Tempus Fugit | 3.5/5
SINGAPORE — The sentiment behind the show’s title — Latin for “time flies” — is appropriate for a two-decade survey of Singaporean artist Jason Lim’s performance art, given that the genre, driven by time and change, might be the most transient form of contemporary art.
Skipping his other known practice as ceramicist, this exhibition at Gajah Gallery might occasion the odd temporal shock for those familiar with his work. (Last Drop #5 was nine years ago? I’m getting old.)
But quite apart from opportunities for reminiscence and nostalgia, Lim’s retrospective seems to suggest that the past is a creation of the ever-moving present. Fantasies of time travel aside, the past exists as documents, memories and artefacts to be edited, presented and interpreted.
Here, Lim’s past work is presented, for the most part, in photographs, lending an air of cold stillness — like a chapel, reference library, or a collection of butterflies mounted on pins. It seems at odds with the impermanence and fluidity of his performances, which often stressed himself and his materials to their limits. However, as Lim notes in the exhibition catalogue, he sees his performances as “creating three-dimensional images”, a point of view that seems well-suited to a photographic interpretation of his work.
For about as long as performance art has been around — challenging the tendency of museums and galleries to reduce art to discrete commodities for sale or precious relics to be interred — it has had something of an uneasy relationship with photography. Some allege that producing photographic documents runs counter to the nature of performance art, while others propose that denying documentation is tantamount to elitism, reserving the experience of a performance for those fortunate enough to have been there.
Putting that historical impasse aside, however, there’s another source of tension within the images on show. They’re caught between a functional role of conveying some documentary information about Lim’s past performances and, as aesthetic experiences in their own right, divorced from any historical context. For one unfamiliar with Lim’s practice, the experience may well be a little disorienting, even with a chronology of press clippings and a video of Lim’s Duet With Paper, performed on the opening night.
Insofar as a retrospective inscribes the past, perhaps what’s at play here is that the past is as much about remembering as it is about forgetting; tracing stories and constructing events out of fragments of the past while remaining in the moment.
Tempus Fugit runs until Sept 5, 11am to 7pm, Gajah Gallery, MICA Building 140 Hill Street #01-08. Noon till 7pm on weekends and public holidays. Free admission.