Joo Choon Lin: Dance in the Destruction Dance, Singapore Art Museum

DANCE IN THE DESTRUCTION DANCE MATERIAL INTELLIGENCE

Performance documentation of pEARs ' --- --- --- ' in §pring at FOGSTAND Gallery & Studio, USA, 2018.

Performance documentation of pEARs ' --- --- --- ' in §pring at FOGSTAND Gallery & Studio, USA, 2018.

DANCE IN THE DESTRUCTION DANCE

Reading Joo Choon Lin’s theatrical performance scripts for the first time, I was struck by how they lacked narrativity. The writing was radically discontinuous, seemingly bereft of linearity or a stable, easily identifiable context. Textures of repetition and permutation, visualised through a multitude of devices such as line breaks, strikethroughs and frequent dashes, were replete in Joo’s writings, producing a back-and-forth pattern of negation and contradiction, doing and undoing. The spatial elements of the page became almost like a sheet or screen on which things register, the execution of text more like drawing than writing. pEARs ' --- --- --- ' in §pring is a particular highlight in Joo’s writerly oeuvre. First performed theatrically in 2018 and presented again in this show, it marked a culmination of Joo’s thinking around the picturing of things as activity, event, process and movement. Indeed, when looking across the artist’s performances, the radical inscription of material and temporal registers through language, writing and object-making have been constant parallel pursuits. Dance in the Destruction Dance presents the dynamic between writing and object-making through the format of performance installation. It traces this convergence between installation and performance by bringing together a range of works produced in the last 15 years including early experiments with qualities inherent in materials, as tools for exploring the metamorphosis between forms. For instance, an interactive wishing pond filled with synthetic goo in her 2012 installation I Only Make Friends With Money is recreated for Dance in the Destruction Dance. Visitors are invited to throw in coins and watch as the coins are ingested by the slime-like substance a play on the viscous properties of the non-Newtonian1 fluid to demonstrate the idea of shapeshifting forms. Joo’s “object sculptures” or freestanding assemblage works, combining myriad hardware parts and handcrafted composite materials that have taken on increasingly variegated shapes, forms and configurations, conceived for interactivity, are also featured. From 2016, movement became an increasingly integral part of Joo’s work as the object sculptures became imbricated in sprawling performance installation worlds,

1 Fluids with non-Newtonian properties are characterised by their ability to change in viscosity due to pressure. Physical manipulations such as squeezing, stirring or agitation can change how they flow.

Stills from Come Out and Play! at 8Q, Singapore Art Museum, 2009.

beginning with Abdominal BASS Cavern Of A Stricken HEART performed in 2016 at Gillman Barracks, Singapore and FOGSTAND Gallery & Studio, Hualien, Taiwan. For this, performers took to outdoor installation spaces, weaving ritual-like movements of procession and veneration to bring the object sculptures into dialogue with the audience. Set to a pulsating rhythm of moving lights and low-frequency drum sounds, the performance spaces were transformed into liminal sites of ritual as a backdrop for the invocation and transformation of the object sculptures. The Blinking Organism X You SPLEEN Me' Round: Operation 2 - Mutation (2017) at the concourse of the Esplanade, Singapore continued the employment of performance installation by Joo to affect the transmutation of form. Filling the concourse space with a range of object sculptures, the installation was articulated by its interaction with a group of performers their probing, inspecting and manipulation generating new sets of meanings for the object sculptures.

Building upon the performance installation as a space for perception and revelation, Joo subsequently expanded her repertoire of object sculptures, focusing on the structure of her works in performance. Indeed, all the object sculptures presented in Dance in the Destruction Dance have their origins in the artist’s “film objects” interactive sculptures that can be reconstituted and moved around which serve as structural determinants in the performance installation. In an exuberant reprise of the vitrine-like film objects that were highlights in her earlier performance installations, Joo generates three new versions, which are inserted with large resin sheets or extensible via long, accordion-like acrylic pieces, for this exhibition. Though recognisably freestanding, the film objects are dense with theatrical accretion: steel bands, hinges and other assembly hardware holding together a bricolage of aluminium or acrylic jointed sheets that are mounted on commercial collapsible backdrop frame stands or hung from chains. What appears as a solid mass in one instance may fragment into a projection surface upon interaction. Joo’s engagement with elements of theatrical production produces heightened sensorial and corporeal encounters with her work, with lighting, sound, and backdrop forming the scenography within which the object sculptures reside. Programmed spotlights and projections are introduced to create changing vistas of light and shadow, and original soundtracks composed by musician and sound artist Joe Ng are looped during the theatrical performance. In this way, what is to be derived from the object is no longer strictly located within it but perhaps more importantly conveyed by the adding, subtracting, substituting and reworking of its situation and comprehension. This process of rethinking the idea of an “inherent object” has formed the basis for much of Joo’s practice, with its ability to invoke the beholder as part of the situation in which objecthood is established and on which that objecthood at least partly depends. Her object sculptures are intrinsically flexible and portable, carrying with them an attitude, as the artist calls it, of “reflecting a reality that is both manifest and un-manifest at the same time.”2 As such, her work is generally conceived as an occurrence or a continuously unfolding experience far more apropos that of sequences in a stop motion

2 Joo Choon Lin, email conversation with the author, May, 2022.

Still from Abdominal BASS Cavern Of A Stricken HEART, 2016.

CHOON LIN: DANCE IN

animation, incorporating a sense of temporality into the objects as well as allowing interactions with their beholder to mould the work. While Joo regularly brings a paradigmatically theatrical approach to her works, the designs of her installations are absent of fixed or omniscient vantage points. The performance installations are consistently open-ended, fragmented and ambiguous environments in which the relations between viewer, artwork, performer and site are continually renegotiated.

A Continuous Present Time

This sense of dislocation and disorientation achieved through a combination of methodologies assumes greater significance in the re-staging of her 2018 theatrical performance pEARs ' --- --- --- ' in §pring for Dance in the Destruction Dance. Joo’s theatrical plays have been highly choreographed events that emphasise the works in her installation as “instruments” or “tools” to be manifested over a period of time. For Dance in the Destruction Dance, Joo once again explores the staging of performances to drive activation of the works. Occurring at specified periods of the exhibition, the activations are carefully scripted and performed, employing the use of literary devices like repetition and onomatopoeia or contradictory speech patterns to produce sensory effects and vivid imagery in sight and sound. Yet Joo also allows for free-ranging interactions to take place between the actors and the works depending on their interpretation of the script. The script drafted by Joo, which includes a repertoire of utterances and action cues, presents a window into the artist’s world built around the phenomenology of audition and perception. The use of spoken and performed language, its mediation by the human sensorium and eventual transmission to enact a transformation in the essence of the object, reflect the complexities of the perception through the simple methods of theatre and play.

Joo’s use of theatrical play to bring about encounters with her works reflects her preoccupation with “freeing language from its functionality”3 through an exploration of its various forms: as mathematical formulas, symbols or encoded messages in her works. Joo often zooms in on her play with language and scripts, as conjuring “a continuous present time.”4 The script of the 2018 version of pEARs ' --- --- --- ' in §pring, for example, comprised poetic elements to interpose sensations of spatial attenuation and desynchronisations among sound and image. The work emphasised non-linearity through the deployment of sound devices like repetition and onomatopoeia to convey a sense of back-and-forth motion or simultaneity, while the use of form such as enjambments to break lines up unexpectedly disrupted notions of linearity. The script’s reading encouraged a play on sound vibration and resonance and its direct effect on matter. “It vibrates to break free from bounded reality and to shift out of normal functionality,” described Joo. “Into a world of its own infinity.”5

This interest in picturing things—as activity, event, process, and movement is literalised in Joo’s creation of immersive performance installations as settings for her work, an approach that has recurred in her work

3 Joo Choon Lin, conversation with author and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa on Google Docs, August, 2022.

4 Joo Choon Lin, email conversation with the author, May, 2022.

5 Joo Choon Lin, conversation with author and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa on Google Docs, September, 2022.

Performance documentation of The Blinking Organism X You SPLEEN Me' Round: Operation 2 - Mutation at The Esplanade Concourse, Singapore, 2017.

since 2016. As the work’s substance lies in its migrations among forms, Joo sees performance installations as spaces of communication that generate an encounter and involvement with her propositions. Conceptualised as an extension of her sculptural activities, performance installation has provided a central tableau of script, moving image, props, lighting and sound for the activation of her works. Joo’s The Blinking Organism X You SPLEEN Me' Round: Operation 2 - Mutation (2017) installed on the

steps of the concourse of the Esplanade, Singapore brought together film objects, full-height acrylic banners, multimedia installations and a live performance. The exhibition occupied one continuous space, offering Joo a chance to showcase not only the range of her making, but also the cohesiveness among the elements. The installation organised sightlines among the works and considered the visual alignments and repetitions of themes and images for visitors moving through the space. Likewise, its soundscape was designed to permeate the concourse, guiding visitors to experience the installation as immersive scenography. The design thus created a unified exhibition that reflected a multiplicity of interconnections among Joo’s works, perceptually as well as thematically. This dynamic correspondence is furthered in Dance in the Destruction Dance as Joo attempts to render the ephemerality of performance into video. Taking the form of multimedia environmental projections in the installation space, the three video projections do not document the performances but rather translate their ideas into, specifically, moving images. For instance, Joo gathers action camera footage of the theatrical performances, interposing them with close-up shots of the actors’ hands and stop-motion animation clips of the film objects, among other materials. In this sense, the videos neither document the performances nor represent them. Instead, Joo deliberately reconfigures the performance elements while accounting for the spatial and temporal conditions in which audiences may encounter her work.

By enabling viewers to experience those interconnections within the exhibition space, The Blinking Organism X You SPLEEN Me' Round: Operation 2 - Mutation (2017) conveyed a fundamental characteristic of Joo’s art. Throughout her practice, Joo has developed ideas across mediums of animation and sculpture, cultivating transformations among motifs as they traverse two and three dimensions, still and moving images. Her integration of work in various modalities including performance, film, video, drawing, sculpture, narrative and installation produces a new form, which urges her audiences to open new synapses and alters ideas of what the component forms can do. In addition, Joo’s continuous refashioning of various works in different forms and for different contexts performances may become singlechannel videos or multimedia installations, or vice versa—enables her works to resist art historical tendencies to understand individual artworks as bound to a singular form or a moment in time. Instead, they eschew divisions by medium or chronology, facilitating a fluid exchange of information across Joo’s works over the course of time.

Joo’s use of performance installation continues to be central to Dance in the Destruction Dance. Presenting new iterations of past works including I Only Make Friends With Money (2012/2023), Glue Your Eyelids Together

Performance documentation of pEARs ' ----- --- ' in §pring at FOGSTAND Gallery & Studio, USA, 2018.

(2017/2023), Beatific Perfume (2020 – 2023) and pEARs ' --- --- --- ' in §pring (2018/2023), Joo works back and forth between performance and installation to develop the work’s content and its complementary forms in tandem with one another. Through this continuous process of drafting and revising, the works evolve in both their forms and presentations, affording them new lives within the present. Again, central to the theatrical performance are Joo’s meticulously written scripts that direct the transitions and transmutations of her work. Following the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with linguistics, her script for Dance in the Destruction Dance remains firmly wedded to writing that stretches out and opens a space for the sonorous. The performance of the script sets up a twofold system of events: physical action cues that enact literal mobilisation of the works, and phonetic devices that play with texture and tonality of reading to test the visceral effect of sound. Joo describes, “Language becomes an ongoing process that is reverberating, is an activity and movement.”6 The use of sound as vibration and resonance that penetrates and its profound effect on beings and things harks back to chants and mantras in spiritual practice for healing or accessing altered states of reality and transpersonal consciousness. Each work is regarded as possessing a particular and unique frequency, and the actors as carriers or “transmitters” of frequency. “I think of [the actors] as creating a perpetual oscillation between the sculpture and the audience,” Joo continues, “like the wingbeat of bees that vibrate to cause the release of pollen.” 7 The sonication generated through the reading of the script travels through the actors’ bodies to the objects, speeding up their dissolution, priming them for transmutation.

Provisionality of Form

Discussions around the artist’s formal approach as centred around a confrontation between consciousness and reality have been largely developed through the engagement with metaphysics and its links with the image. Theorists of metaphysics highlight that consciousness or, more generally, mental activity is correlated to the behaviour of the material brain and plays a role in our perception of ontologically stable entities in space. Likewise, belief in “dualaspect” frameworks of thinking like that of Cartesian philosophy also considers mental and material domains of reality as aspects, or manifestations, of one underlying reality.8 The pair formed by consciousness and world or subject and object appears to be unravelling, opening onto other types of relationships. The reception of Joo’s work reflects something of this conviction in the power of an expanded metaphysicality of objects connected to a dynamic sense of being as becoming or occurrence.

Joo’s partaking in this zeitgeist brings into view the lesser explored dimensions of perception and phenomena in contemporary art, and in writings

6 Joo Choon Lin, conversation with author and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa on Google Docs, August, 2022.

7 Joo Choon Lin, conversation with the author, November, 2022.

8 Harald Atmanspacher, “Quantum Approaches to Consciousness,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, April 16, 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-consciousness/#MindMattDualAspe.

Still from animated video for pEARs ' --- --- --- ' in §pring, 2018.

around her practice. Philosophically and spiritually infused views on the nature of being recur in conversations with the artist, who has expressed a strong desire to connect with principal tenets of metaphysics and mysticism. Specifically, Joo’s strategies of making and unmaking suggest a dynamic sense occurrence that alludes to Advaita Vedānta, a school of philosophy for which the belief in only one conscious reality, Brahman, has shaped major metaphysical concepts. Philosophical systems that query the production of appearance of this world are fitting objects of fascination for the artist who considers the provisionality of form in her own work. It is important to note, however, that to invoke Advaita is not to ground the artist in orthodox doctrinal pronouncements. Rather, it is to expand on the consciousness manifested through particular material complex initiated by the artist and that exists alongside philosophical systems of metaphysics.

“I’m interested in making works that are ‘instruments’ or ‘tools’, ready to be activated,” Joo continues, “like a mantra or yantra—revelatory symbols of cosmic truth.”9 Advaita metaphysics offers a key concept to describe the generous and often dominant place that the artist gives to encounters between her film objects and the audience. Advaita’s illustration of borrowed existence, or the naming of objects and designation of their form and functionality as merely a dependent reality, has certain symmetries with the artist’s own exploration in the migration among forms, or “transitions” of her film objects between shape, colour, movement, and use. Analogies like that of the clay pot have been used to illustrate borrowed existence, or the naming of objects and designation of their form and functionality as merely a dependent reality or adhyāsa (superimposition): Clay may be shaped into new names and forms, from a lump to a pot to a plate. With each new form, the former is destroyed, yet the clay continues through each. Foundational existence is thus transitive, lending existence to objects, like the clay to each of its forms.10 This position offers an approach that repudiates familiar conceptions of presence and existence, introducing instead a formal and conceptual pliability that may inform methodologies of artistic production. While Vedantic thought may offer easy metaphors for illustrating Joo’s ontological approaches, the point of side-stepping such language is not to demystify the works or the fascination they produce, but rather, to suggest that their appeal may be more instinctive and autobiographical. The techniques that constitute Joo’s world making and construction of reality are “an extension of [her] consciousness.”11 Her compositional method entails re-arrangement, emphasising a modularity and temporality that provides a powerful metaphor for the artist’s desire to go beyond thresholds of consciousness; “All existence is timeless, that is, confined to a continuous present time.” Joo continues, “our linear sense of time and the material world is a projection of the mind and the senses.”12 From silkscreen prints on water to balloon sculptures and objects held

9 Joo Choon Lin, email conversation with the author, November, 2022.

10 Harald Atmanspacher, “Quantum Approaches to Consciousness,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, April 16, 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-consciousness/#MindMattDualAspe.

11 Joo Choon Lin, conversation with author and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa on Google Docs, September, 2022.

12 Joo Choon Lin, email conversation with the author, November, 2022.

Installation view of pEARs ' ----- --- ' in §pring at FOGSTAND Gallery & Studio, USA, 2018.

together with a host of assembly hardware, Joo’s works are often conceived to suggest the transmutability of form. Likewise, her film objects are protean, suggested by the presence of compositional passepartouts like latches, hinges, collapsible legs, and casters. Equally important is how audiences are invited to apprehend the works through the duration and experience of theatrical performance. In the performance, we hear propositions being uttered and then rejected, as the object sculptures are repeatedly expanded and collapsed, and pushed and pulled against. A sense of temporality, of time both passing and to come, simultaneously approaching and receding, is repeated through the performance, offering an experience of reality as activity, event, process and movement. This incorporation of activation within the work has a strong grounding in Joo’s performance installations, which evolved from controlled observations of material change, often involving video documentation, into more live situations, such as theatrical plays.

Where the interpretability of Joo’s work remains open ended, its formal language is precise. Although her work has changed over the years in terms of scale and types of materials, an aesthetic of bricolage has always been present. Both in the choice of objects and in the compositions into which they are merged, there exists a repeating lexicon of common materials, jointed and flexible hardware, and origami-type construction that serve as the objects’ primary unifier the carrier of logic to the otherwise illogical. In her ability to construct formal connections and extensions among preexisting things, Joo is a skilled manipulator of “do-ityourself” worldmaking. Whereas an unusual juxtaposition in the artist’s work may on one hand elicit a feeling of instability, any uncertainties are ultimately countered by the formal cohesion among the parts when they are activated, which convinces us that they are created for being in motion or as an occurrence. Likewise, small gestures like the discarding of transparency film scripts on the floor after reading symbolise a moving stream of consciousness that passes through our mind.

In the past decade, Joo’s practice has been framed as a highly arithmetic process engaging with concepts of quantum physics, geometry and mathematical movements enclosing the work in a discourse that translates fluidly across “global” art speak. But little of this is evident or significant for the viewer’s experience, which is primarily optical and corporeal, and perceptual and visceral. In that sense, the allure of Joo’s fabricated object sculptures is in their inexhaustibility. What Dance in the Destruction Dance does is bring together two salient features that continue to drive Joo’s artistry: an investment in the performative as an essential complement to what might otherwise be a conventional, object-based, environmentally scaled aesthetic practice, and a commitment to craft in its fullest, most unbridled metaphysical terms. The experience of her work necessarily exists in time, or with the duration of the experience because at every moment the work itself is manifesting. It is in this condition of continuous and entire presentness, amounting to the perpetual creation of itself, that Joo decides to compose her works, readily accepting and taking advantage of the ambivalent and indeterminate.

EXCERPT FROM pEARs ' --- --- --' IN §PRING

pEARs ' --- --- --- ' in §pring by Joo Choon Lin was first performed in 2018. The following excerpt is from her script updated in 2022 for performance as part of Dance in the Destruction Dance

2/woman You are in a wonderful shape!

(Walking to Daisy and then proceed to changing transparencies on sculptures)

3&4/man (Carry a huge ruin wall piece (foam) on your back and place it against a wall, and slowly detach the Tarp sculptures from the foldable stands; arrange and ‘pin’ them on the ruin wall, appears to be a painting)

1/woman (Daisy) pE AR --- like down on their upper lips

My eyes are filled with a hidden flame

A sharp s ound was felt

‘In’ day The head went down

B ecause its round --- it’s destined to roll Did no reappEAR 2/woman (change printed images from pyramid sculpture)

1/woman (Daisy) I hear a s oprano uttering her vibrant notes

Flame reaching their ears stealing their breath

Flame of pain shoot across (3&4/man howling ~) the bone A pE ARly note filled my eyes

3&4/man (howling ~ grasping for breath)

(Operate the pulley system to lower the sculpture)

JOO CHOON LIN

JOO CHOON LIN: DANCE IN THE DESTRUCTION DANCE

[Special Lighting Effect: Sun rays]

1/woman (Daisy) I’ve left a child in front --- me ---

A harmless child, A goat disguise as in the shape of lion B ehind --- me --- absent of 12 years

Tigress the absentee in the void of shape Harmless the child

Put her hands before my eyes

To concentrate the solar rays and 12 blades rays Make my sight more penetrating (behaves and speaks like a 12 years old child)

1/woman (Daisy) (remove the sculpture from the pulley) 3&4/man (C ontinue howling ~ grasping for breath)

2/woman CHECK! A Candle or two?

(Walking towards 3 / 4 man and force a butterfly pacifier objects on their mouths | 3 / 4 man collect breaths from 2/woman)

1/woman Daisy unveil… unveil… unveil… unveil… (mumbling to oneself) unveil… unveil… unveil… (place the vessel sculptures on unveil… the pedestal, next to 3/4 man)

the glass the grass g-ra-ss the spit the split s-peed the vomit the submit sub -m-it (Bells-sounds coming from snake puppet gloves wore by 2/woman)

3/man Every quarter of an hour

4/man Every hundred yards from the cliff

3/man Swallowing liters of water

4/man { The bowels of the sea}

3/man His hair

3/man His eyes

4/man Streaming

4/man riveted on the shore

3/man { The bowels of the sea}

4/man Put it on as a cloak

3/man a cloak

1/woman Daisy B efore ‘another day’ ‘§pring’ the earth (2/woman changing images on pyramid sculpture)

3/man ‘another day’ felt the spill in sun Put on a cloak Daisy comes to it 4/man it comes to Daisy (contradicting tone) (3&4/man looking at 1/woman Daisy)

1/woman Daisy on the watch by day - a gigantic butterfly(mute) On the watch by night - a gigantic butterfly(mute)

(1/woman Daisy holding a butterfly sculpture, 2/woman holding a magnifier sheet. Go near to the audience)

Still from animated video for pEARs ' --- --- --- ' in §pring, 2018.

In the reverberation of unconsciousness

Obey its own recoiling instinct

§pring back DisappEAR from the face of earth like immature autumn leaf

In a flowery cream ‘Daisy’ Sleep a deep heavy sleep Sleep heavy deep sleep Under the shade of pla-ne-fly Cast a shadow of a pEAR tree (utter rhythmically) - Head - reappEARing on the surface of red cream (place a red sheet on OHP) - Head - be - the - death Of three daisies {Eternally} burning in the axis of (Light Bulb off - 2/woman his invariant(invisible) light! switch off the OHP) § §§ (humming/hissing sound) §§§ §§§§§§ §§§§§§§§§§§§§§§ §§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§ 2/woman CHECK! A Candle or two? 1/woman Daisy Make a pEAR The buzzing of their metallic wings The incessant crashing of icy (breath in heavily) The ice breaks up - § on the east breaks up - § on the west ‘breaths’ flung against one another Produce a sharp sound

His eyes

Riveted on the shore

His EARs

Reverberated beneath

Dripping with saliva Rattling into the vertiginous sonorous evil

A wave is so x Fast Nothing in it is visible After all, you’re unlikely to forget it in a hurry.

Utter by all:

Omoomoomookooskrookookookookoo (circumambulate and Okookookookooskrookookookookoo activate the landscape

Omoomoomoomooskrookookookookoo s culpture)

The invisible one:

In the shape of §pring

Everything is working towards its reverberation: trees, mountains, planets, cows, lions. Everything, that is, except the creator.

His pear-shaped lower lip hangs down like a heavy chain: his stomach is inflated, his teeth are unbrushed, his right eye emits the lunar light, his left eye radiates the solar ray, between his eyebrows there is a hidden flame and the blue waves of his hair are covered with dust.

A lion, who was passing by, inclined his majestic tail and said, ‘For my §, god of consciousness, lord of the world, eternal of eternity, the sound of sound, I respect him, even though his radiance now seems to be eclipsed. You, the imitator, are mere cowards, since you attacked them while they are asleep’.

The invisible one:

In the shape of §pring

A red circle, hanging from the end of a triangle

The hens, angular wings with broken spines, were looking for food Rushed up and down, up and down, up and down

From all parts of the §ections Attracted by the smell of blue sea-men. Red swarmed all over her heart as if it were dung-heap.

Turn blackish gold

On the fences, which §ection the yard, on the east side, several very small openings have been made. On the west side, was closed by a metal squawking.

3/man 4/man:

In angular shapes of §pringA ‘spinning+’ upward △ (3/man) A ‘spinning–’ downward ▽ (4/man) §pring-ing into an {Ellipse} when one is see-sawing: WE didn’t die We didn’t die We sing a different song We didn’t die We didn’t die We reverbWe reverb Produce a sharp sound

Oh! when you hear the pEARly notes flowing down from my immense blue body; The lion lamenting the disappEARance of its cubs.

If those harmonies are played on the chords of a hamstring, I listen in delight to the pEARly notes groveling in heartbeat through the cannonade waves of {consciousness}. I have not spoken to anyone since then. (speak lightly)

1/woman Daisy, 3&4/man (Change to the last transparency sheet with ‘§’symbols and produce hissing/humming sound) & (Bells-sounds coming from snake puppet gloves wore by 2/woman)

pEARs

IN §PRING IN REVERSE

I started the poem pEARs ' --- --- --- ' in §pring in Reverse by looking back at the previous works of Joo Choon Lin. From the transformations and movements in her works, the idea of a reversal and its potential gradually surfaced. I was brought into a reversal, in all its senses, of opposites, reflections, and reversions as doorways to enter Joo’s works. This “re-verse” seemed to call for a response in verse, a task for which I turned to the structure of a Fibonacci poem. In the poem, the syllables in each line increase and decrease based on the Fibonacci sequence,1 a reference to the numerical bases of the geometric arrangements in Joo’s Mission Control (2020 –) and her exploration of the patterns present in nature and creation, from the shape of the galaxies to the rhythm of Sanskrit poetry.

The poem’s narrative returns to the exhibition book, On the Origin of Pears, which Joo and I collaborated on for the first iteration of pEARs ' --- --- --- ' in §pring (2018). The exhibition book traces the evolution of “pears” that first took on the appearance of a “pair,” represented as a yin and yang symbol. If you observe the symbol, a pair of pears locked in a tight embrace might arise. You might also notice that the pair has pinhole eyes. The book proceeds to bring readers through a visual experience of how the air in the pair deflates. Across a journey through a stream and mountains, they become two pears an original and its twin reflected in water.

In this poem, these shapeshifting pears appear in the costume of fonts. The nature of these pears as mutating entities evokes the ideas of transformation in Joo’s works. I think of the mountain splitting apart as its casters roll away from the centre in pEARs ' --- --- --- ' in §pring (2018) as well as the metaphorically loaded tarpaulin forms in 聞。梵音 [三部曲] / pEARs '__/\_/\_/\__' in §pring (2020) that suggest a book, mountains, or waves of the ocean. This altering state of things was explored early on in Joo’s practice in her investigation of appearance versus reality. In the Broken Tools and Resolution of Reality series of works made between 2011 and 2013 for instance, familiar objects such as dot matrix printers and tools took on a discomforting presence when freed from their function.

1 In the Fibonacci sequence, each number is the sum of the two preceding ones. This visual poem has three stanzas, each with 13 lines. The syllables of each line are based on the following numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 8, 5, 3, 2, 1, 1.

Made using PowerPoint, the poem comprises three stanzas. Each stanza can be freed into its own deck of slides by cutting along the dotted lines. When all the dotted lines are cut, readers can stop at any slide, move up or down to another stanza, and connect the lines of the poem in an endless series of permutations, just like the never-ending folding and unfolding of Joo’s tarpaulin sculptures in Beatific Perfume (2020/2023).

In Stanza One, these pears materialise in different typefaces with varying degrees of readability. They soon take on the cloak of the typeface Braggadocio2, leaping their way from object to subject, into the words of Stanza Two where the flatness of the font transitions into bodies with facets and shadows.

As the pears spring into action in Stanza Two by the magical power of their ear to reach a kind of perception beyond our five senses, the words seem to radiate and whirl, imbued with a life that might be obscured in its utterance. By its inexpressible nature, the text forms a counterpart of sorts to the inaudibility of the whirring, buzzing, omnipresent beat of life explored in Joo’s works, in the vibration that flows through a tree and our constant stream of projections on the world around us.

In Stanza Three, these pears go into hibernation. As the pears wind down and un-manifest, the words gradually flatten and fade as they await their next calling. I hope that across the three stanzas, the text mirrors in some way the energy and exuberance of Joo’s works, inviting readers into a journey of reflections, reorientations and inversions.

Unless otherwise mentioned, all image captions refer to titles of Joo Choon Lin’s works. Images with these work titles are provided courtesy of Joo.

2 Braggadocio is a stencil typeface designed by W.A. Woolley in 1930. Its readability is impacted by its extremely bold design, heavy weight and absence of serifs. As its name suggests, Braggadocio conjures up the image of a brash creature. It presented itself as a fitting vessel for the pears to inhabit during one’s reading of the poem when the pears come alive. Its geometric construction also complements the geometric references in many of Joo’s works.

P. 22 (Top) Mission Control The Cold Purity Of Mathematic Love/ Trust Equation = {¢☼INHZ[G☼LDEN MILKY WAY/ ☾ ☽ SYSTEM -\+ ¢☼SMI¢ EXISTEΩCE [SPACE/TIME] -\+ [IN/☼UT]} (2020 –) (Bottom) Multi-Tier Fall (2012)

P. 23 (Top) ☽☼☾ The Cold Purity of Mathematic Love/ Trust Equation 3 = {¢arbonHz [Golden Milk / Ω 1.618 -\+ Se{E}d of ¢ФnsciФusness [TIME/ MOTIOΩ] [In/out]} (2019) (Bottom) I Only Make Friends With Money (2012)

P. 24 (Top) NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

(Middle) Website background of The Blinking Organism X You SPLEEN Me' Round: Operation 2 - Mutation (2017) (Bottom) Resolution of Reality (2012)

P. 25 (Top) The Cold Purity of Mathematic Love/Trust Equations: {¢ARBON HZ[¢X(HOH)Y]Ω1.618-\+

FLOWER OF ¢ФNSCIФ USNESS [HEARTBEAT] BREATH [IN/OUT]} (2022) (Middle) The Hot Purity of Mathematic Love/Trust Equations= (2020) (Bottom) If We're Going To Die, We'll All Die Together (2013)

P. 26 (Top) The Cold Purity of Mathematic Love/Trust Equations: {¢ARBON HZ[¢X(HOH)Y]Ω1.618-\+

FLOWER OF ¢ФNSCIФ USNESS [HEARTBEAT] BREATH [IN/OUT]} (2022) (Middle) The Hot Purity of Mathematic Love/Trust Equations= (2020) (Bottom) Your Eyes Are Stupid (2013)

P. 27 (Top) 聞。梵音 [三部曲], pEARs ' __/\_/\_/\__ ' in §pring Trilogy (2020) (Bottom) Wilhelm Scream (2013)

P. 28 (Middle) Gliding Through ●▲◆ (2015) (Bottom) The Beat Of The City that Freezed (2010)

P. 29 (Top) Your Eyes Are Stupid (2013) (Middle) When Surface Betrays Solidity (2012) (Bottom) Supersensible Realm (2011 – 2012)

P. 30 (Middle) 1.618 Sound Sculptures (2020) (Bottom) Sketch (2018)

P. 31 (Middle) Beatific Perfume (2020) (Bottom) pEARs ' --- --- --- ' in §pring (2018)

P. 32 (Top) INTESTINOLOGY Series #01: We Have The Most Beautiful Intestine (2014) (Middle, left) The Blinking Organism X You SPLEEN Me' Round: Operation 1Belief System (2017)

(Middle, right) The Blinking Organism X You SPLEEN Me' Round: Operation CCCLXIX (2017) (Bottom) Sketch (2018)

P. 33 (Top) The VEGGsplode and EGGcellent Picture Show (2014) (Middle) pEARs ' --- --- --- ' in §pring (2018) (Bottom) NASA

P. 34

(Top) I SAW You SING (2011) (Middle) Abdominal BASS Cavern Of A Stricken HEART (2015 – 2016)

Still from Beatific Perfume, 2020.

Still from Glue Your Eyelids Together, 2017.

I Only Make Friends With Money, 2012. Installation view from Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada, 2014.

Performance documentation of pEARs ' --- --- --- ' in §pring at FOGSTAND Gallery & Studio, USA, 2018.

O NTRIBUT O R B IOGR A PHI ES

JOO CHOON LIN (b. 1984) is a visual artist and poet based in Singapore who explores the relationship between consciousness and the technologies of representation. Joo has exhibited work locally and internationally and has participated in the 4th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, Japan (2008), 1st Aichi Triennale, Japan (2010), Roving Eye at Sorlandets Kunstmuseum, Norway (2011), Resolution of Reality at Third Floor - Hermes, Singapore (2012), Your Eyes Are Stupid at Singapore Biennale (2013), Be Mysterious, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada (2014), Paradise Sans Promesse, Frac de Pays de la Loire, Nantes, France (2015) and The Blinking Organism X You SPLEEN Me' Round: Operation 2 - Mutation, Esplanade Concourse, Singapore (2017).

MAGDALEN CHUA is an artist who writes to experience words beyond language. She also works with sculpture, and her recent projects explore spatial approaches to painting. Her works have been presented at Wolfson College Gallery, Oxford, England (2012); Govanhill Baths, Glasgow, Scotland (2013); Sluice Art Fair, London, England (2015); Raum.Weisz, Leipzig, Germany (2017) and Klub Proza, Wroclaw, Poland (2019) among other exhibitions and art spaces. Her curatorial projects include These Things Must Be Done To Get Along in Life, Post-Museum, Singapore (2009); studio 41, a project space in Glasgow, Scotland (2011 – 2013); The Biennial of Young Artists, 5th edition, Bucharest, Romania (2012) and Sandstorm in an Hourglass, The Substation and Tzu Chi Humanistic Youth Centre, Singapore (2020).

SHABBIR HUSSAIN MUSTAFA is a Senior Curator at Singapore Art Museum.

SELENE YAP is an Assistant Curator at Singapore Art Museum.

P. 1 – 3 Courtesy of FOGSTAND Gallery & Studio.

P. 4 Courtesy of the artist.

P. 5 Courtesy of the artist. Photo by 林靜怡

P. 7 Courtesy of The Esplanade.

P. 8 Courtesy of FOGSTAND Gallery & Studio.

P. 9 Courtesy of the artist.

P. 10 Courtesy of FOGSTAND Gallery & Studio.

P. 14 – 15 Courtesy of the artist.

P. 36 – 41 Courtesy of the artist.

P. 42 – 43 Courtesy of Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Photo by Rita Taylor.

P. 44 Courtesy of FOGSTAND Gallery & Studio.

P. 45 Courtesy of the artist.

Director, Singapore Art Museum: Eugene Tan

Curatorial and Collections: Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, June Yap and Selene Yap

Content Development: Ong Zhen Min and Aditi Shivaramakrishnan

Production Management: Anisah Aidid, Mish’aal Syed Nasar, Suhirman Sulaiman, Teo Loo Bing and Andre Wang

Exhibition Design: SPACElogic Conservation: Melanie Barrett

Marketing Communications and Creatives: Esther Conyard, Tracy Lam, Bridget Lee, Gwyneth Liew, Teo Jess Ling and Stephanie Wong

Education, Access and Programmes: Eunice Poh, Lim Chye Hong, Naomi Ng, Nur’ain Noor Bani, NurHazirah Azmi and Razi Razak

Partnerships and Patronage: Tan Shir Ee, Tiffany Wan and Zhang Szeling

Visitor Experience: Esther Conyard, Michelle Lee, Faris Nakamura, Nur Hakim, Malorie Oliveiro, Seow Yuih San, Siva Kumar, Timothy Tan and Jade Yong

Performers for pEARs ' --- --- --- ' In §pring: Afiszan Amat, Christina Cai, Sonia Kwek and Gabriel Nicholas Tham

Special Thanks

Marcel Gaspar Alston (Erissans) Magdalen Chua Joe Ng Lyon Sim Colin Justin Wan

Published in conjunction with Dance in the Destruction Dance (13 Jan–16 Apr 2023), an exhibition organised by Singapore Art Museum.

© 2023 Singapore Art Museum

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Published in 2023 Please direct all enquiries to the publisher at Singapore Art Museum (Corporate Office)

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Curators & Editors: Shabbir Hussain Mustafa Selene Yap Managing Editor: Ong Zhen Min

Project Editor: Aditi Shivaramakrishnan

Designed by Studio Vanessa Ban LLP Series design by CROP.SG

NATIONAL LIBRARY BOARD, SINGAPORE CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Name(s): Joo, Choon Lin, artist. | Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, curator, editor. | Yap, Selene, curator, editor. | Singapore Art Museum, organiser, publisher.

Title Title: Dance in the destruction dance / Joo Choon Lin; curators & editors, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, Selene Yap. Description: Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2023. Identifier(s): ISBN 978-981-18-6247-2 (paperback)

Subject(s): LCSH: Joo, Choon Lin, 1984---Exhibitions. | Installations (Art)--Singapore--Exhibitions. | Performance art--Singapore--Exhibitions. | Art, Singaporean--Exhibitions.

Classification: DDC 709.2--dc23