The most affecting piece I've seen so far at the Singapore Biennale is an installation at the National Museum by the Vietnamese artist Nguyen Trinh Thi, Unsubtitled, consisting of an array of human-sized wooden cutouts, each with its own video projection. It is Nguyen's response to a crackdown by the Vietnamese cultural police on Nhà Sàn Studio, the experimental art space in Hanoi with which she is associated, after a nude performance by Nhà Sàn's La Thi Dieu Ha went viral on the Internet:
Thi directed each artist to face the camera, eat an item of food, and then state their name followed by the name of the food they had just consumed. Suggesting a kind of review stand, the pseudointerrogation sessions do not result in self-criticisms. Instead we see and hear a chorus of overlapping statements-of-the-obvious: the basic human act of eating was just committed. Examining the gap between artists and the general public, and questioning long running methods of surveillance and intimidation pervasive in Vietnam, Thi creates an ethereal portrait of this time in Hanoi, and of the artists who inhabit it.But the power of the work hits you as soon as you glimpse it, and you can feel it as you wander through the forest of solemnly self-assertive video portraits without knowing anything about its origins.
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| Nguyen Trinh Thi |
My favorite, though, mounted outdoors at the Singapore Art Museum was an enormous digital print (275 X 682 cm) by the Malaysian Poodien, Long Live Food, reproducing and manipulating socialist realist images from China in the 1950s through 1970s to display an orgy of rosy-faced children wielding gigantic fruits and vegetables and joyful citizens waving their Apple iPads in place of the original Little Red Books; commissioned as a mural for the non-halal E.A.T. Food Village, Kuala Lumpur.
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| Via Quacker Oats. |
