New Sculpture Square takes shape with 3 shows

SINGAPORE — To one side of Sculpture Square’s Chapel Gallery, visitors will notice a square of light, projected partially on the floor and partially on the wall.

It’s the latest interpretation of Singapore conceptual artist Cheo Chai-Hiang’s seminal work 5’ x 5’ (Singapore River) — and seems a rather unlikely piece to kick off the re-launch of an art space dedicated to sculptures.

But it’s also in line with the new direction taking shape at Sculpture Square. With three new exhibition programmes — Iconoclast, 24/7, Bureau — unveiled this week, artistic director Alan Oei thinks it’s time to rethink our notions of the artistic form.

“It’s about trying to look at what sculpture is today,” said Oei, who was appointed last August and is a painter by practice. “I would never consider myself a scholar of sculpture, so one of the ideas is to go the exact opposite — to ruthlessly interrogate the notion of sculpture.”

Beginning with a piece of conceptual art, mind you.

Cheo’s piece is the focus of the first installment of the Iconoclast series, which will look at iconic works by Singapore artists. Curated by Louis Ho, the show A Void: Returning To The River tracks the history of this conceptual piece, which started off as proposal to the Modern Art Society in 1972. Essentially a list of instructions to create a five feet by five feet square piece of nothing, Cheo’s idea was rejected, before finally interpreted in a number of ways beginning in 2005.

“For the longest time, it was in the realm of idea, an absent moment for three decades,” said Ho, who supplements Cheo’s work with other artworks and a timeline of Cheo’s practice and other artworks and events pertaining to the Singapore River.

The idea behind 5’ x 5’ was “partly a practical thing,” said Cheo, who quipped that the proposal was all he could afford as a student back then, and the dimensions was simply arbitrary. As for the idea of a “blank” piece of square, he added: “The notion of presence is a strange one. Sometimes absence has a stronger presence.”

There are two other exhibitions up at Sculpture Square. Mike HJ Chang’s This Place Is Elbow Deep is under the 24/7 programme of window dioramas. His humour-tinged works, which use brooms, curtains, “hedges” and transparent bricks, play with concepts of “hiding and revealing” — no sculptures per se here but, rather, “sculptural compositions”, said Chang.

The Bureau programme, meanwhile, is an ad-hoc residency of artists from different disciplines. The first batch — Ang Song Nian, Tan Peiling, Kamiliah Bahdar and Elizabeth Lim — is presenting Oversight, a project about public sculptures. It mainly comprises a video installation of 16 public sculptures recorded clandestinely over 24 hours to see how the public engages with these works.

“We want to engage artworks in a more intellectual and responsible manner,” explained Oei, who revealed that they’re looking at Chua Mia Tee’s seminal painting National Language Class for the next Iconoclast show. But before that, they’re also launching another programme called the Social Mileu Project, beginning with Ghost: The Body At The Turn Of The Century in October. The show, which opens to coincide with the Singapore Biennale, is set to look at how artists from various genres like film, music and performance arts, “used the body as the artistic medium, as a site for resistance and counter-culture,” said Oei.

And in line with this new direction for Sculpture Square, he wants audiences to be more involved (visitors are encouraged to create their own versions of 5’ x 5’, for instance). Oei is also considering bringing into the discussion of sculptures forms like performance art (“which has a direct lineage to sculpture in Singapore”) or even re-looking at sculptures by the likes of Han Sai Por, Ng Eng Teng or Anthony Poon.

“It would be good to look at these in different ways,” he said.

The three shows are on from Aug 15 to Sept 16, 11am to 7pm, Sculpture Square, 155 Middle Road. Free admission. Closed on Mondays. A symposium of 5’ x 5’ will be held on Aug 13, 2pm, and an artist tour for the two other programmes will be on Aug 24, 2pm. Register for either at arts [at] sculpturesq.com.sg.