Performance Art In Context: a Singaporean perspective

PERFORMANCE ART IN CONTEXT: A SINGAPOREAN PERSPECTIVE

by Lee Wen

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Degree Master of Arts (Fine Arts) LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts Faculty of Fine Arts Singapore May, 2006

ii

Accepted by the Faculty of Fine Arts, LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree Master of Arts (Fine Arts).

Vincent Leow Studio Supervisor

Adeline Kueh Thesis Supervisor

I certify that the thesis being submitted for examination is my own account of my own research, which has been conducted ethically. The data and the results presented are the genuine data and results actually obtained by me during the conduct of the research. Where I have drawn on the work, ideas and results of others this has been appropriately acknowledged in the thesis.

The greater portion of the work described in the thesis has been undertaken subsequently to my registration for the degree for which I am submitting this document.

Lee Wen In submitting this thesis to LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, I understand that I am giving permission for it to be made available for use in accordance with the regulations and policies of the college. I also understand that the title and abstract will be published, and that a copy of the work may be made available and supplied to any bona fide library or research worker. This work is also subject to the college policy on intellectual property.

------------------------------------------------------Lee Wen

iii Abstract

Author:

Lee Wen

Title:

Performance Art In Context: A Singaporean Perspective

Degree:

Master of Arts (Fine Arts)

Studio Supervisor:

Vincent Leow

Thesis Supervisor:

Adeline Kueh

Month/Year:

May, 2006

Number of Pages:

97

Style Manual Used:

Modern Language Association (2nd edition)

This thesis will attempt to make a survey of my personal experience and development working in performance art. In doing so I would also like to go over my motivations and encounters of working in performance art and discuss the various issues of performance art as a fine art practice and medium. My focus will be on the complexities and questions surrounding the self as subject and use of one’s own body as a visual art form, material and representation within the specific contexts of cultural location and time. The temporal and ephemeral nature of performance art also necessitates examining the problems faced in documenting, collecting, preserving and archiving.

Since its appearance in Singapore, the practice of performance art posed various questions. Why would artists feel motivated to work in a temporal art form, which does not result in the making of a material art object? Given the temporal and ephemeral nature of performance art how does it continue to be represented? For those who had not seen the actual performances presented in the past how can one continue to discuss the relevance and contexts of those performances today? Should the temporal ephemeral works be preserved?

My research will attempt as much as possible to follow an academic format and research based on published materials. However, it is an endeavor embarked upon with the foreknowledge that there are very few comprehensive, analytical texts on contemporary art of Singapore and especially in regard to performance art. My thesis therefore will also depend on personal interviews and interactions with the practicing performance artists as well as based on my own personal work and experience as a practicing artist.

From this research we may reclaim performance art and its position as a valid fine art form in relation to more traditional media. It will also interrogate possibilities for future actions and directions to develop my work in performance art and its contribution to contemporary art discourse.

v

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to those who were generous with their time, effort, and support reading the dissertation drafts and offering suggestions and advise.

To my supervisors: Vincent Leow, Adeline Kueh, and staff of LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts especially, Milenko Prvacki, Ye Shu Fang, Ian Woo, Ahmad Abu Bakar.

With special thanks to William Lim, C.J. Wee Wan-ling, Alastair MacLennan, Boris Nieslony, Helge Meyer, Tang Da Wu, Chua Chye Teck, Lam Hoi Lit, Jeremy Hiah, Lina Adam, Woon Tien Wei, Jennifer Teo, Koh Nguang How, Jason Lim, Khairuddin Hori, Juliana Yasin, Ray Langenbach, Lee Weng Choy, Audrey Wong, John Low, and members of the Artists Village, p-10, Plastique Kinetic Worms, Black Market international and Command n.

And all my relations

vi Table Of Contents

CHAPTER 1: Enactments, Documentations and Re-presentations

p. 1

1.1 Introduction

p. 1

1.2 Local perspective

p. 2

1.3 Performativity and Alternative Media

p. 4

1.4 Re-Enactments

p. 7

1.5 Global Trends / Marginal Networks

p.10

CHAPTER 2: First Encounters: Towards a Conceptual Framework

p.13

2.1 Introduction

p.13

2.2 Tang Da Wu and the Artists Village

p.13

2.3 S.Chandrasekaran and Trimurti

p.16

2.4 Asian Values, State Intervention vs Individual Vision

p.18

2.5 Identity: Between Individual and Society

p.22

CHAPTER 3: Contexts and Manifestations

p.25

3.1 Self, ethnicity and multiculturalism

p.25

3.2 Embodiment into Representation

p.28

3.3 Persona: contrasts and conflicts

p.30

3.4 Journey of a yellow man

p.31

3.5 Neo-baba

p.33

3.6 Ghosts Stories

p.35

3.7 Conceptualization, Execution, Documentation

p.36

CHAPTER 4: Revelations and Representations

p.38

4.1 Actions, Signs and Representations

p.38

4.2 Memory and the Archive

p.40

4.3 Essence of the Performative

p.42

4.5 Anthropometry Revision

p.45

4.6 Conclusion

p.48

Notes

p. 52

List Of Figures

p. 64

Figures

p. 67

Bibliography

p. 91

“Whoever knows how to die in all things will have life in all things.”

—St. John of the Cross The Sayings of Light and Love, no. 160.

What Are You Doing! What Are You Saying!

In modern times a great deal of nonsense is talked about masters and disciples, and about the inheritance of a master's teaching by favorite pupils, entitling them to pass the truth on to their adherents. Of course Zen should be imparted in this way, from heart to heart, and in the past it was really accomplished. Silence and humility reigned rather than profession and assertion. The one who received such a teaching kept the matter hidden even after twenty years. Not until another discovered through his own need that a real master was at hand was it learned that the teaching had been imparted, and even then the occasion arose quite naturally and the teaching made its way in its own right. Under no circumstance did the teacher even claim “I am the successor of So-and-so.” Such a claim would prove quite the contrary.

The Zen master Mu-nan had only one successor. His name was Shoju. After Shoju had completed his study of Zen, Mu-nan called him into his room. “I am getting old,” he said, “and as far as I know, Shoju, you are the only one who will carry on this teaching. Here is a book. It has been passed down from master to master for seven generations. I also have added many points according to my understanding. The book is very valuable, and I am giving it to you to represent your successorship.”

“If the book is such an important thing, you had better keep it,” Shoju replied.

“I received your Zen without writing and am satisfied with it as it is.”

“I know that,” said Mu-nan. “Even so, this work has been carried from master to master for seven generations, so you may keep it as a symbol of having received the teaching. Here.”

The two happened to be talking before a brazier. The instant Shoju felt the book in his hands he thrust it into the flaming coals. He had no lust for possessions.

Mu-nan, who never had been angry before, yelled: “What are you doing!”

Shoju shouted back: “What are you saying!”

—101 Zen Stories Zen Flesh, Zen Bones Compiled by Paul Reps & Nyogen Senzaki

1 CHAPTER 1 ENACTMENTS, DOCUMENTATIONS AND RE-PRESENTATIONS

1.1 Introduction

This thesis will attempt to make a survey of my own development working in performance art. In doing so, I would also like to go over my own motivations and encounters of working in performance art. My focus will be on the complexities and questions surrounding the self as subject and use of one’s own body as a visual art form, production and representation within the specific contexts of cultural location and time.

The temporal and ephemeral nature of performance art also necessitates examining the problematics faced in documenting, collecting, preserving and archiving.

My research will attempt as much as possible to follow an academic format based on published materials. However, it is an endeavor embarked upon with the foreknowledge that there are very few comprehensive written surveys with references to performance art and performance artists in Singapore art history.1 Except for the discussion of artists who have had published monographs or critical analyses written about them, my perspectives will need to be informed by personal experiences and conversations or interviews via actual encounters with the artists than on textual readings alone.

2 Performance art being an ephemeral and temporal phenomena, questions the validity of the absent critic’s appraisal without having actually witness the live presentation. A “live” presentation is often seen as a unique and immediate cultural experience, which dissolves the separation between the artist and the spectator. However this is contradicted by the fact that many of our understanding and knowledge of performance art has been studied and written about from evidential proofs via other media such as photography in the past and increasingly in film and videos today.

There is no possibility of a completely unmediated relationship to any kind of cultural product, including performance or body art.

2

The privilege

of being in direct contact, of seeing the “actual” artwork should not override other deliberations that arise out of the evidence based on documentary traces of a live presentation. Being there to see the actual “live” presentation does not preclude others who had not seen it to make valid critical appraisals. Later evaluation based on documentation, whether in the form of photography, textual or oral, film or video, with the help of hindsight and historical distance may lead to a more meaningful and clearer understanding of the live presentation.

1.2 Local perspective

In South East Asia the practice and development of performance art has become progressively intensive from the 1980’s till today. The recent growth and diversity of contemporary art in South East Asia remains unconsolidated due to its diverse social historical situations of rapid changes and emphases

3 on post-war politics of nation-building and economic development.

3

Within

Singapore’s context, art historian, TK Sabapathy had cited sculptor, Tan Teng Kee's Picnic event of 1979 as the first evidence of performance art. Tan created a one-hundred-meters long painting entitled “The Lonely Road”. He then cut it into smaller pieces and incinerated one of his sculptures at the end of the event.4 It is doubtful that Tan had actually meant this as performance art. The description sounded like a social gathering in which the artist had decided to make some actions towards the destruction of one sculpture. Tan’s entire range in sculpture is based on abstract modernist mode and had no evidence of any performative consciousness or intention. 5 The next foray into performance art is that of Tang Da Wu in 1982 when he presented “Five performances” at the National Museum Art Gallery.

Following this Tang went on to initiate The Artists Village in 1988, an alternative space and group was set up in the last remaining farms of Singapore. It was here that various artists, such as Amanda Heng, Vincent Leow, Wong Shih Yaw, Zai Kuning, Tang Mun Kit and myself began their experiments in alternative practice and ensued into performance art as part of their practice during the events and exhibitions. 6 Tang’s first performances in 1982 were performances without theme and were actions improvising with found objects. They were experimental and demonstrative of the possibilities of making art via performance.

7

In the later performance works of Tang Da

Wu, there is a narrative feature veering on a proselytizing and pedagogic aspect at work, which often evokes the “medicine man” selling Chinese medicines in the street markets as a precedent. However in his practice there is an ironic twist, which includes the counter-active ingredient in advocating

4 against the use of these traditional medicines as aphrodisiacs such as “Rhino’s drink” (fig.1) and “Tiger’s Whip” (fig.2). There is a conscientious concern to represent an ethical perspective, which critique the effects on ecological imbalance by a capitalistic consumer culture.8 The artists S. Chandrasekaran, Goh Ee Choo and Salleh Japar also presented performance art loaded with narrative messages in their exhibition, “Trimurti” in 1988. The exhibition comprised presentations of paintings, sculptures, installations and performance art. The works were contemporary in form but were based on their respective ethnic origins of Hindu, Buddhist/Taoist and Islamic traditional philosophies. There seems to be a conscious attempt to show themselves as practicing or using contemporary strategies yet having an unyielding link to their “Asian” traditions and roots. 9

1.3 Performativity and Alternative Media

There is comparative lack of effort by art and cultural institutions to represent recent contemporary art practices, which are temporal and ephemeral. 10 Time-based art, which may take form in conceptual art, land art, performance art, site-specific installations, happenings, face the danger of being eroded from our memory in the quick pace of change of recent times.

What are the ways for performance artists to take pro-active steps towards amending this discrepancy? I would like to trace some possible strategies that artists have taken in making works that are time-based or temporal in nature and conveyed in alternative media.

5 Some performance works

have been made strategically

and

specifically to include an end document in another media. Artists like Bruce Nauman and Hsieh Tehching had made works not in front of a live audience but in their studios and documented them meticulously in videos or photography to be presented later in exhibitions. The presentations in these other media seemed fittingly used to ensure the relevance and continued discourse after the fact of the actual occurrence of the live performances.

Bruce Nauman began working in the 1960s with a mistrust of the selfcontained object. Art for him was to create work based on real experiences.

His sculptures sometimes implicated participation and “performance” of the viewer by walking and moving around the object’s space. This inspired him to observe his own movements and to perform in his studio making works such as “Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), and “Walk with Contrapposto (fig.3.1968)” without an audience in order to limit the situation and admitted a mistrust of audience participation.

11

His studio was like a laboratory cum

theatre where works later involved another performer executing tasks under Nauman’s scripted instructions. Nauman often played with words and puns and to perform was a self-conscious “act” which made one the “actor”. The actions captured on videos provide a strange continuous narrative when played over and over.

12

The focus on him as material and object switched later to the “other” as performer, which includes the viewer. In “Performance Corridor” (fig.4.1969), where the installation was a prop which featured the viewer as performer captured on an attached video camera and transmitted on a monitor as part of the constructed environment. Like a fun house, which provides the participant

6 with distortions of various mirrors and corridors, the viewers are made uncomfortable and disrupted while walking through the installations. In the 1980s, as his work became more political, Nauman’s characters became overtly theatrical. Clowns, jesters and mimes appeared in his works commenting on the masquerade of social theater.

Unlike Nauman, Hsieh Tehching had made socially, politically poignant works while resisting becoming explicitly theatrical. Between the years of 1978 and 1986, Hsieh Tehching made five "One Year Performances," and then continued with "Earth," a thirteen-year performance that stretched from the end of 1986 to the end of 1999. Each of these performances involves making a vow to follow as closely to the conditions, which he will adhere to for a year. The conditions include a particular constraint or mode of being, which he will go through while documenting it meticulously on various media like photography or video. The documentation have been compiled and can be viewed on a computer via website or DVD-ROM.

13

(fig.5. 2000)

His last thirteen years performance ended on January 1, 2000 with a presentation where he revealed in a public announcement that he did not do any “art” work during that 13-year period for this performance and “kept himself alive”. Thus making a paradoxical situation of making art without actually “doing” art. The enigmatic Hsieh have not made any performance art work since his last “Earth” piece. However he had exhibited the documents in the form of posters, photographs and videos. He also gives lectures about these past works.

14

Vito Acconci created performances in the 70’s, which were well documented on photographs and videos. Although he had stopped

7 performance for more than twenty years, he presents his past works with elaborate installations providing possible new readings based on his variable presentations. An exhibition in 2004 presented a large selection of works made from 1969 to 1973. The presentation looks like a large room of flow charts comprising photographs, typewritten paper, notes on paper and cards, connected by broad red line or tape accompanied by videos and installations.

15

It gave a sense of an artist re-invention and re-discovery of his past

performances. (fig.6. 2004)

1.4 Re-enactments

Marina Abramovic has made various performances in which she later represent them in various media. Some of her works are re-presented as photographic objects, reframed and modified with texts or drawings to become artworks in themselves although images are based on performances done in the past. A series of works were made in 1994 based on various performances done in the 1970’s. “The Lovers� was the performance she did in 1988 with long time collaborator, Ulay setting out to walk from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China for 90 days and meeting in the middle. They had planned to marry when they meet however due to an unexpected twist, and they separated instead. A set of color photographs with unique drawings on the border, together with a new video installation was presented in an exhibition in 1997.

16

The photographs and video footage were taken during the 1988

8 performance they could be re-worked into becoming accessible in a gallery and revitalized after a good period of 9 years after. (Fig.7.)

Unlike other artists committed to performance art having various qualms of re-presenting live works in other media, Abramovic took it to the extreme of re-staging historically iconic performances recently with her “Seven Easy Pieces” at the Guggenheim Museum (November 2005). The performances she chose were five iconic works in performance art history done by other artists in the past and one by her. She performed works based on Bruce Nauman’s “Body Pressure (1974) ”, Vito Acconci’s “Seedbed (1972)”, Valie Export’s “Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969)”, and Gina Pane’s “The Conditioning, first action of Self-Portrait(s) (1973) Joseph Beuys’ “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965)” and her own “Lips of Thomas (1975)”. She wanted to do Chris Burden’s “Trans-fixed (1972)” but she was turned down when she solicited Burden’s permission.

17

(fig.8. 2005)

According to the Guggenheim Museum’s press release, the reenactments were done on the premise that there was little documentation that exists during the early critical period of performance art. Abramovic also wanted to examine the possibility of redoing and preserving an ephemeral art form.

18

One can see that she did re-interpret the performances based on the

original but it would hardly be a true repeat or preservation of the original.

What is interesting is that it provided a bridge to the performances of the past especially for an audience who may not even be born yet at that time. Her performance was well documented with video and photography to be preserved but it is her work that is being preserved. As the artist’s, body, place and time is different, therefore even the re-doing of a performance is

9 altogether another performance and cannot be the same as the original even if she did it exactly the same.

Although there have been many criticisms on Abramovic’s “Seven Easy Pieces”, one can appreciate the challenges she brought out in the attempt at preserving or at least re-examining an ephemeral art work.

Abramovic had done a performance, which had been provocative and unconventional, perhaps running the risk of parody or pastiche of the earlier performances rather than its preservation. Looking at the list of artists she reenacted, Abramovic is the only one still working directly in performance art.

Presentation in the prestigious Guggenheim Museum looked like a triumphant canonization of herself.

The idea of re-enacting performance art has its precedents. The Whitechapel Art Gallery in London held 'Short History of Performance – Part One' in 2002 featuring artists’ re-enactments by Carolee Schneemann, Stuart Brisley, Bernsteins, the Kipper Kids, Hermann Nitsch, Bruce McLean, and Jannis Kounellis.

19

This was followed by a second part in November 2003

featuring artists using lectures format to question ideas of authority and truth.

There were key presentations of artists re-enacting their own performances by The Atlas Group, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Inventory, Robert Morris, Martha Rosler and Carey Young. 20 The problematics of re-enactments and documentations have seen different responses from artists. Some artists have made appropriations of past performances, which at the same time look at memorializing or critique a well-known performance art work and sometimes update it using new technology.

10 MTAA

(M. River & T.Whid Art Associates) uses the internet as a

medium for public art and updates Tehching Hsieh's one year performance to re-contextualize in the present art scene.

21

Although this is an interesting

variation of a performance with new media, or could be a way to memorialize an iconic work, it comes across more like a parody through the use of technology than a serious live performance art piece. The work does not have the intensity of someone actually making a live action. (fig.9. 2004) Other artists question the idea of framing and contextualizing of performance art through documentation and archiving. Hayley Newman, in her photographic project, “Connotations-Performance Images 1994-1998” featured various photographs of performances that she faked and meticulously providing details thus addressing facets of authenticity and counterfeits.

22

Newman was able to make a gender and feminist twist while

making references to past iconic performance art works. In “Meditation on Gender Difference” using pink makeup, she faked sunburn on herself the parts usually covered by a bikini, referencing Dennis Oppenheim’s 1970 “Reading Position for Second Degree Bum”. (fig.10. 1996)

1.5 Global Trends / Marginal Network

Performance art seems to be always a marginalized form of mainstream contemporary art practice. Art museums often do not represent performance art in their permanent collections and not many countries would have performance art represented in their biennials, annual art festivals and international art events. Besides the need to convince unadventurous curators

11 to accept it as a valid fine art medium, performance art as a temporal and ephemeral form needs to find ways of presentations autonomously. There is a growing network, albeit a marginal one, over the years where artists are initiating their own events and exhibitions, contributing to its proliferation, promulgation and evolution.

Based on my personal involvement with some of the artists initiated events, I would like to also analyze and perhaps also speculate how these independent events affects contemporary art practice. Some artists who actively promotes international performance art networks include Seiji Shimoda, who organizes “Nippon International Performance Art Network” in Japan,23 Richard Martel who co-ordinates the Center for Contemporary Art “Le Lieu” in Quebec, Canada and publishes “Editions Intervention,” since 1982

24

and Boris Nieslony in Cologne, Germany who organizes out of ASA (Art Service Association) European e.V.

25

In Chapter 2, I will outline my first encounters with performance art in Singapore, which gave the impetus for me to embark on working in performance art. I will also explore institutional responses and prejudices in re-presenting (or excluding) performance art especially the different acceptance and reception of “Trimurti” as compared to biases against Tang Da Wu and “The Artists Village”, which I believe creates an anxiety amongst practitioners to actively be involved with their own documentation.

In Chapter 3, I will identify some of the contextual frameworks and methodologies of my works in the past. Based on my own practices, I also hope to explore the complexities and questions surrounding the self as

12 subject and use of one’s own body as a visual art form, material or representation within the specific contexts of cultural location and time.

In Chapter 4, I will look at the representation in performance and contiguous problems of archive and documentation. The historically identified possibilities of photography, film, videos, mixed media installations, reenactments and electronic technology, poses questions of accuracy, relevance and authenticity. Can documentation and archiving actually represent an ephemeral work, which is intended to be transitory? What are the motivations to intentionally create works that are ephemeral and should they be preserved? In asking these questions I hope to reconcile the discrepancies of preservation and documentation to performance art as regards to its temporal ephemeral nature. From these discussions I also hope to find new directions.

13 CHAPTER 2.

FIRST ENCOUNTERS: TOWARDS A CONTEXTUAL FRAMEWORK

2.1 Introduction

My first encounter with performance art was through the work of Tang Da Wu and S. Chandrasekaran. Other Singapore artists such as Amanda Heng, Vincent Leow, Wong Shih Yaw and Zai Kuning also began to work in performance art when we held our exhibitions and experiments in the Artists Village, an informal alternative art group started in 1988. However the scope of this essay requires my narrowing down to the works by Tang Da Wu and S. Chandrasekaran. There are various overlaps in the methodology and approach, which I used in the beginning of my work when compared to that of Tang Da Wu and S. Chandrasekaran. I will attempt to make a comparative study with reference to my own practice.

26

My encounter with performance art

per se also was the beginning of my questioning the ephemeral phenomenon of performance art and its problematic relation to its documentation.

2.2 Tang Da Wu and The Artists Village

My first works, which could be seen as performance art, was through reading my poetry, which served as a textual background for a narrative and making some actions based on them in 1989.

27

I wanted to approach it from

personal practice based on drawing, painting and sculptural background. I

14 had published a book of poetry and drawings, “A Waking Dream” in 1981.

28

This was an attempt in combining a textual narrative to the drawings I had made. Through the “poetry actions” I was beginning to make images in actions based on the poetry. The works in Tang Da Wu and S. Chandrasekaran were also narratives although differing in subject, context and methodology.

Tang Da Wu had started to make performances in the UK just before presenting his first performances in Singapore. The first performances were not based on any subjects and were improvisations with body, material and environment. He presented his first performances in Singapore when he made “Five days of performances” at La Salle College of Arts and the National Museum Art Gallery in 1982.

29

In 1988, he presented his first of a

series of narrative performances during the Second Singapore Art Festival Fringe at the former St. Joseph Institution building, which was soon to be renovated into the present Singapore Art Museum. The performances “In the case of Howard Liu” and “Superman” presented were commentaries about the power relations between artists and institutions within the art world in Singapore. 30 It was the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which moved Tang to a more socially conscious narrative. “In the end, my mother decided to eat Cat food and Dog food”, was first performed in 1988, Orchard Road, a main shopping area in Singapore. It was based on contaminated food due to nuclear radiation. This was the beginning of a series of works based on ecological themes that followed such as, "They Poach the Rhino, Chop off his Horn and Make this Drink", (fig.1. 1989, National Museum Art Gallery, Singapore),

15 "Tiger's whip", (fig.2.1990, Chinatown, Singapore; 1991,National Museum Art Gallery, Singapore, also other venues).

31

Various different themes were also

dealt with usually based on Tang’s strong feelings towards current affairs such as “Open the Gate”, (1989, Artists Village, Sembawang) as a response to Tian An Men incident in Beijing, and “Death of a Filipino Maid”, (1990, Shell Theatre, Singapore) concerning the issue of maid abuse in Singapore. Tang was making performances based on his observations of current issues and situations in society. The performances were responses that were specific to the situation in which he was presenting them. In a museum exhibition like that in the “Rhino Drink” he would make an elaborate installation and tell his story around the installation. The installation would be left like a relic of the performance for exhibition. Whereas in a performance on the Tian An Men incident or that of “Death of a Filipino Maid” the performances were staged for a shorter duration appropriate to a site-specific location. For “Tiger’s Whip” he showed the versatility of doing the performance in a museum gallery as well as in open public spaces in Chinatown. He also showed spontaneity in responding to reactions from the audience and was sensitive to unexpected occurrences. In “Death of a Filipino Maid”, for example, he asked me to buy a leg of raw mutton but I arrived late at the performance stage as I had difficulty finding it in the market. He was able to improvise with a borrowed pair of shoes from a member of the audience. He slipped in and out of them, changing his tone of voice while alternating with his own shoes as if changing between the persona of the maid and her master as he changed the shoes.

When I arrived to put the meat on the front of the stage he picked up the piece of meat and began to talk about the abuse of the maid by laying it on a chair

16 and hitting it violently. Tang was able to continue the performance seamlessly and the unsuspecting audience thought that the late arrival of the prop was all part of a premeditated plot.

The performances were presented with ordinary objects related to the context of the performance and Tang would be in a simple costume but different from his normal dressing. The most elaborate ones would include some sculptural objects and used during the performances. For example in “Rhino Drink”, he presented the performance with an installation of a huge rhinoceros lying on its side surrounding by numerous bottles of the “rhino drink”. His face is powdered white with Chinese opera powder and he is dressed in a costume, which he made himself. The performance had various tense moments of silence in between which he would deliver a simple yet moving narrative of the subject concerned.

2.3 S. Chandrasekaran and Trimurti

In 1988, S. Chandrasekaran, Goh Ee Choo and Salleh Japar held the multi-media exhibition entitled “Trimurti” at the Goethe Institute in Singapore showcasing works in drawings, paintings, installation and performance. An effort was made to use traditions as a starting point and using contemporary means of art to renew an identity and connection back to their traditional values. The three artists used symbols and themes based on the mythology of their ethnicity and religion. “Trimurti” means “having three forms” representing the triad aspects of the “Supreme Being” and the Hindu gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, is re-interpreted as a secular symbol, neutralized and equated as

17 natural forces of “Creation”, “Preservation” and “Destruction”. A religious belief is appropriated and “naturalized” for nonaligned acceptance or revitalization.

Chandrasekaran was of Indian descent and a Hindu, Goh was Chinese and used symbols of Taoism and Buddhism and Salleh Japar, a Malay Muslim related to Islam with an inclination towards Sufism. Amongst the three, S. Chandrasekaran was the only one who continued to primarily work in performance art. 32 S.Chandrasekaran titled his works with Sanskrit Hindu vocabulary and reinterprets or re-enacts his interpretations visually through the objects, installations and performances. In his later solo works Chandrasekaran continues to cite various Hindu concepts while reframing them in his personal quests as an artist spiritual journeyman. “Yogi” (1990, Portland Sculpture Park, performance, installation) which means the seeker of spiritual truth is reframed as his personal search. In performances such as “Kala Chakra (Wheel of Time) and “Atman” series (1992, copper, enamel on clay tablets), the soul or life principal became a time-based process.

Chandrasekaran

makes

his

drawings,

paintings,

33

objects

(fig.3) and

installations rendered with an earthy, pastoral sense of allure linking traditional Indian aesthetics and Hinduism. His drawings are meditative spontaneous doodling, which he develops in stages of increasing complexities of paintings, objects, installations and performances. He installs himself in the installation as an immobile, durational performance, undergoing a process of what he calls “aesthetic hybridization” of traditional Hindu philosophies. The spiritual search he embodies in his performative installations seem to covet a catharsis in a personal quest, which is not easily assessable for the non-

18 believer. Beyond the exotic gaze of his Hindu ethnic traditional origins, one is also susceptible to an awe of his physical endurance when the performances are of longer durations.

2.4 Asian values, State intervention vs. Individual vision

Although Tang Da Wu and the Artists Village, which he founded in 1988 has been widely recognized and respected in Singapore as well as internationally, yet neither he nor the Artists Village had ever been given a retrospective at the Singapore Art Museum to date in Singapore. Tang had been one of the first contemporary artists working in Singapore who have also exhibited internationally and was awarded the prestigious Arts and Culture Prize of the 10th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prizes in 1999. Various leading Singapore artists such as Amanda Heng, Juliana Yasin, Han Sai Por, Chng Seok Tin, Vincent Leow, Zai Kuning, Wong Shih Yaw and Tang Mun Kit, were associated with The Artists Village. The Artists Village had been continuously producing various

pioneering,

innovative

projects

in Singapore

and

internationally. They were invited to the exhibition, “Situations”, featuring alternative art groups from Berlin, Sydney and Singapore in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2005. The Artists Village have continued to renew and re-invent themselves with new generations of artists such as Jeremy Hiah, Kai Lam, Woon Tien Wei and Lisa Adam and have continued to initiate younger generation artists into their ranks. 34 In the catalogue “Trimurti-Ten Years After” there is a consistent repeated strain of arguments to separate the working methodology and

19 conceptual framework from that of Tang Da Wu. In the arguments there seem to be a demonization of Tang’s methods as being “foreign and westernized” and the “Trimurti” artists being of “Asian roots” and regional extraction.

S.Chandrasekaran says: “Tang Da Wu’s performances are not rooted in elements from this region even though the issues are. The body gestures, materials, space understanding didn’t come from this region. They were Western-oriented body language which I thought did not work.” 35 Ray Langenbach identified that the arguments put forward by Chandrasekaran and Goh Ee Choo in “Trimurti” exemplified a “desired Asian language

of

embodiment,

clear

boundaries,

limits

to freedom

and

responsibility, all anxious values explicitly espoused and constantly reiterated by the PAP government”, a reflection of the state ideology.

36

These

articulations together with the accompanying texts advocate “Trimurti” to be Nanyang regionalists, formalists, a necessary “harmonious” alternative to Tang Da Wu and the Artists Village who are deemed to be “foreigninfluenced” therefore “un-Asian”, who are provocative, confrontational and “do not preclude aggressive forms of artistic transgression and activism”.

37

Other than their subjects and themes in their performance, there is a formalistic strain similarly applied in both artists’ working methodologies. Tang and Chandrasekaran still find the traditional media of drawing and studio practice essential to their work. They also have consistently made paintings, sculptures, and installations besides working in performance.

Tang welcomes interactions with the audience. He often emphasized more than the subject matter or issue, that as a performance artist, the most important thing for him is executing a definite skill, which is necessary when

20 spontaneously responding to a live audience. He finds it challenging to get immediate responses and this motivates him as he finds that the traditional media like painting and sculpture takes a longer time before they are shown to an audience after completion. He even admits that there is a risk involved and sometimes he submits to the vulnerability of ending up feeling foolish.

38

The performances of Chandrasekaran were less interactive with the audience physically. His is often an immobile body in an installation or site, almost sculptural. They were usually time-based and durational, putting his body within an installation, which were imbued with symbols based on Hindu mythology or philosophy. Chandrasekaran uses his body to incarnate a symbolic meaning in a ritual, which tests the body’s endurance. The process he goes through also arouses transformations in him. However they are spectacles meant to provoke a reaction: “I want my art to provoke, even disturb the audience. I want them to go out thinking. That’s what I want art to do.”

39

Although his performances may not explicitly arouse direct physical

interaction with the audience, there is often a desired implicit semiotic interaction instigated by the artist’s presence within his designated condition.

In looking at the two artists works, Langenbach’s reading of Victor Turner’s discrimination between taxonomical linkages from that of the symbolical, in discussing how artists communicate alliance with social structural positions would be useful here.

40

Both Tang and Chandrasekaran

often talked about their work in relation to mythology and the use of traditional beliefs

reframed

within

contemporary

contexts.

However,

Tang’s

performances in comparison to Chandrasekaran’s tend to promote openness towards individual responses via dialogue and inquiry. Chandrasekaran may

21 suggest an individual interpretation of Hindu traditions however he used them in a metaphorical way, which accepts unquestioningly traditional religious ideals and neutralizes economic, social or political positions and ideological implications. The Singapore government introduced the “White Paper on Shared Values” to the Parliament in January 1991 advocating and institutionalizing core “Asian” values.

41

In comparison to Tang, the concept of

“Trimurti” and Chandrasekaran supports comprehensive replication of traditional religious values in contemporary art terms, which is compliant with state ideology of “Asian” values outlined in the white paper issued in 1991.

Notions of ‘harmonious multi-culturalism’, ‘re-invented traditions’ and ‘Asian values’ lend credibility to the Singapore Art Museum’s retrospective to “Trimurti” in 1998. This privilege of a retrospective by a trio of young artists who exhibited together only once ten years before seemed to be at an unusual accelerated pace. Singapore Art Museum’s curator, Ahmad Mashadi’s description of “Trimurti” as an “inclusionary strategy”

42

is arbitrary

and suggested administrated prioritization and legitimatization by a state institution.

43

The “Trimurti” prestigious retrospective as compared to the

omission of Tang Da Wu and the Artists Village from any high profile exhibition up to now, exposed the Singapore Art Museum’s partiality in privileging artists whose strategies aligned with Singapore government’s policy of asserting “Asian values”.

22 2.5 Identity: Between Individual and Society

The earlier works I presented while working with artists from The Artists Village from 1989 to 1990 were done out of curiosity, experimental spirit and the natural need for personal growth as well as exploring different media, dimensions and possibilities. Art was seen by those of us who worked at the Artists Village as too much concentrated on decorative and illustrative purposes in Singapore. We wanted to work beyond that. This does not imply that decorative art cannot be meaningful. However we were seeking a language that can reflect the experiential realities of our time and the experimental results does not necessarily prioritize the decorative aspects of art making.

I was less concerned about the social dimension and philosophical context than that of exploring a form, which was new and relevant to the time that I was working in. Just like Tang Da Wu and Chandrasekaran, I saw contemporary art practice as a remaking of mythological narratives. The incident during an event I helped to organize in 1994 and its aftermath gave me a different perspective. Josef Ng was charged and found guilty of committing an obscene act in public for his performance, “Brother Cane�. The performance was centered on the sentencing and caning of 12 men caught for homosexual soliciting in public in 1993. The men found guilty were revealed in name, ages and occupations in the newspapers together with graphic descriptions of the operations where police officers disguised themselves as gay solicitors in order to entice them. Josef Ng’s performance was simple yet poignant as a show of protest of the strict laws against

23 homosexuals in Singapore. The last few actions he made included cutting his pubic hair, which was deemed to be a criminal offence. The well-executed work was removed from its context and sensationalized in the newspapers where the controversy focused on it being an obscene act of pornography and the dangers of performance art towards internal security and disruption of public order. 44 This controversy strongly impressed me towards a social and political understanding as an artist and stirred a political perspective of the untimely eviction of the Artists Village from the original site in Sembawang in 1990. The eviction forced us to participate in the 1990 Singapore Arts Festival in various public sites throughout the city.

45

Besides presenting solo works, I made

numerous performances in collaborations with the other artists from the Artists Village. The theme of our project mooted by Tang Da Wu was “C.A.R.E.” an acronym for “Concerned Artists for the Environment”. Although it was one of the most exciting and fruitful experiences for experimenting, learning and organizing an art event in public spaces, it was a heavy undertaking of mixed feelings, given the situation of the loss of the land that we used to operate in. I was asking many questions during the eviction which we had no time for resolution as we were busy participating in the Arts Festival soon after. Some questions that were churning inside me include: What is the position of art and artists in society? Were we evicted because we had the privilege of holding events at the village without license? 46 During the time when the Artists Village was occupying the last remaining village farms in Sembawang, it occurred to most of the artists participating that we came together in a natural way that it appeared inevitable

24 for the state to support its continuation as we were contributing to the cultural growth of a new society.

There were speculations that some paintings exhibited were too raw and explicit. Our visitor’s book was usually filled with praises but there were the occasional rude comments, accusations that some works were pornographic or blind “aping” of western culture and various negative responses. The many reports in the newspapers and magazines seem to show the Artists Village received encouraging public reception. Yet we could not find any recourse in terms of alternative space when we were served eviction notices. Another speculation was that we were not even legal entity, as we were then not registered as an organization or a legally legitimate “society”.

The rapid social, political and economic transitions and recent shifts in culture and technology, affected by diaspora and globalization makes it increasingly important for individual visual artists as cultural workers to play an active role to interrogate the meanings, effects, and consequences of identity formation in contemporary society. Individual artists are social actors who have a possibility to activate on their own beyond the state’s institution agenda.

25 CHAPTER 3.

CONTEXTS AND MANIFESTATIONS

3.1 Self, ethnicity and multiculturalism

The representation of the human self after post-modernity’s multifaceted perspectives of identity-formation is both problematic and complex.

Self and its formation may be seen as a matrix of configurations of human experience through the domains of science, morality, art and religion.

47

In

bringing together the legacy of modernity in confrontation with strategies of post-modernity, a revised narrative of the “self” may be suggested. A redesigned portrait based on discourse, engaging in action, situated within community in order to moderate towards transcendence.

In response to various criticisms that performance art for Singapore is yet another example of blind derivative of Western art, I began to investigate the comparison of self-representation in Chinese painting and Western art.

Performance art is usually used as a term to describe a practice within the visual art whereby the actions of the individual artists, sometimes together in a group partake in the work itself. This is often seen to be alien or overly egoistic to some in Asia, who are used to referring themselves more to a social group rather than as unique or outstanding individuals. To be too outstanding is usually frowned at as in the Chinese idioms, not to be like “a camel in a sheep’s pen” or “outstanding nails are to be knocked down”. In comparison to Western culture, it would be difficult to find similar emphases

26 on portraiture and especially self-portraiture in the corresponding periods of history in Chinese painting. 48 In his four-volume study of world religion and myth “The Masks of God”, Joseph Campbell traced human cultural history unfolding like a continuous evolutionary journey.

49

Themes were compared and developed,

through variations and distortions and reasserted into a grand theory of the evolution of human culture and consciousness. Culminating in its last volume, “Creative Mythology” anticipated the emergence of a great movement of advancement and climax for human culture. One could inference the relevance when looking at the historical and cultural comparisons of the relative later emergence of performance art in Asia as compared to the West.

Considering that in Chinese art history, Taoism and Buddhism was the philosophical background whereby the mastery in painting was in landscape and nature rather than in the realistic representation of the human form. At the same time caught in the midst of post-colonialism and entrenched in economic under-development there was a less tendency to accept the changes based on Western philosophy.

In China the first foray into performance art began in the mid 80’s however there were not many who used performance art principally compared to other avant-garde practices.50 In 1992 artists like Zhang Huan, Ma Liu Ming and Zhu Ming settled in the eastern edge of Beijing and organized various “underground” performances in private events. They soon became known to use performance art as a main form of practice.

51

This could be seen as a

parallel history to the dates in Singapore where performance art also became conscious manifestations of the artist’s body as artwork.

52

27 Like S. Chandrasekaran, Zhang Huan uses traditional mythology to create the scenario for a personal transformation and re-interprets them in contemporary contexts. However, unlike Chandrasekaran, he did not use them unquestioningly and thereby neutralizing economic, social or political positions and ideological implications. Zhang Huan’s earlier executed performances were based on the social conditions in the post-Tian An Men incident (1989) in China and his Buddhist background. His earlier performances such as, “12 Square meters” (fig.4.1994) where he sits naked covered with honey and fish oil in a filthy toilet and “65 kilograms” (1994) in which he suspended himself from a ceiling and tested his ability to endure the harsh conditions in which neither he nor the audience could escape. His later migration to New York led to various explorations into his new surroundings.

However there is still a strong reference to his Chinese identity and Buddhist philosophy background. 53 I had found it necessary to assert the social and political difference of a descendent of Chinese diaspora outside of China and specifically in a Singapore multicultural and post-colonial context.

54

It would be too

pretentious for me to merely persist in the old religious or philosophical traditions and yet it was problematical to deny my connections to the same ethnicity.

Stuart Hall acknowledged that there are two kinds of identity. Identity as “being” which offers a sense of unity and commonality and identity as “becoming” which is a process of identification and shows the discontinuity in our identity formation. The first one is necessary and yet it is that of the

28 second, which is closer to those who come from a postcolonial society and a history of diaspora.

55

I decided that the only way to deal with my unique Singaporean identity with a postcolonial, displaced history of diaspora was with a playful and ambiguous interrogation of the stereotyping and exoticization of identity via ethnicity and history. I also found it necessary to work in series as a way to cope with the anxiety of incomplete process and complexities of issues involved within a single performance work. There is also a conscious desire to overcome the social constraints of disseminating a marginal form and temporal ephemeral performance work more widely. At the same time it was a respond to artists working in series within the modernist and minimalist frame of attempting to use a quasi-mathematical inference.

56

This was the

contextual framework for considerations before initiating three series of my works: “Journey of a yellow man” (1992-2004), “Ghosts Stories” (1995-1997) and “Neo-Baba” (1995-1997).

3.2 Embodiment into Representation

In my series of works “Journey of a yellow man” (fig.13. first performed, 1992, London), “Neo-Baba” (fig.14. first performed, 1995, Tokyo) and “Ghosts Stories” (fig.15. first performed, 1995, Tokyo) I had set out to offer a narrative discourse based on actions that create communicative images and to situate myself in a local as well as international community. They are based on local contexts of an individual’s struggle within the cultural location of Singapore but with view to universal socio-political themes. These works were initiated and

29 were part of another phase for me after residing and researching in London for 2 years from 1990 to 1992. Prior to that, my works were done in the spirit of experimentation with the Artists Village. The time spent in London allowed for wider perspective and research into a more individuated practice within global concerns.

The body may be the most obvious site, source and sense for identity formation. Yet it may not be as natural, absolute and stable as it appears to be. The biological body in itself as ground for our identity is placed within variable experiences based on history, culture, race, and gender, amongst other complexities. However, self-representation through performance allows for fluidity and openness to confront stereotypical perceptions and preconceived conventions. Verification nevertheless is necessary by creating a range of different ways of performance and presentations. Selfrepresentation via performance art is never completely autonomous and requires a reframing through the view of the audience and society.

Each performance in the series of “Journey of a Yellow Man”, “Ghosts Stories” and “Neo-Baba” differs in length, format and has a different subtheme. They have been performed in a variety of audiences, different countries and diverse venues. Some are short performances of thirty minutes whereas others may be involving an installation, which incorporated long durational performances. The performances have been conceived based on site-specificity and also responding to the nature of the event concerned.

There is also relationship to the time of enactment which influences the work manifested with regard to my own personal physical, mental, emotional and psychological state. The use of the body in the production of self-

30 representation as performance art is both a vulnerable and potent strategy. As Tang Da Wu said, we run the risk of making a fool of ourselves.

57

At the

same time, self-representation in performance art as Peggy Phelan said, “always shows more than it means”.

58

Between these tensions the body has a special possibility of showing itself visually via actions with multi-layered representational variations. In “Journey of a Yellow Man” series, the yellow colored painted human form distorts its pre-conceived expectations and arouses awkward uncomfortable reactions ranging from awe to disgust. In contrast to that of the “Journey of a Yellow Man”, “Neo-Baba” is a clownish, stand-up comic.

59

The masquerade

takes the form of either a formal attire of office worker or mis-matched costumes. “Neo-Baba” also frequently portrays a multi-cultural hybrid that makes fun of his own perplexed identity and social situation. The persona in “Ghosts Stories” however is usually a clear-headed and solemn one. “Ghosts” are often depicted as haunting the living by some supposedly dissatisfied noncorporeal manifestation of the dead until their desire is met or some grievance was settled by the haunted. However my series of “Ghosts Stories” used it as a metaphor for repressed anxieties resulting from living in hyper-rational and over-administered controlled authoritative societies.

3.3 Persona: contrasts and conflicts

The works often begin with recognizing some core anxieties and concerns that arose from my personal experiences as well as my reading of some issues in contemporary society. My response is also based on the

31 various critiques given from different philosophical arguments on the state of contemporary art. There have been shifts of perspectives amongst artists since the 1960’s in response to the social function of art and emphases of art as a commodity sustained into an investment of aesthetic beauty for the sake of the market. The protests and resistance of the avant-garde became less important and faced obliteration within a global market consumer culture where artists were divided between image-making and social concerns.

60

My

works straddle between these polarities as a visual artist. I still try to see image making as a priority, however I could not work without a concern for context in a world of conflict and changing values. There is also an element of pedagogy involved where I usually take the stance of asking questions in order to provoke some thinking for these concerns and not necessarily advocating a particular position. By providing images of contrast and conflict in performance based on personal history, performance art can serve as a tool for cultural discourse and constructing identity. 61

3.4 Journey of a yellow man

One of the anxieties I faced of being a Chinese Singaporean in London was that of often being mistaken for being from mainland China. Even mainland Chinese would usually expect me to be well versed in Mandarin language and knowledge of Chinese culture. Although I am familiar with the language and culture still they would frown on my lesser capacity and competence. At the same time, being first time away for a longer period than

32 before, there is a greater sensitivity of prevalent racism when living in a predominantly “white” society.

To the West, “the other” is often seen not only as exotic, erotic or primitive but also inferior and subject to colonization. Edward Said’s evaluation of “Orientalism” is seen by many to be the founding work on postcolonial theory.62 His writings have made us more aware of the perceptive bias of the West towards the East. Said was critical of what he found as various false assumptions by Western attitudes towards the East. Societies like Singapore having undergone colonialism face the dilemmas of developing national identity after colonial rule. The self-image of the colonized is that of an abject, subordinated people used by the colonizers. Postcolonial societies struggle in grappling with a binary opposition between the subordinated inferior Oriental and the ruling superior Westerner. The postcolony however is chaotic and pluralistic but has its own internal coherence. 63 There is a need to continue to investigate and engage with contemporary realities and to open up various questions of representations of postcolonial identity.

In the search for a visual image as a starting point to explore this issue I found the most stereotypical image of the “Asian” in the history of biology.

The Swedish scientist and botanist, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is said to be the father of taxonomy, the scientific classifications of animals and plants now used in biological sciences. He even made some differentiations among the human race in four categories. These included Native Americans (Homo Sapiens Americanus) were seen as "red," "ill-tempered" and "subjugated."

The "European" category (Homo Sapiens europeaeus) was "white, serious and strong." The Asiatic (Homo sapiens asiaticus) is described as “yellow,

33 melancholy, and greedy” lastly the African (Homo sapiens afericanus) was depicted as "black, impassive and lazy." These categories are explicitly racist stereotypical perceptions, which even today helped scientists to categorize and interpret with these observations. 64 These contexts along with earlier explorations on identity, helped to initiate my series of “Journey of a yellow man”. Painting the body yellow alluded to various issues on my ethnicity and was also like putting on a fullbody mask. When working at the Artists Village and Tang Da Wu, we talked about putting the Chinese opera white powder on the face as a mask to signify embodying another persona in performance. The mask also helps to overcome our shyness of revealing ourselves as well as anxieties of stage fright when stepping in front of an audience.

Etymologically, “mask” originated from the Italian “masca”, which describes an evil, hideous character. The Latin form of “persona” also implied a mask as in a role or a person.

65

The yellow man persona was an over the

top mask which wishes to address various issues at the same time projecting a visually strong image. It accentuates my difference as an Asian “other” and at the same time ruptures the stereotypical perceptions of identity and renders an entirely different gaze.

3.5 Neo-Baba

Neo-Baba is another series of work, which is a reference on identity with regard to social realities within a local context and an effort to relate to an international, global community. (fig.14) There was a self-conscious attempt at

34 laughing at one’s self and situation. “Neo-baba” is a pun on the anti-art movement of “Dada” and the derogatory term, “baba” used to describe Straitsborn Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore.

Although not wearing a mask, the handling of a comic persona to me was another way of putting on a masquerade in a different way. The NeoBaba persona was often well dressed in a formal office worker’s attire of necktie and white long sleeves shirt but sometimes mis-matching costumes to show a disparity in one’s constituent personality indicating a hybridization of cultures.

66

Neo-Baba also spoke in various different dialects, languages and

colloquial Singlish, which showed evidence of my multi-cultural background.

67

I did not expect audiences to understand what I was saying, especially when performing outside of Singapore. The use of slang, dialects and colloquial languages peculiar to Singapore were deliberate to throw light on a unique hybrid identity based on a plural and multi-cultural environment.

Some objects I have used in the Neo-Baba series is a pair of boxing gloves sewn together with an opposing pair. When I wear them they insinuate an invisible opponent or fighting with a missing opponent depending on the perceiver. Chewing gum is also used in various ways and actions were made with the gum after an over consumption of it. This was a reference to the exceptional ban of the sale and import of chewing gum in Singapore.

Neo-baba was also used as a platform to question conservative assumptions of art and culture, which often generalized what aspects of culture should represent the larger society. At the same time it was also an acknowledgment of the complexities involved in our post-modern world of pluralism and global market capitalism. The use of laughter has its social

35 function and is useful in helping us keep an emotional distance to the object of laughter.

68

These are often tongue-in-cheek self-deprecations with the hope

that the criticisms made will be more easily palatable when seen in a lighter vein.

3.6 Ghosts Stories

I began the series of “Ghosts Stories” (fig.15) after making the observation that ghosts stories easily make their mark on the best sellers lists both in Singapore and Japan. On personally encountering Japan for the first time, comparisons with Singapore seems to suggest that the popularity of ghosts stories in both societies may be symptomatic of a nostalgia for the irrational in a hyper-rationalized society. Both countries have roots in Confucian culture and tend to be rigid, hierarchical with discernible social control under well-ordered paternalistic family and social codes, though differing in structure and history. The popularity of ghosts and horror stories seems to express a need to release repressed tensions arising from living under these conditions, which may lead to a paranoia and censorious disposition under an authoritarian and suppressive society. 69 In this series I also sometimes use a black cloth over my head as a mask, however it is not as distinctive element in the work as the “yellow man”.

The emphasis here is to create a “chilling” effect based on the scenario created by objects, sound, lighting and the actions as well as the concealed intimidator within a ghostly image. Some of the objects used repeatedly include golden eggs, sometimes made of painted plaster sometimes from

36 stones. I also used blocks of ice, military blankets.

The Chinese idiom, "Kill the chicken to frighten the monkeys" (Mandarin: sha ji xia hou) is used repeatedly. It connotes a typical authoritarian attitude of punishing the deviant scapegoat as a means for social control. I used this as a visual metaphor for the extreme punishment of political detention without trial, which is the most extreme form of repression and social ostracism. It is sometimes used as the basis for some of the objects for installations or actions in performance of the series.

3.7 Conceptualization, Execution, Documentation

I like to identify a generalization of three main stages of art production process in my experience. This may be a simplified reading but it could prove to be useful for our discussion. The three major stages are, ideation and planning, followed by its enactment or performance, and finally its completion as an object or documentation. The conceptualization and planning may take form in writings such as drafts, proposals, scripts, manifestoes or drawings of diagrams, sketches, which may leave lasting evidence as a documentation item. The execution of a performance or event in itself can take varied forms depending on the actual situation. The final execution may differ from its original ideation stage of intention due to unexpected occurrences or even lapses of the artist as the real situation may differ from one imagined during its planning stage. Items to be collected for documentation may include that from the two preceding stages the bulk of which may be products of recording technology produced as audio recordings, photography, video, film or digital

37 technology. It could also include others like critical reviews and public media coverage.

From the readings of Jackson Pollock’s action paintings as a result of performative actions, one could just as well see the process of paintings as the performance itself where the painting product, which hangs in the art gallery or museum, is actually a documentation item in an archive specializing in collecting such forms of documentation.

70

These three stages maybe

delineated differently depending on our philosophical inclination, historical distance or contextual changes, of how we define where the artwork is manifested, where it begins or ends. In fact if we look at art objects such as painting and sculpture in a performative way the paintings and sculptures may be seen as documentation items for a performance in its second stage of production.

38 CHAPTER 4.

REVELATIONS AND RE-PRESENTATIONS

4.1 Actions, Signs, and Representations

Symbolic representations practiced by social actors giving social meanings are the keystone to human culture. Representation is the characteristic response of human nature in attempting to imagine the real.

71

Artists who engage in performance as an art form also knows that its use as a form of representation via the self as embodiment in specific space and time ultimately ends in disappearance. Performance art being an ephemeral form and medium as opposed to other practices which produces a tangible object like painting or sculpture, poses various problems for its continued discussion in contemporary art history and theoretical discourse. Performance itself is seen as an “essentially contested concept” and this essence is built into itself.

72

These characteristics make it even more problematic when we consider art

museums and cultural institutions’ inability to represent performance works from the historical past. Any visit to art museums permanent collections will show the imbalanced if not lack of representations of performance art in visual art history for exhibition. The exhibition “Out of Actions”, which started in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1998 and toured Vienna, Barcelona and Tokyo there after, was one of the rare exhibitions by a cultural institution, attempting to focus on performance art comprehensively, showing the possibility of exhibiting and collecting objects involved in and arising out of performance art from the past. 73

39 David Medalla’s “A Stitch in Time” (1968-72) was an interactive project that resulted in an installation. (Fig. 16) The installation requests visitors to stitch something on a fabric provided, as it also provides the impetus for dialogue and conversations as they do so. The process, albeit re-staged without the artist’s physical involvement could still be continued in the exhibition held two decades after the initial occurrence.74 Genpei Akasegawa, one of the co-founders of Anti-Art (Han-geijutsu) performance group, Hi Red Center, was famous for his trial for forging counterfeit 1,000-yen notes, even though the notes were printed only on one side. He turned his trial into an exhibition of sample performances and invited various friends who were artists and critics to appeal on his behalf. Several of his objects wrapped in the printed 1,000-yen notes that were seized during the trial have been included in the “Out of Actions” exhibition. (fig.17)

75

Although there were substantial objects and installations arising from performances, a large part of the exhibition featured photographs, film and videos made by the artists themselves from documentation materials. There can never be any completely clear accounts to live actions, performances and events which are multi-layered, open and fluid as well as attaining the same ambiguous and complex subtleties. Such records can show what transpired but can never be full renderings of the momentary. Gina Pane is known for inflicting pain on herself, such as mutilating herself with razors in performance. Her work, “Les Corp Presenti” (1975) comprises photographic documentations put together as aesthetic representations. (Fig.18) They may not completely capture all elements of the live actions; nevertheless they provide a collage of images requiring our imaginative participation. This can

40 be seen as the final realization of an artwork based on the photo documentations, in line with her artistic process of a search for a language or sign from which the performative actions of inflicted wounds are the origin. 76

4.2 Memory and the Archive

Perhaps the power intrinsic in performance is the blurring between art and life but it also arouses various conflicting desires. We can neither repeat our past nor leave it behind. The desire to integrate art and life has been a subject frequently proposed since the 1960s. Allan Kaprow created “Happenings” as a means of blurring the line between art and life where he celebrated the everyday experience of life as art. His ideas were based on his reading of John Dewey’s “Reading Art as Experience” where he proposed an experiential nature of art as well as the Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock, whose action paintings he saw as art events.77 There have been precedents such as the writings of the inimitable poet, playwright, theater director and innovator Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) who was the first to call for a theater with the disappearance of the stage proscenium to knock down its false reality.

78

Dada and Surrealism also had the inclination to critique the

institutionalization of art and advocated art as social praxis by sublating aestheticism into life.

79

Artist and composer, John Cage whom Kaprow

studied under, introduced him to the avant-garde movement of Fluxus, where he later became a major contributor to their historical “art/life” events. The blurring of art and life subjecting itself to being time-based and momentous would also involve the use of light, sound, and easily decomposed materials

41 such as food and other raw natural materials. These would prove to be impossible to conserve or represent completely in any documentation media.

The objects of art making fulfills a human desire to outlast our mortality.

As Hippocrates (c.460-357 BC), the Greek philosopher said: “Ars longa, vita brevis", usually rendered in English "art is long, life is short." The ephemeral quality of performance art at once makes contradictory claims towards its validity as an art medium. However, discourses continue to be made based on documents in various media for archiving purposes. The relationship between truth and authority is necessarily a practical concern for the performance artist when considering conservation within the archive. In “Archive Fever”, Jacques Derrida investigates these complexities within the concept of the archive in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis.

80

Derrida draws attention to the fact that the prefix “arche” is found both in “archive” and “architecture”. It represents in the ontological sense a point of commencement or origin as well as in a nomological sense its commandment or authority. The archive is an institutionally structured database of memory and records. As a data architecture structure it organizes and re-organizes memory. The Freudian psychoanalytic survey also reveals that the desire to maintain an archive is convoluted with hidden contradictions. There is a disjointed division between an aggressive and destructive “death drive” (Greek: thanatos), and the fear of loss, which is imbued with the contradictory impulse towards the destruction of the archive and yet integrates its preservation.

81

The archive is provoked into conserving what had passed and

sustaining it as the present. The collection and storage of documentations inside the shelves of an archive, however also highlights the fear of loss that

42 leads to inertia and amnesia, the destruction rather than representation of memory. It is necessary to go beyond the destruction of memory by provoking a transformation and construction of memory and to suggest the archive as a live process. The archive has to operate more than a depository but also as a medium that leads to an active process of appropriation of and from the outside. This involves an internalization of that which is “outside” where that which is being archived commenced. Which leads us back to its “originary”; the commencement of memory and records based on historical occurrences is subjected to surveys, analysis and authoritative selection into shifting narratives, in order to convey the value system and beliefs of the prevalent society. It indicates a decisive option of perspectives for reviewing, reimagining and recreating individual, personal as well as social, collective identities and memory.

4.3 Essence of the Performative

Together with artists working in conceptual art, process art, land art and other time-based art forms, performance artists, actually acknowledged and consciously chose to participate in the temporal and ephemeral nature of the time-based medium as an intrinsic value in itself. The idea or context of the work became of utmost importance more than the resulting material form or object, which was usually “secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious”.

82

Some even consciously resist commodification and defy the

collection of their works in permanent forms of relics, photography, film, video and documentation. Veteran performance artist Alastair MacLennan, based in

43 Belfast, usually makes long durational performances he calls “actuations”. He prefers the use of photography to video documentation as he feels that video might give the false impression to the viewer that they have seen the actual live performance itself. Adina Bar-On, a pioneer performance artist of Israel would like all documentations to be destroyed when she dies. However there have been exhibitions of their works where photographic and textual representations were exhibited accompanied by publications.

83

These assertions could be dismissed as radical idealism and a desire to remain pure to the point of self-defeat in a global capitalistic market economy. Even if no commodity is produced in order to be detached from a market economy, there is always the struggle for viability by performance artists resorting to a second income--earning job at the same time. Organizers of such art events are suppose to remain viable through some philanthropic or arts endowment sponsorship if not through the sale of tickets if not other means of fund-raising. However the excessive commercialization of the art market sometimes distorts the value of a work of art with its high prices through the profit-motivated speculations of investors at auctions and other market mechanisms. Our perception of the work’s value is no longer based on an aesthetic experience but the awareness of the prices, where works with higher prices are deceptively equated to be the superior art. 84 The alternative strategy via embodiment of art in the self and body exacerbates a commodification of the body. The body becoming “prostituted”, reduced to a commoditized status, liken to a marketed, industrialized, serial body. The excessive commercialization of art and other extravagant indulgences are symptomatic of a relative disembodiment in consumption.

44 This has not eliminated the body, but instead aestheticize the body into artifact. 85 In order to reclaim its purposeful directions, performance artists persevere to re-embark on a subjective tactical representation as conscious response and resistance albeit in an opposition between authentic cultural discourses of what art can actually mean versus the tyranny of market commodification of how art can make profit. Until the 1980s Western White patriarchal heterosexual male had always dominated performance art or even the art world in a global sense.

86

Multi-cultural, feminist and homosexual

artists finding themselves on the marginal situation of the art world have since found a way to intervene through the use of body in performance. Rebecca Schneider traces the artist’s explicit body as a contested but potent arena with the ability to expose power relations by re-enacting social traumas to renegotiate cultural differentiations and the insistent refusal by the marginal to be occluded by the dominant society. 87 Just as Derrida had said about the archive, and I would include art objects in museum collections, as they may also be seen as a documentation of sorts, that ultimately the archive or art produced is not just a compilation or record of the past but a remembering of the beginning which holds a promise and a responsibility towards future directions. For performance art to recover its authenticity, its potency it needs to continuously look to its origin of idealization and motivation of using self-embodiment as process, ritual and strategy to re-invigorate the radical cultural project of art. 88 Interventions in performance art need to relentlessly re-invent tactical incursions in order to respond to the market’s ability to persistently

45 appropriate avant-garde strategies back into falsity and shallowness as well as the discrepancies of representations of cultural institutions and the art world at large. In the light of this, I recently coordinated two major projects; one is my solo series of work, “Anthropometry Revision” and the other a continuation to organize together with other Singapore artists, “The Future of Imagination 3”, an international performance art festival.

89

These projects are

the culmination of my researches and consolidate my findings into new subsequent directions.

4.5 Anthropometry Revision

In some recent performances, I worked with a loose structure in order to respond more spontaneously to different situations and contexts depending on the event or exhibition, which I executed them. The free-form nature allows me to play with an open-ended vision of identity and social relationships. The actions provide an image for contemplation where some of the actions are repeated at the different situations and improvised to fit into a new structure composed for the specific situation. For example the performance, “Selfportrait”, which I presented in Dresden 2005, had an action, which is based on some actions I began by using the shoes I was wearing, symbolic of an invisible authority. (fig.19) This action was first initiated in Mexico (from which there was no apt documentation) have been recreated in different variations within diversely structured performances.

90

I have decided to use this image

with the shoes on my bare back as a starting point in the new series of work “Anthropometry Revision”.

46 From

its

Greek

roots,

“anthropometry”

literally

means

the

“measurement of humans”. In anthropology it refers to the measurement of human individuals for the study of human physical variations for comparison and classifications. The French law enforcement officer, Alphonse Bertillon, credited to have given this name in 1883, used this identification system based on physical measurements to identify criminals. Today this exercise has been supplanted by fingerprint identification. In the early 19th Century it was linked to Anthropological Criminology, and had various misconceptions, such as wrongly associating criminal characteristics to primitive humans, monkeys and apes. Anomalies and defects in the human form or severe difference in physiological characteristics were also seen as evidence of physical inferiority or psychological disposition of a born criminal.

91

These

historical misunderstanding of early anthropometry and marginalization of physical abnormality serves as contextual historical background to a series of photographic, video and performance works.

With direct reference to my own body, distorted at birth by scoliosis, they critique the aesthetic of the pose for consumption, within a society with conflicting desires and aversions of a body longed for and yet repudiated.

These still images presented in photographic prints and video incorporates my deformed body in various poses of disclosure and masquerade are selfreflective and repetitious. (Fig.20-22) The minimal differences in poses are appearing as obsessive repetitive performances adding up into dramatic effects. They acknowledge an artificiality of the pose as disfigured ideal in adaptation and disguise, exaggerated through self-conscious repetition. Selfconscious reflexivity should not be seen as self-absorbed narcissism. To

47 know our identity via one’s own bodily representation is to undermine the received image of those who dominated and imposed on us.

92

With historical distance, I also revisit Yves Klein’s “Anthropometries” series. (Fig. 23-26) Klein himself was interested in reviving forgotten aesthetic philosophical idealism of the past. His enthusiasm to embrace the “flesh” was motivated by a consciousness of oppressive burden borne by the body and his desire to create a new departure towards transcendence. Dressed in suit and tie, with white gloves, his own body remained “untainted” and distant as if avoiding contamination and the abjection of the social and individual body, which his female models were subjected. In contrast Kaprow’s “Happenings” embraced dirt as nature and fertility. Klein’s latent criticism of the failure of institutional avant-garde advent into abstract paintings seems incomplete.

93

The use of women’s bodies as “paint brushes” while remaining himself “clean”, and producing the “framed and pedestal” art objects were evidence of his own misogyny and failure, caught in the prevalent domination of the bourgeoisie mentality.

Despite the contradictions in its aristocratic ironic way, Klein’s work was a complex negotiation in extending Jackson Pollock’s performative “action” legacy, which Kaprow also acknowledged. Its expression makes it impossible to look at paintings in the same way again.

94

“Anthropometry Revision” does

not intend to re-enact Klein, hence becoming “farce” in repeating history (sic.

Marx). My intention is to continue a committed somatic discourse based on documentary evidences in the archive of art history and to interrogate a past performance work relevant to my own surveys and position.

48 CONCLUSION Performance art continues to be a valid open-ended, contested and vital form of art practice, which is also expanding in a wider range of possible manifestations.

95

The increase of intensity in this practice has also seen

diverse interventions responding to various questions facing its own intrinsic problematical ephemeral distinctiveness. The anti-commodification stance also remains to offer alternative propositions and cross-examine what art and culture can really mean, do or represent.

In the creation of other art forms such as painting or sculpture, the work is preserved in itself. Performance art may be an ephemeral form but its memory can be preserved in other media. The essence of its mark in passing into another media such as photography, film, and video, however becomes a memory of the actuality and can never be the same experiential phenomenon.

There are no possibilities for an unmediated relationship in cultural production even if it were a direct face-to-face live encounter. The discourse of performance via other media such as photography, film, video, new media CD-ROM and websites are as equally valid for the sake of continuous discourse in contemporary art.

96

Hence even the live re-enactments done by

artists may recall the original performance but it can only be a renewal in a new scenario and a bridge to the actual past experiences.

An art museum’s permanent collection and its program of exhibitions in some ways are like an archive of representations of cultural history in a society. The art museum’s program of exhibitions and collection imposes and exposes particular alignments and associations between different trajectories

49 of cultural consciousness as records, and promotes particular influence and agenda, which are open to discussion and interrogation.

In Singapore, there had been attempts at self-organization and documentation by independent artists to overcome the inconsistencies our museums and cultural institutions, which of better resources, are failing in accomplishing the cultural mission with balanced representation. “Open ends” was an exhibition of performance art documentation held at the Substation in 2001 organized by artists led by Amanda Heng.

97

It was a valuable effort

involving various interviews between the concerned writers and artists, which fulfilled a dire need. The fragments of the past recorded in these documentations are also vital parts of the present and if not also the future.

Koh Nguang How has been the sole archivist of The Artists Village in the years prior to 2000, before the new generation took over the main activities.

His documentation of the Artists Village was given a first showing in Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005. 98 Various artists have been instrumental in opening new inroads to a more diverse practice of performativity in Singapore, which are not yet collated. Ray Langenbach had made several textual cum action presentations in lecture format such as “The Performative Indoctrination Model: Colonialism without tears”.

99

Charles Lim and Woon Tien Wei explored pioneering ideas

in virtual and internet performances.

100

Bernd Behr attempted a tongue-in-

cheek re-enactment of Yves Klein’s “Leap into the void” at the same site where the original took place in Paris suburb and exhibited it as a looped video of the artist failing to take flight and falling on the ground.101 Koh Nguang How researched into the errors printed in past art publications and exhibition

50 catalogues.

102

Lim Tzay Chuen’s conceptual multi-layered works could be

seen as performative interventions such as proposing to tear certain pages from the Sydney Biennale’s catalogue and moving the Merlion to Venice.

103

Ho Tzu Nyen’s recently produced “4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art” as a series of four television programs, exploring and re-telling the stories of four milestones works by four artists in Singapore’s art history.

104

Dana Lam re-

enacted Amanda Heng’s “Let’s Chat” a dialogical installation exhibition.

105

Khairuddin Hori had presented some bold interventions such as “Die Faustus Die!”, a Rock opera executed on the third-storey facade of The Substation art centre.

106

Juliana Yasin was the central organizer of “Fusion Strength”, first

presented at Plastique Kinetic Worms in 2001, a collaborative interactive performance and installation group exhibition involving interventions of artworks by the participating artists. 107 The Artists Village have over the years organized various events and happenings including public art projects such as “AIM: Artists Investigating Monuments”, interventions at public monumental sites and B.E.A.U.T.Y., a project cum exhibition to find a good home for challenging artworks which have failed to get exhibited in the past and have been rescued from secluded storage. 108 Although attempts have been made, the suspicion remains that cultural institutions can never give a complete, adequate and balanced representation to performance art that artists begin to self-organize exhibitions, events and festivals. This partly contributed in motivating me to organize and direct the “Future of Imagination”, an international performance art event held three times in Singapore since 2003. The event also hope to introduce more diverse art practices from different countries and backgrounds acknowledging a

51 globalised situation of contemporary cultural interactions. It also appeals for changes towards an expanded intensified discourse.

109

As a response to “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979” organized by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the exhibition “Art Action 1958-1998” was organized by Richard Martel, in Quebec.

110

Martel invited artists and historians for a conference during the

performance event and published an alternative account of performance art history left out by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles exhibition and catalogue. Some of the artists featured also include other artists who also organize like Boris Nieslony from Germany, Seiji Shimoda from Japan and Chumpon Apisuk of Thailand.

Boris Nieslony since 1978, have through the years collected and maintained the most comprehensive archive of performance art “Die Schwarze Lade” (The Black Kit) and was adopted and housed in “SeedammKulturzentrum-Perforum” in Berne, Switzerland since 1981.

111

This archive

contains dossiers from artists worldwide and still growing as a “living” archive.

He also organizes various performance art events and conferences.

Performance art practice today has expanded beyond that of just producing one’s own solo works. The blurring of art and life goes beyond that of producing art as a product for consumption but to also respond to the exigencies of the cultural needs of society. Many artists have found it necessary to facilitate considered change and overcome shortcomings of official art institutions and events by starting their own alternative art spaces, festivals of performance art events, publications in order to provide an invaluable counter perspective and possibilities to that of the institutions. To

52 paraphrase Derrida in “Archive Fever�, it is necessary to continually go inside the archive (and museums) to interrogate the documents, which by the perspective of art as performance, include the collected art objects in museums as testimonial of the historical past. Just as the archive needs to engage with the originary source, which lays the outside realities, in order to keep the cultural project away from the perils of thanatos.

52 NOTES There is a lack of any comprehensive history of Singapore art history.

Surveys on Singapore’s art history such as Kwok Kian Chow’s “Channels and Confluences – A History of Singapore Art”; 1996 Singapore Art Museum, focused on painting and sculpture and do not inform much on performance art. It is only mentioned in passing that Tang Da Wu and artists from The Artists Village such as Vincent Leow, Zai Kuning, Amanda Heng as well as S. Chandrasekaran as part of “Trimurti”, were also practicing performance art.

The most comprehensive survey to date is that in Ray Langenbach “Performing the Singapore State 1988 – 1995”, 2003, unpublished PhD thesis, Center for Cultural Research, University of Sydney. http://library.uws.edu.au/adt-NUWS/public/adt-NUWS20041027.174118/ Since 1994, the most consistently published writer on Singapore’s contemporary art is Lee Weng Choy, Critic and Co-Artistic Director of The Substation, Singapore. However his writings normally do not focus on performance art except for writings surrounding the controversial 1994 incident, which resulted in a de-facto ban on funding of performance art, which was only lifted in 2003. Lee Weng Choy, “Chronology of a Controversy”, and “A Review of Josef Ng’s Performance”, in Looking at Culture. Edited by S.K. Sanjay Krishnan, Lee Weng Choy, Leon Perera and Jimmy Yap. Singapore published by the editors. 1996.

1

Amelia Jones, specialist in feminist and performance art, and RoseLee Goldberg not only advocated the validity of critical appraisals based on documentation but also demystified the privilege of “live” encounters with the artist’s body in performance: Amelia Jones, "Presence" in absentia: experiencing performance as documentation, 1997 Art Journal Vol.56 No. 4 p.11-18. Body Art / Performing the Subject. University of Minnesota Press 1998 p. 33-35.

RoseLee Goldberg, “Be my mirror”, Don’t Call It Performance catalogue 2004 El Museo del Barrio New York.

2

3

Some recent publications includes Clark, John; Modern Asian Art, 1998 Sydney, Fine Arts Press, focused on Japan, China, India, Thailand and Indonesia. Another often cited work is “Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions, Tensions” by Apinan Poshyananda, Thomas McEveilley, Geeta Kapur, Jim Supangkat, Marian Pastor Roces, Jae-Ryung Roe, 1997 Asia Society, New York, focused on India, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand. Both books focused on the few countries and their artists’ use of traditional imagery and modes to deal with contemporary issues. What is revealed is the complexity of the notion of “Asia” as a single region and highlighted the difficulty to access generalizations and trace the ebb and flow of influences and information in the local spheres of cultural productions.

T.K. Sabapathy: Sculpture in Singapore. Exhibition Catalogue Singapore: National Museum Art Gallery. 1991.

4

5

T.K. Sabapathy, Tan Teng Kee: An Overview, 1958-2000, Singapore: Exhibition Catalogue, Sculpture Square, 2001.

53

6

Kwok Kian Chow, Channels and Confluences – A History of Singapore Art, 1996 Singapore Art Museum, p.141-150. "Open ends" 2001, Catalogue, documentation exhibition of performance art in Singapore, (Septfest 7-21 September 2001). Singapore, The Substation, Interview with Tang Da Wu by John Low (pages are unnumbered).

7

Lee Wen, “Interview with Tang Da Wu” The Future of Imagination 3, Catalog, Singapore, 2006, pg.12.

8

“Asian Artist Today -Fukuoka Annual V: Tang Da Wu Exhibition Catalogue", 1991, Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan.

Constance Sheares, "Constance Sheares, In Conversation with S. Chandrasekaran, Goh Ee Choo, Salleh Japar", in Trimurti and Ten Years After. Edited by T. K. Sabapathy. Singapore: Singapore Art Museum / National Heritage Board. 1998. p. 54,60 and 75.

9

10

My comparison refers to works in more traditional modernist practices of paintings and sculpture being more represented as opposed to recent alternative media and practices. For a critique of the art museum and relationship to contemporary art representation see Douglas Crimp: On The Museum's Ruins, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.,1993.

11

Paul Schimmel, Kristine Stiles, Russell Ferguson editors: Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 by Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Interview quoted pg. 91.

12

Joan Simon, ed. Bruce Nauman: Exhibition Catalogue and Catalogue Raisonne New York: Distributed Art Publishers, in association with Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1994. Texts by Neal Benezra, Kathy Halbreich, Paul Schimmel, and Robert Storr.

13

Shaviro, Steven, Performing Life: The Work of Tehching Hsieh, Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance Art Documents 1978-1999 DVD ROM, http://www.one-year-performance.com/ Jill Johnston, Tehching Hsieh: Art's Willing Captive, Art in America, Sept, 2001.

14

Saltz, Jerry. “Body Heat.” The Village Voice. April 23, 2004, other works of Acconci refer to Taylor, Mark C. Frazer Ward, Jennifer Bloomer: Vito Acconci London: Phaidon, 2002.

15

16

P.C. Smith, Racing Forms, internet review, "Boat Emptying Stream Entering”, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, January 10, 1997 - February 22, 1997. http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/reviews/smith/abramovic.asp

54

17

Johanna Burton, Repeat Performances, Artforum, January 2006, p.55-56.

Smith, Roberta, Turning Back the Clock to the Days of Crotchless Pants and a Deceased Rabbit, New York Times, November 17, 2005, Arts and Leisure, p.1.

Kennedy, Randy, Self-Mutilation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery, New York Times, November 6, 2005, Arts and Leisure, p.1.

18

Guggenheim Museum website: http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/abramovic/index.html 19

Rachel Withers, “Short History of Performance-Part One”, ArtForum Spring 2002.

20

Whitechapel Gallery website: http://www.whitechapel.org/content.php?page_id=323 21

MTAA (M. River & T.Whid Art Associates) homepage: http://www.mteww.com/mtaaRR/on-line_art http://www.turbulence.org/Works/1year/info.php?page=bg

Hayley Newman, “Performancemania”, Catalogue published by Matt’s Gallery, 2001. For a critical analysis see: Camilla Jalving: Inventing reality. On truth and lies in the work of Hayley Newman, in Rune Gade, Anne Jerslev (ed.), Performative Realism: Interdisciplinary Studies in Art And Media, Museum Tusculanum 2005, p.145-180.

22

Shimoda Seiji, Editor. The Nippon International Performance Art Festival Catalogues, 1993 to 2005, Tokyo, NIPAF. 23

24

Richard Martel, editor. Art Action 1958-1998, 2001, Quebec, Inter, (Editions intervention).

25

Art Service Association website: http://www.asa.de

26

This thesis is to enable more insight into my own practice. It is beyond the scope of my thesis to make a thorough critical analysis of Tang and S. Chandrasekaran’s work.

27

The first presentations were at the exhibition “Happenings”, held at National University of Singapore campus co-organized by Artists Village and students from the Faculty of Architecture in 1989.

Lee Wen, A Waking Dream, drawings and poetry, 1981, Select Books, Singapore.

28

"Open ends" 2001, Catalogue, documentation exhibition of performance art in Singapore, (Septfest 7-21 September 2001). Singapore, The Substation, Interview with Tang Da Wu by John Low (pages are unnumbered)..

29

55

Lee Wen, “Interview with Tang Da Wu” The Future of Imagination 3, Catalog, 2006, pg.12-19. I did not see them but heard about them and they were poorly documented.

30

31

"Open ends" 2001, Catalogue, documentation exhibition of performance art in Singapore, (Septfest 7-21 September 2001). Singapore, The Substation, interviews by John Low also Catalogue “Asian Artist Today” – Fukuoka Annual V, September 10 – November 10, 1991, Fukuoka Art Museum.

32

T. K. Sabapathy, Editor. Trimurti And Ten Years After. Exhibition Catalogue. Singapore: National Heritage Board / Singapore Art Museum.

1998.

33

“Icons”, An exhibition of recent works by S.Chandrasekaran, 11-18 January 1996, exhibition catalogue, The Gallery Fort Canning Centre Introduction by Constance Sheares, “Trimurti to beyond” by T.K. Sabapathy. I was also invited to Portland Sculpture Park in 1990 and helped S.Chandrasekaran on his “Yogi” installation after I finished making my own work, a stone installation.

It was here where I had various conversations with Chandrasekaran about his process.

Russell Storer, ed: Situation: Collaborations, Collectives & Artist Networks from Sydney, Singapore and Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2005.

The Artists Village Website: http://www.tav.org.sg/ 34

35

Op. Cit. interview with Constance Sheares pg. 54.

36

Ray Langenbach, “Performing the Singapore State 1988 – 1995”, 2003, PhD thesis, Center for Cultural Research, University of Sydney. Ch. 4.

37

Op.Cit. Ahmad Mashadi “’Different Things’: Trimurti and Multicultural Assertions” pg. 32 – 41.

38

"Open ends", 2001, documentation exhibition of performance art in Singapore, (Septfest 7-21 September 2001). Singapore, The Substation, Interview with Tang Da Wu by John Low (pages are unnumbered).

39

Op. Cit. interviews with Constance Sheares, pg 65.

Op. Cit. and also Quoted by R. Langenbach: Turner, V. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journals.

40

For detailed discussion on the debate on “Asian” values see Wee Wan-Ling, C. J.: “’Asian Values’, Singapore, and the Third Way: Re-Working Individualism and Collectivism”. Sojourn, 15(2), pp. 332-358.

--- “Capitalism and Ethnicity: Creating “Local” Culture in Singapore”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (April 2000): 129-43. See also Fareed Zakaria, A 41

56

Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew, Foreign Affairs 73 (no. 2, March-April 1994): p.109-127.

42

Op.Cit. Ahmad Mashadi “’Different Things’: Trimurti and Multicultural Assertions” p. 39-40.

For an exploration of the relationship between theatre, performance art and cultural policies of Singapore see William Peterson : Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore 2001, USA, Wesleyan University Press.

For an examination of Singapore’s management of social and cultural policies see Carl A. Trocki: Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control, 2005, United Kingdom, Routledge.

43

For detailed descriptions and discussions see Lee Weng Choy, “Chronology of a Controversy”, and “A Review of Josef Ng’s Performance”, in Looking at Culture. Edited by S.K. Sanjay Krishnan, Lee Weng Choy, Leon Perera and Jimmy Yap. Singapore; published by the editors. 1996. also in William Peterson : Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore 2001, USA, Wesleyan University Press. pg.153-159. and Ray Langenbach: “Performing the Singapore State 1988 – 1995”, PhD thesis, Center for Cultural Research, University of Sydney.

August 2003, p 240-287 http://library.uws.edu.au/adt-NUWS/uploads/approved/adtNUWS20041027.174118/public/09Chapter8.pdf 44

The eviction forced a move out of the rustic village. Tang brought as many works and material he could salvaged from the old village, which were too much for the first house he rented and necessitated a second move where he finally re-settled in three rented post-colonial houses in Queens Avenue, Sembawang. The move was an enormous operation, which drained us yet we continued immediately after to participate in the Arts Festival.

45

46

The Artists Village was occupying land that was deemed for “urban renewal”. In Singapore it is compulsory by law to apply for public entertainment license for public performances. Before eviction the village was actually private property and we did not apply for public entertainment license for art events and performances as the events were deemed private events. I was living there in the village when we were served eviction notice in 1989-90.

I assisted Tang Da Wu to negotiate with the then newly formed National Arts Council as well as the Land Authorities for extension to stay longer in Sembawang unsuccessfully. When I went down to appeal for extension of the eviction, the Land Authorities officer chided us for holding events that attracted media publicity, which made me suspicious of the undisclosed underlying rationale of our eviction. After eviction, the land was handed over to the military to be used as jungle training grounds.

Sociologist, Goffman saw individuals as social actors participating in social transactions as every day performance. Social interactions are symbolic 47

57

which changes according to differing actors and situations. Erikson’s psychoanalytical approaches to adolescent identity crisis saw the individual self through a dynamic process with the communal culture. Schrag dismisses deconstructionist and postmodern continually shifting views as debilitating the self as subject and re-asserts the creative features of self-formation and selfunderstanding. His critique of Weber’s and Habermas’s theories of modernity adopted their differentiation of three cultural spheres of science, morality and art. He added religion as a legitimate fourth cultural sphere.

Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Penguin, 1959; Erik Erikson: Identity: Youth and Crisis, Faber & Faber,1968; Carl. O. Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity, Yale University Press,1997.

Richard Ellism Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 16001900, 1992 Cambridge University Press, New York.

WU Hung, Katherine R. TSIANG, editors; Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture, 2004 Harvard University Press.

48

Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, Occidental Mythology, Oriental Mythology, Creative Mythology (Masks of God) 1991 (reissued) Penguin.

49

Gao Minglu, Toward A Transnational Modernity: An Overview of the Exhibition, Gao Minglu ed. Inside Out: New Chinese Art (catalog). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

50

Qian Zhijian, Performing bodies: Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and performance art in China –Interview, Art Journal, Volume: 58. Issue: 2.

Summer 1999, New York.

51

For a comparison with Japan see Munroe, Alexandra: Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, Harry N Abrams, NY 1994. One could also make contrasting comparisons with Japan, which was more open to the new influx of philosophical ideas from the west. Yoshihara Jiro who exhibited in Paris in 1952, helped initiated the avant-garde group, Gutai. Under the influences of “l’art informel” and “action painting”, Gutai staged events that have been cited as the precedents of Happenings. Groups like “Neo-Dada Organizers” and “Hi Red Center” in Tokyo followed this in the 1960’s.

However my interest here is to make comparisons based on parallel histories of coming from the same ethnic roots of Chinese culture evolving into artists presenting themselves in performance art and related to my early development and position in Singapore.

52

Hans Gunter Golinske, The Body as Intercultural Medium of Communication “On the Spiritual Background to the Art of Zhang Huan”, in Dziewior, Yilmaz.

“Zhang Huan” Kunstverein in Hamburg, Published by Hatje Cantz 2003 p.7378.

53

54

For a historical survey of the Chinese diaspora see Lynn Pan: Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora, Boston, Little, Brown, 1990

58

Stuart Hall, Cultural Identity and Diaspora in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. J. Rutherford, ed. Pp. 222-237. London: Lawrence and Wishart.1990.

55

Rosalind E. Krauss The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT press, 1986 “Notes on the Index”, p.196-220. Concerning repetition in performance and representation see Anthony Howell: Mimicry and Repetition in Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to its Theory and Practice, Routledge Harwood Contemporary Theatre Studies, 1999, p. 29-44.

56

57

"Open ends", 2001, documentation exhibition of performance art in Singapore, (Septfest 7-21 September 2001). Singapore, The Substation, Interview with Tang Da Wu by John Low (pages are unnumbered).

58

Peggy Phelan: Unmarked, 1993, London, Routledge. p. 27

There are not many critical reviews written on my work except for some newspapers reports and catalogue essays. Lee Weng Choy: Catalogue Essay, The Third Asia Pacific Triennale Catalogue, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Australia. 1999.

James Swinson: Lee Wen Connection / Location, Third Text/ no.45 Winter, London 1998-99 - pp.95-97 Ho Tzu Nyen, Chapter Four: Four Suits – Of Memes and Men, The Substation Magazine, (internet magazine) posted : 16 September 2005 http://www.substation.org/magazine/issue02/ft_4suits.html 59

Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? New York: Thames & Hudson, [1984] 1986.

60

Charles R. Garoian, Performing Pedagogy: Toward an Art of Politics.

Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

61

Edward W. Said, Orientalism New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

------------- Culture and Imperialism, New York, Vintage; Reprint edition, 1994

62

63

Achille Mbembe: On the Postcolony, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001 p. 102.

64

Although my work is not directly related to issues of racism I found it useful to understand the perceptions of identity in relationship to race and ethnicity.

For issues of classification see Audrey Smedley: "Science and the Idea of Race," in, Race and Intelligence: Separating Science from Myth, edited by Jefferson M. Fish (London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2002): pg. 145-155. For a structural review of the relationship between race, and class on national identity formation see: Balibar, Etienne & Wallerstein, Immanuel: Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Verso, 1991. A social anthropological assessment on the relationship of ethnicity to identity

59

formation is given by Richard Jenkins: Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Explorations, Sage Publications, 1997.

65

Erich Herold, The World of Masks, London, Hamlyn, 1992.

66

Like masks, clothing can alter, camouflage and enlarge us: Anthony Howell: Being Clothing in Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to its Theory and Practice, Routledge Harwood Contemporary Theatre Studies, 1999, p. 15-28.

67

“Singlish” is a colloquial English spoken in Singapore, creole based on a mixing of grammar and vocabulary of English language with some of its Malay,Tamil languages and Chinese dialects of Hokkien and Teochew and Mandarin. For a historical survey see Anthea Fraser Gupta: The Step-tongue: Children's English in Singapore. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1994.

Henri Bergson: Laughter : an essay on the meaning of the comic, translated from the French by Cloudesley Bereton and Fred Rothwell.Kobenhavn : Green Integer, 1998.

68

Freud saw a relationship between psychological repression and horror fiction albeit not repression based on social pressures of ideology and state structures. Sigmund Freud, (1919), The Uncanny, The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14, Art and Literature, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990, p. 339-76.

Henry James’s famous ghost story “The Turn of a Screw” had been read as a story of sexual repression. See Wilfred L Guerin, Jeanne C Reesman, Earle G Labor, John R Willingham, Lee Morgan (authors): A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, Oxford University Press US, 2005, p. 144-146.

Bradley examines how horror fiction genre also articulates our repressions via altered images of the body and self. Linda Bradley: Writing Horror and the Body, Greenwood Press, 1996.

For a reading of “Frankenstein” and “Dracula” as literature of repressed fear see Franco Moretti: Dialectic of Fear, New Left Review 136 (Nov.-Dec.), p.6785, 1982.

69

70

For readings of Jackson Pollock as performativity see: Amelia Jones: Body Art/ Performing the Subject. University of Minnesota Press 1998, p. 55-57; also Schimmel, Paul: Leap into the Void: Performance and the Object, in: Schimmel, Paul(ed.): Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979, Thames and Hudson, Los Angeles, 1998, p.17-120.

For an ontological interpretation of art as performance see: Davies, David. Art as Performance. Malden, Oxford and Victoria: Blackwell Press, 2004.

71

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, Basic Books New York, 1973, 2000.

72

Marvin A. Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, 1999, Routledge.

Paul Schimmel, Kristine Stiles, Russell Ferguson editors: Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 by Museum of 73

60

Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

74

For context of the work, see David Medalla in conversation with Gavin Jantjes in Gavin Jantjes, (ed.) in association with Rohini Malik, Steve Bury, and Gilane Tawadros, A Fruitful Incoherence: Dialogues with Artists on Internationalism. London: Institute of international Visual Arts, 1998, p.94-109.

Alexandra Munroe: Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, Harry N Abrams; NY 1994.

75

Helena Konterova,, The Wound as Sign: An Encounter with Gina Pane, Flash Art (Milan) , 92-93, (October- November 1979), p. 36-37. Discussion on the modern object and body’s transformation into the postmodern sign: Jon Erickson: Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art, and Poetry, University of Michigan Press, 1995.

76

Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley, University of California Press, Los Angeles and Berkeley 1993.

77

78

Antonin Artaud, The theatre and its double, Tr. Victor Corti, Calder, London, 1970.

Peter Bürger's 1974 classic text, Theory of the Avant-Garde, responded to Renato Poggioli's work of the same title. He found Poggioli excessively optimistic of conjunctions between political and aesthetic avant-garde movements and distinguishes quite sharply between modernism’s selfprotective gesture, and what he terms the historical or revolutionary avantgarde. Peter Bürger: Theory of the Avant-Garde, Tr, Michael Shaw University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Murphy responded to critics of post-modernism’s lack of direct political and ideological engagement, re-linking life and art: Richard Murphy, Theorising the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity, , Cambridge University Press, 1999.

79

80

Jacques Derrida, Eric Prenowitz (Translator) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, University Of Chicago Press 1998.

81

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, (1920) W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.

Lucy Lippard,: Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 (NY: Praeger, 1973), vii 82

Their opinions based on personal conversations with the artists. For details of their works see: Hugh Mulholland (ed) Knot Naught: Alastair MacLennan A Retrospective, catalogue published by Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, 2003.

Idit Porat: Adina Bar-On, Performance Artist, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House Ltd & Herzliya Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, 2001.

83

84

See 'Art and Money', in Robert Hughes Nothing if Not Critical: Selected

61

Essays on Art and Artists, New York, Penguin,1990, p.387-404.

85

Mark Seltzer: Bodies and Machines, Routledge, NY, 1992, p 136.

86

For discussions concerning the art world see in Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen (ed.) : Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology, Blackwell, 2004 Arthur Danto: The Art World, p.27-34 and George Dickie: The New Institutional Theory of Art, p.47-54.

87

Schneider’s book is pitched on feminist theory and performance art, which artists on the margins can identify with. Rebecca Schneider, The explicit body in performance, London, New York : Routledge, 1997, p 1-7.

Without doubt art and culture are complex and contested terms to define depending on contexts, philosophical inclinations, which is beyond the scope here. Michael Fried’s critique of art’s “degeneration as it approaches theater” called for recuperation of effective evaluation: Michael Fried: Art and Objecthood University of Chicago Press, 1998, Terry Eagleton’s Idea of Culture, Blackwell, 2000 re-examines culture’s complex roots and argued to retrieve its relation to nature towards a ‘human nature’ as opposed to the postmodern non-naturalistic perspectives. Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial perspectives appealed for tolerance and asserts the minority’s rights to narrate and be represented in an international platform: Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London ; New York: Routledge, 1994; Introduction: Narrating the Nation in Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration. London ; New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 1-7 88

89

Lee Wen, ed.: The Future of Imagination 3, Catalog, Singapore, 2006.

Acciones en Ruta, Festival Internacional de Arte Acciones y Performance Acciones en ruta. Intervencion en la Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico City, June 2003.

90

91

Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, W. W. Norton & Company; Rev/Expd edition 1996, p.142-172. Also see Neil Gerlach: The Genetic Imaginary, University of Toronto, 2004, p. 36.

92

The body as a natural site for cultural representation as subject is reclaimed from postmodernism’s contradictions in Terry Eagleton: The Illusions of Postmodernism, Blackwell Publishers, 1996, p.70-77. For a thorough study of the body as an axis of sociological analysis see Bryan S Turner: The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory, Sage Publications, London Thousand Oaks, Calif. 1984/1996. For a critique of narcissistic tendencies in consumer culture see: Christopher Lasch: The Culture of Narcissism.

American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. W.W. Norton: London, 1991. On realism’s use of photographic document as decentred representation of the idealized body and anti-repressive performance see: John Roberts, The Art of Interruption, Manchester University Press, 1998, p.

172-183. Concerning repetition in performance and representation see

62

Anthony Howell: Mimicry and Repetition in Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to its Theory and Practice, Routledge Harwood Contemporary Theatre Studies, 1999, p. 29-44.

93

Yves Klein, Selected Writings, 1928-1962, Tate Gallery Publications, 1974.

For a postmodern, feminist critique: Jane Blocker : What the Body Cost: Desire History and Performance, University of Minnesota, 2004, p.55-95.

94

Amelia Jones: Body Art/ Performing the Subject. University of Minnesota Press 1998, p. 86-100.

The list includes: (1) provocative, unconventional, often assaultive interventionist or performance stance; (2) opposition to culture’s commodification of art; (3) a multimedia texture, drawing for its materials not only upon the live bodies of the performers but upon media images, television monitors, projected images, film poetry, autobiographical material, narrative, dance, architecture, and music; (4) an interest in the principles of collage, assemblage, and simultaneity; (5) an interest in using “found” as well as “made” materials; (6) heavy reliance upon unusual juxtapositions of incongruous, seemingly unrelated images; (7) an interest in the theories of play that we discussed earlier [Huizinga and Caillois], including parody, joke, breaking of rules, and whimsical or strident disruption of surfaces; and (8) open-endedness or undecidability of form.” Carol Simpson Stern, Bruce Henderson: Performance: Texts and Contexts, New York, Longman, 1993. p.382-3. Quoted in Marvin A. Carlson : Performance: A Critical Introduction, Routledge; 1999, p.80.

95

Amelia Jones, Body Art/ Performing the Subject. 1998 University of Minnesota Press.

Jones, Amelia and Stephenson, Andrew (ed.) Performing the Body/ Performing the text, 1999, London, NY Routledge.

RoseLee Goldberg, “Be my mirror”, Don’t Call It Performance catalogue 2004 El Museo del Barrio New York.

96

“Open ends” – A documentation exhibition of performance art in Singapore, 2001, The Substation. Amanda Heng, Jason Lim and myself initiated the project.

97

98

Russell, Storer, ed.: Situation: Collaborations, Collectives & Artist Networks from Sydney, Singapore and Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2005.

99

Ray Langenbach, The Performative Indoctrination Model: Colonialism without tears, 3. Werkleitz Biennale “subfiction”, 1998 http://www.werkleitz.de/events/biennale1998/text/cat/langenbachE.html 100

Charles Lim and Woon Tien Wei, alpha 3.8: translocation, Emerging Artists/ Emerging Medium_01, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota http://www.tsunamii.net/

63

http://www.walkerart.org/archive/E/9D73994CD5CB9E846139.htm 101

Bernd Behr, Théâtre du Vide, 2001, Video, in . Guo Liang, And we took ourselves out of our hands (In search of the Miraculous), exhibition text, P-10, Singapore, October 2005 102

Koh Nguang How, Errata: Page 71, Plate 47. Image caption. Change Year: 1950 to Year: 1959; Reported September 2004, P-10, Singapore September 2005.

103

Lee Weng Choy, Anwar Sadali: "Lim Tzay Chuen Makes a Proposition", Broadsheet, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2004, p.33-34. Lee Weng Choy: “ The Public Remainder: Singapore Goes to Venice, Beinnale Comes to Singapore.”

Broadsheet, Vol. 34, No. 2, 2005, p.87-88.

104

Rusell Storer, Ho Tzu Nyen:4 X 4, Broadsheet BS Vol. 35 No1, 2006, p.42,43 105

Dana Lam, Let's Chat - after Amanda Heng by exhibition at The Substation Gallery, December 2005; a re-presentation of Amanda Heng's Let's Chat, first presented at The Substation Gallery in October 1996 and subsequently, in Gedung BPI-ITB, Bandung, Indonesia (1998), the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and Kawabata Shopping Mall (1999) and the Singapore Art Museum (2000).

Khairuddin Hori and Gene Sha Rudyn, Die Faustus Die!, The Substation Façade, 2-4 November 2001. http://diefaustus.tripod.com/index.html 106

107

Juliana Yasin, et al, “Fusion Strength 2001”, Plastique Kinetic Worms, Singapore, 26 April to 13 May 2001. http://jy1970.tripod.com/id1.html 108

Russell, Storer, ed.: Situation: Collaborations, Collectives & Artist Networks from Sydney, Singapore and Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2005.

See archives in the Artists Village website: http://www.tav.org.sg/Archives.htm Other offshoots art initiatives which facilitates network, research, residencies and exhibitions started by former Artists Village members includes, Plastique Kinetic Worms, an artists run spaces started by Yvonne Lee and Vincent Leow, and p-10 started by Woon Tien Wei and Jennifer Teo. Jeremy Hiah and Lina Adam started “Your Mother Gallery” as art space, “rock and roll bar” and meeting place for artists in their living room.

PKW website: http://www.pkworms.org.sg/, p-10 website: http://www.p-10.org/ Your MOTHER Gallery website: http://www.geocities.com/yourmothergallery/ 109

Lee Wen, ed.: The Future of Imagination 3, Catalog, Singapore, 2006

110

Richard Martel, ed. Art Action 1958-1998, Quebec, Inter/editeur, (Editions intervention) 2001.

111

Websites: http://www.seedamm-kultur.ch/; http://www.perforum.ch/

64 List of figures: 1. Tang Da Wu, They Poach the Rhino, Chop Off his Horn And Make this Drink, Performance at National Museum Art Gallery, Singapore, 1989.

Photo: Koh Nguang How …………………………………………………….67 2. Tang Da Wu, Tiger’s Whip, Performance at People’s Park, Chinatown, Singapore, 1991. Photo: Koh Nguang How. ………….……………………….68 3. Nauman, Bruce, Image from Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk),1968. videotape, black and white, sound, 60 min. repeated continuously, from Bruce Nauman Exhibition Catalogue, Distributed Art Publishers, in association with Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1994. p. 136. …………………………..…….69 4. Nauman, Bruce, Performance Corridor, 1969 from Bruce Nauman Exhibition Catalogue, Distributed Art Publishers, in association with Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1992. p. 27. Photo by Peter Moore..……………….70 5. Tehching Hsieh: One Year Performance-Art Documents, 1978-1999 (2000) DVD-ROM ………………………………………………………………………....71 6. Image of installation, Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body 1969-1973, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2004. Photo: Robin Holland.………………….72 7. Abramovic, Marina, The Lovers (Seated Figure) 1988; Published in 1996 Color photograph with unique drawing on lower margin framed: 28 3/4 x 27 inches, Sean Kelly Gallery website: http://www.skny.com/ Downloaded on 27 April 2006. …………………………………………………..73 8. Abramovic, Marina, Seven Easy Pieces, 2005, View of Abramovic performing Valie Export’s Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, November 11, 2005. Photo: Kathyrn Carr.

Artforum January 2006, pg.55……………………………………………..…….74 9. MTTA (M. River & T.Whid Art Associates), 1 YEAR PERFORMANCE VIDEO (aka samHsiehUpdate) 2004 http://www.turbulence.org/Works/1year/performancevideo.php………….…75 10. Newman, Hayley, Meditation on Gender Difference, 1996, Lexham Gardens, London. Photo: Christina Lamb, Color C-Type print 40 X 26.7 cm.

Newman, Hayley, Aaron Williamson, “Hayley Newman Performancemania”, Matt’s Gallery, 2001. pg. 49..………..…………….………………………….….76

65 11. S. Chandrasekaran, Kala Chakra (Wheel of Time), Performance, 1991, http://scholars.nus.edu/landow/post/singapore/arts/mixed/chandrasekaran/ind ex.html………………………………………………………………………………77 12. Zhang Huan, 12 Square Meters, Performance, 1994, Beijing China, ©Zhang Huan. Made Possible by Zhang Huan Studio. http://www.zhanghuan.com/12SquareMeters.htm……….…………………….78 13. Lee Wen, Journey of a yellow man, Performance, 1992, London, England.

Photo: Rosa Sanchez…………………………………………………….……….79 14. Lee Wen, Neo-Baba, Installation and Performance, 1995, Tokyo, Japan Photo: Satoko Sukenari……………………………………………..…………….80 15. Lee Wen, Ghosts Stories, Performance, 1995, Tokyo, Japan. Photo: Raiji Kuroda……………………………………………………..………………………..81 16. David Medalla, A Stitch in Time, 1968-72, Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, London, from Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Japanese Edition 1999, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo p.214………………...….82 17. Genpei Akasegawa, One Thousand Yen Note Trial – Catalogue of Seized Works, 1967, Courtesy of Nagoya City Museum, from Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Japanese Edition 1999, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo………………………………………………………….83 18. Gina Pane, Les Corps Presenti, Photodocumentation of performance (23 pieces), 1975, Collection Anne Marchand, Museum moderner Kunst Stifung Ludwig, Vienna, from Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Japanese Edition 1999, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo…………………………………….84 19. Lee Wen, Self-Portrait, Self-portrait Performativ, langaut, Golberode, Dresden, Germany, October 2005, Photo, Kai Lam……………………………85 20. Lee Wen, Anthropometry Revision 1, Digital Lamda Print, 2006, 101.6 cm X 142.24 cm…………………...………...86 21. Lee Wen, Anthropometry Revision 2, Digital Lamda Print, 2006 Tryptich, 101.6cm X 101.6 cm each..………………….……………...….…...87 22. Lee Wen, Stills from Anthropometry Revision 3, DVD 32 secs video loop., NTSC, 2006 ..………………………………………………………………………88 23. Yves Klein, Untitled Anthropometry (ANT 160), 1960, Yves Klein Archives, Paris. from Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979

by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Japanese Edition 1999 Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo p.34………………………………….….89

66

24. Yves Klein, Rehearsal. Practice canvas later cut out into several paintings, 1960 from Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979

by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Japanese Edition 1999, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo p.34…..…………………………………89 25. Yves Klein, “The Living Paintbrushes”, 5 June 1960, from Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Japanese Edition 1999 Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo p.32…………………….……………………………..90 26. Yves Klein, Anthropometries et Symphonie Monoton, exhibition at the Galerie Internationale d’art competition,Rue Saint-Honore, Paris, 9 March 1960 from Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979

by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Japanese Edition 1999, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo p.200…………………………………….90

67

Figure.1 Tang Da Wu, They Poach the Rhino, Chop Off his Horn And Make this Drink, Performance at National Museum Art Gallery, Singapore, 1989.

Photography by Koh Nguang How.

68

Figure.2 Tang Da Wu, Tiger’s Whip, Performance at People’s Park, Chinatown, Singapore, 1991. Photography by Koh Nguang How.

69

Figure 3. Nauman, Bruce, Image from Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), videotape, black and white, sound, 60 min. repeated continuously, from Bruce Nauman Exhibition Catalogue, Distributed Art Publishers, in association with Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1994. p. 136.

70

Figure 4. Nauman, Bruce, Performance Corridor, 1968-70 Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum, New York. From Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Japanese Edition 1999, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo p.90.

71

Figure. 5, Tehching Hsieh: One Year Performance-Art Documents, 1978-1999 (2000) DVD-ROM

72

Figure 6. Image of installation, Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body 1969-1973, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2004. Photo: Robin Holland.

73

Figure. 7. Abramovic, Marina, The Lovers (Seated Figure) 1988; Published in 1996 Color photograph with unique drawing on lower margin framed: 28 3/4 x 27 inches Sean Kelly Gallery website: http://www.skny.com/ downloaded on April 27, 2006

74

Figure 8. Abramovic, Marina, Seven Easy Pieces, 2005, View of Abramovic performing Valie Export’s Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, November 11, 2005. Photo: Kathyrn Carr.

Artforum January 2006, pg. 55.

75

Figure 9. MTTA (M. River & T.Whid Art Associates), 1 YEAR PERFORMANCE VIDEO (aka samHsiehUpdate) 2004 http://www.turbulence.org/Works/1year/performancevideo.php downloaded on June 8, 2006

76

Figure. 10. Newman, Hayley, Meditation on Gender Difference, 1996, Lexham Gardens, London. Photo: Christina Lamb, Color C-Type print 40 X 26.7 cm.

Newman, Hayley, Aaron Williamson, “Hayley Newman Performancemania”, Matt’s Gallery, 2001. pg. 49.

77

Figure 11.

S. Chandrasekaran, Kala Chakra (Wheel of Time), Performance, 1991, http://scholars.nus.edu/landow/post/singapore/arts/mixed/chandrasekaran/ind ex.html

78

Figure 12.

Zhang Huan, 12 Square Meters, Performance, 1994, Beijing China, ŠZhang Huan. Made Possible by Zhang Huan Studio. http://www.zhanghuan.com/12SquareMeters.htm

79

Figure 13.

Lee Wen, Journey of a yellow man, Performance, 1992, London, England,

80

Figure 14. Lee Wen, Neo-Baba, Installation and Performance, 1995, Tokyo, Japan.

81

Figure 15. Lee Wen, Ghosts Stories, Performance, 1995, Tokyo, Japan.

82

Figure 16.

David Medalla, A Stitch in Time, 1968-72, Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, London, from Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Japanese Edition 1999, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo p.214.

83

Figure 17.

Genpei Akasegawa, One Thousand Yen Note Trial – Catalogue of Seized Works, 1967, Courtesy of Nagoya City Museum, from Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Japanese Edition 1999, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo p.150

84

Figure 18. Gina Pane, Les Corps Presenti, Photodocumentation of performance (top, detail) (bottom, 23 pieces), 1975, Collection Anne Marchand, Museum moderner Kunst Stifung Ludwig, Vienna, from Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. p.99.

85

Figure 19.

Lee Wen, Self-Portrait, Self-portrait Performativ, langaut, Golberode, Dresden, Germany, October 2005.

86

Figure. 20 Lee Wen, Anthropometry Revision 1, Digital Lamda Print , 2006, 101.6 cm X 142.24 cm

Digital Lamda Print , 2006, 101.6 cm X 101.6 cm

Lee Wen, Anthropometry Revision 2,Tryptich,

Figure. 21.

87

88

Figure 22.

Lee Wen, Stills from Anthropometry Revision 3, DVD 32 secs video loop., NTSC, 2006

89

Figure.23 Yves Klein, Untitled Anthropometry (ANT 160), 1960 Yves Klein Archives, Paris. from Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Japanese Edition 1999 Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo p.34.

Figure 24.

Yves Klein, Rehearsal. Practice canvas later cut out into several paintings, 1960 from Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Japanese Edition 1999, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo p.34.

90

Figure.25 Yves Klein, “The Living Paintbrushes”, 5 June 1960. from Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Japanese Edition 1999 Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo p.32.

Figure.26 Yves Klein, Anthropometries et Symphonie Monoton, 9 March 1960 from Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Japanese Edition 1999 Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo p.200.

91

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Bergson, Henri : Laughter : an essay on the meaning of the comic, translated from the French by Cloudesley Bereton and Fred Rothwell.Kobenhavn : Green Integer, 1998.

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Nation and Narration. London; New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 1-7 Blocker, Jane : What the Body Cost: Desire History and Performance, University of Minnesota Press, 2004 Bradley, Linda: Writing Horror and the Body, Greenwood Press, 1996.

Buchloh, Benjamin H.D.: Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. MIT Press, 2001.

Bürger, Peter, Translated by Michael Shaw : Theory of the Avant-Garde, University of Minnesota Press, 1984 Buren, Daniel : “Function of the Studio” [1971], October 10 (Fall 1979): 51-58.

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Carlson, Marvin A.: Performance: A Critical Introduction, Routledge; 1999.

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Derrida, Jacques, Eric Prenowitz (Translator) Archive Fever : A Freudian Impression, University Of Chicago Press, 1998.

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Goldberg RoseLee; “Be my mirror”, Don’t Call It Performance catalogue El Museo del Barrio New York 2004.

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Golinske, Hans Gunter, The Body as Intercultural Medium of Communication On the Spiritual Background to the Art of Zhang Huan, Zhang Huan, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hatje Cantz 2003.

Guo Liang, And we took ourselves out of our hands (In search of the Miraculous), exhibition text, P-10, Singapore, October 2005 Gould, Stephen Jay: The Mismeasure of Man, W. W. Norton & Company; Rev/Expd edition 1996 Guerin, Wilfred L., Jeanne C Reesman, Earle G Labor, John R Willingham, Lee Morgan (authors) : A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, Oxford University Press US, 2005 Gupta, Anthea Fraser : The Step-tongue: Children's English in Singapore.

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93 Hall, Stuart: Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. J. Rutherford, ed. Pp. 222-237. London: Lawrence and Wishart.1990.

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Ho Tzu Nyen, Chapter Four: Four Suits – Of Memes and Men, The Substation Magazine, (internet magazine) posted : 16 September 2005. http://www.substation.org/magazine/issue02/ft_4suits.html Howell, Anthony: Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to its Theory and Practice, Routledge Harwood Contemporary Theatre Studies, 1999.

Hughes, Robert: Nothing if Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists, New York, Penguin,1990/1992.

Johnston, Jill, Tehching Hsieh: Art's Willing Captive, Art in America, Sept, 2001.

Jalving, Camilla: Inventing reality. On truth and lies in the work of Hayley Newman, in Rune Gade, Anne Jerslev (ed.), Performative Realism: Interdisciplinary Studies in Art And Media, Museum Tusculanum 2005.

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Jones, Amelia: Body Art/ Performing the Subject. University of Minnesota Press 1998.

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94 Krauss Rosalind, E. : The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT press 1986.

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“Icons”, works by S.Chandrasekaran, 11-18 January 1996, exhibition catalogue, The Gallery Fort Canning Centre.

“Open Ends” – A documentation exhibition of performance art in Singapore, 2001, The Substation