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Young Artist Award winner goes heavy on themes of failure, imperfection

SINGAPORE — He filmed his portly self jiggling his flabby tummy, underarm and thighs, as well as running and climbing the stairs. He also displayed 4D lottery tickets featuring numbers from his birth certificate, and the date of his pet’s “birthday”.

Multidisciplinary artist Kray Chen is the youngest of four artists who received the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award - the country’s highest accolade for art practitioners aged 35 or below - this year. Photo: National Arts Council

Multidisciplinary artist Kray Chen is the youngest of four artists who received the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award - the country’s highest accolade for art practitioners aged 35 or below - this year. Photo: National Arts Council

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SINGAPORE — He filmed his portly self jiggling his flabby tummy, underarm and thighs, as well as running and climbing the stairs.

He also displayed 4D lottery tickets featuring numbers from his birth certificate, and the date of his pet’s “birthday”.

These might sound almost absurd to be considered art, but the recurring theme of “the fat person, the clumsy guy” can be found in a sizeable number of works by multidisciplinary artist Kray Chen. “Once you see them, you’re almost required to reflect a bit more,” he said.

The 30-year-old recently won the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award, being the youngest of four artists this year to receive the country’s highest accolade for art practitioners aged 35 or below. The award, established in 1992, also supports these artists with a grant of up to S$20,000 each.

Mr Chen was judged to have the potential to play a greater leadership role in Singapore’s art circle.

One of his key works is titled Exercise Now and Fit a Standard Size Coffin Later. It was influenced by renowned Singaporean playwright Kuo Pao Kun’s 1985 play, The Coffin Is Too Big for the Hole, which discusses the death of diversity when Singapore was rapidly developing in the 1980s and 1990s, and the standardisation of many processes.

“In my case, it is a body that is too big for a standard coffin,” Mr Chen said. “I just thought that it would be the follow-up to Kuo Pao Kun’s work... I am from the generation that is the product of this ‘standardisation’... I still see how that affects the way people think about themselves and others, as well as their general worldview.”

Mr Chen uses his body as a symbol of dysfunction in relation to the pragmatic order of the Singapore society, to get people thinking about the “inefficient body within this economic machine”, he said.

Video clips of him exercising were put on a loop, and he uses them to show how banal is the society’s fascination with achievement and efficiency.

These thoughts stemmed from what he called “the biggest joke” of his life, when he was assigned to the Commando unit to be a logistics manager while serving National Service. “I really felt like a monster, in relation to all the ‘macho’ people. I felt really inferior, and the feeling had to be channelled somewhere,” he said.

When he entered Lasalle College of the Arts in 2008, he became “ambitious and hungry” to make something out of his time there. “It was almost like a last chance. And I really grabbed everything with both hands, both arms,” he said. He graduated in 2014 with a master’s degree in fine arts.

The year before that, he had put up his first solo exhibition called 1st Prize, an installation of four 2.4m-tall panels showing the latest winning 4D numbers. It was to reflect the lottery culture here, where “number-spotting” is intrinsic to everyday life, he explained.

His “most poetic and most personal” artwork to date, he added, was what he called The Egg Project.

“I just find my whole circumstance quite interesting — I am someone engaged in a very elitist, cultural activity, supported by people holding working-class jobs. So I just thought I had to honour my roots,” he said, referring to his parents who work as hawkers and paying for his studies.

For this “project”, he sold fried eggs at Lasalle at 50 cents each to cover the cost of going to a private art school, to repay the school fees he owed his parents. The endeavour was doomed to fail, he added.

“That notion of knowing it would never be completed, that it would not happen, but still doing it anyway, I would say that is also really the crux of what my parents are doing, in a way,” he said of people who try to “achieve the Singapore dream, to climb the social ladder”.

For now, Mr Chen is “done” with exhibiting his body in his work. Last year, he embarked on his next project called Critical Fengshui while he was on a four-month residency stay at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.

For his office which was located at art enclave Gillman Barracks, he hired a fengshui master to “prime” the studio space so that he may have a “good” residency stay and “a good future as an artist”. Like the lottery theme, it again centres on the notion of getting a stab at a better life through influences beyond human power.

Professor Ute Meta Bauer, the founding director of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and who nominated Mr Chen for the Young Artist Award, said that this latest work would reflect the pressure that comes with being an artist in Singapore.

Singaporeans should check out Mr Chen’s works, she said, because they present “a perspective that shows that to be human is to try, but to also fail”.

“This opens up wider ideas about evaluating standards of perfection and appreciating difference”, Prof Bauer added.

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