Art review: Dog And Butterfly

SINGAPORE — Artist Mike Chang’s first solo exhibition in Singapore, Dog And Butterfly, now on at Yeo Workshop, has a distinct lack of dogs and butterflies featured, and you would be forgiven for wondering about the link between the title and the exhibition itself.

It all becomes clear — well, clearer — when you note that the exhibition owes much to Plato’s Allegory Of The Cave, in which the cave’s prisoners come to believe that the shadow puppets they observe are real. Dogs and butterflies — to say nothing of rabbits — are just about the easiest shadow puppets to form with our hands, which suggests a touch of self-effacement on the part of the artist.

Rather than some literal projection of light and shadow, Chang has adapted the notion of the Allegory Of The Cave to his own studio — and through it, the intimate and personal process of how he responds artistically to the world he inhabits. Basically, what is on show at Yeo Workshop is, depending on your point of view, a facsimile, abstraction, or projection of the artist’s studio, charted by an annotated guide hand-pencilled onto one of the gallery’s walls.

On the surface, it is a gesture which runs some risk of accusations of an over-inflated sense of self, in that the artist’s everyday space, and the objects and processes located therein, are significant enough to be duplicated in a gallery. However, Chang’s Dog And Butterfly is not only a simple copy, or infrastructural exposure, in the manner of, say, open kitchens, or IKEA’s relentlessly engineered pseudo-warehouse experience. It also delves into the recursive layers of representation.

The space is broadly divided into two such layers, separated by an unfinished false wall, reminiscent of theatrical props — the rear of the wall is left exposed, revealing the sandbags which give it structural stability. This wall is pierced in the corner, lending focus to what might be the exhibition’s centrepiece: A strangely doubled representation of a chair, as if two folding chairs — as folding chairs are wont to do — were trying to inhabit the same space and time. This layered set-up is meant to suggest a sort of imperfect camera obscura, which then yields an imperfect representation.

Representational imperfection through recursion turns up again in a video monitor in the exhibition’s outer layer, depicting a drawing of a butterfly folded over a corner, photographed, with the subsequent photograph being likewise folded and photographed, with successive iterations eventually falling prey to the vagaries of image compression.

Perhaps the most painstaking copy on show — the sheer fidelity of which brings paradoxical attention to its status as a copy — is of Chang’s notebook, collecting four years of the artist’s thoughts and sketches. As with the rest of the show, it is hard to escape the nagging question of which side of Plato’s cave one is standing on, and the possibility that the direction of projection is not also from Chang’s studio to the gallery, but its inverse as well. Bruce Quek

Dog And Butterfly runs until Nov 15 at Yeo Workshop, #01-01 1 Lock Road. 11am to 7pm (Tuesdays to Saturdays), noon to 6pm (Sundays); closed Mondays and public holidays.