Clara Che Wei Peh & Kaushik Swaminathan: Appetite

The upper-level Listening Room contains over 3000 vinyl records, Appetite, Singapore, 2021. Photo: Appetite As soon as you step inside Appetite, located on the second floor of a two-storey shophouse right at the heart of the central business district in Singapore, you will notice the artworks hanging along the hallway. Lindy Lee’s ethereal Reaching for the Moon in Water, 2018, and forgetting, remembering, 2020-2021, commanding you to come closer and admire the details of her liberating use of Chinese ink, fire and paper. To the left of Lee’s large paper works, Yang Yongliang’s Prevailing Winds, 2017, plays on loop. Both artists make use of, and play with, the tradition of Chinese ink and calligraphy, bending the rules and reinventing our understandings of ink paintings to reflect a contemporary understanding of materials.

Up another narrow flight of stairs, the Listening Room. Mere minutes later, you have a cocktail in one hand and a spoonful of corn custard with uni in the other, as your gaze falls on the library of over 3,000 vinyl records: Yang’s The Streams from his series Time Immemorial, 2016, is nestled on the shelf behind you.

“Initially conceived as the research and development arm of Brehm’s successful Restaurant Nouri, Appetite brings together an R&D kitchen, a record bar and an art gallery, all under one roof.”

Appetite street view, Singapore, 2021. Photo: Appetite

Such is the experience of being at Appetite, a multi-concept space opened by Michelin-star chef Ivan Brehm and his team. Initially conceived as the research and development arm of Brehm’s successful Restaurant Nouri, Appetite brings together an R&D kitchen, a record bar and an art gallery, all under one roof. Driven by their passions and belief in multicultural and transdisciplinary practices, the team learns from and works with elements across various art forms and fields of knowledge.

As an exhibition centre, Appetite is one of the very few independent art spaces in Singapore with a regular exhibition programme and public events series. Its exhibitions eschew the white-cube display model and place art in a relational and lived setting, within which viewers are able to interact with artworks freely and comfortably as though in their own homes. Appetite’s curatorial efforts are supported by a global team of researchers with art praxis and art history students and scholars from Yale University, University of Chicago, Pomona College, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Yale-NUS College, to name just a few.

Dawn Ng, Waterfall IV (exhibition view), 2020 4K video, 21 min 36 secs, Appetite, Singapore, 2020. Photo: Appetite

Since its opening in August 2020, Appetite has staged four exhibitions, working with gallery partners such as Sullivan+Strumpf, to introduce its diverse audiences to artworks by internationally-renowned artists.

Its inaugural exhibition “She/Her” explored representations of the female form, working closely with Southeast Asian artists such as Pinaree Sanpitak and Yanyun Chen. Then, Appetite brought together the works of Haegue Yang, Rikrit Tiravanija, Jason Martin, Dawn Ng and more, for its second show, Chromatic Identities. An exploration into colour and its historical, experiential and anthropological lineage, the exhibition drew from research around the spice trade and the migratory routes behind pigments and chemicals used across food and art. In early 2021, Appetite presented We are closed on Sundays because it’s God’s day, which looked into the origin, function and subject matter of mythology. Featuring artists including Gonkar Gyatso and FX Harsono, the exhibition not only addressed poignant questions surrounding myth and narrative-making throughout time, but it was also a much-needed effort to offer an alternative to Western forms of abstraction. Most recently, Appetite staged What Happened Here?, a meditation on land and memory, featuring the works of artists like Lindy Lee and Yang Yongliang, whose works ask us to consider our innate relationships with the landscapes we inhabit and imagine.

As we roll into the second half of the year, Appetite looks forward to its next exhibition—a contemplation on urbanism and the urban condition. Inspired by the practice of Singapore-based artist, Kanchana Gupta, the exhibition will look into the works of artists who seek to uncover the hidden or less-visible dimensions of living in the city, who utilize and critique the materials and methods of how we have built up our cosmopolitan reality, and what have we forgone in the process.

Appetite Tuesday to Saturday, 6pm - late 72A Amoy St, Singapore 069891 Appetitesg.com