend's performance with Mohammad Riduan. How it translates on paper is less easier to grasp. Seah’s abstract works aren’t action paintings or at least she doesn’t consider them as such. That there is also the occasional attempt by Seah to make sense of the blots and blobs and line traces as specific forms or hints of it means more or less a conscious attempt at shaping something into being. I love the somewhat synesthetic idea of “hearing” an image, of seeing what it sounds like—but just how does one perceive a painting or drawing as pure emotion as sound? Does a Rothko painting “shout” or throb?

Angie Seah's Forget About Teh Horrible Dream, I Just Want To Make a 100 ScReam. But at the same time as well, I feel it’s a bit like shortchanging Seah’s works if one approaches it as something like a Rorschach inkblot test (the implied imagery in some instances makes it easy).

From Angie Seah's Primal Screams. It is easier to approach these wonderfully enigmatic works without taking into consideration the notion of sound. A series of works within the show, for example, deal with emotion as weather (or weather as emotion?). But sound—or the notion of it at least—is too omnipresent to ignore. It’s in the title, it’s tangentially informed by the mouth icons she did before, and she even reveals how the pleasure of manipulating paper for her semi-sculptural drawings is also derived from the sound of crumpling, tearing, cutting. Seah does look at her performance and her drawings as two separate avenues of expression. Maybe I’m just overthinking things, but I think that one’s reading of the exhibition may be incomplete without the performances. A symbiotic coexistence that, to my mind at least, is vital and necessary. (Resolution of Reality runs until Dec 16 at Hermes, Liat Towers. Primal Screams runs until Nov 12 at The Substation Gallery. Seah's performance with Aya Sekine is on Nov 8, 7.30pm.)