Issue Nov 05 Front page cover picture "The World is too small" by Iranna G.R. acrylic on tarpolin, 54 x 66 in, 2005 at Bodhi Art Singapore At Venice Art Education: For Our Community, By Our Community When Blood turned Green (A journey into underwater art)

Singapore At Venice

The Merlion - A Singapore Icon!
With the head of a lion and the body of a of a fish, the Merlion, Singapore's most well known tourist symbol, has elicited mixed reviews. It was created in the 1960s, drawing upon the legend that a Malay prince sighted a lion on the island's shores. The symbol was first used as a corporate emblem for the Tourism Board in 1964. In 1972 a 26-foot statue was completed and installed at the mouth of the Singapore River. Lee Kuan Yew, then Prime Minister, was the guest of honor at the official launch.

The Merlion Park quickly turned into a popular tourist destination and the statue spawned countless souvenirs. It became, along with the national airline's "Singapore Girl", one of the country's main icons for promoting the "lion city" (from the Sanskrit words "singa" and "pura"). But the Merlion has also had many detractors. Some local and international visitors have found the pseudo-mythical creature to be the epitome of kitsch.

In 2002, the eighty ton Merlion statue was moved because a bridge had been built that cut off its view to the sea. The move gave the statue a new prime location on the waterfront. The whole relocation project, which cost over US$4 million, also involved substantial redevelopment of the new site and resto-ration of the statue.

Why Mike?
When asked why the move and why this statue, a spokesperson for the artist said: "Over the last decade, Singapore has invested a lot of financial resources and human energy into developing the arts. Given Singapore's desire to draw attention to this effort, to establish links between art, economic returns, and the tourism industry, what more appropriate gesture could an artist make than to create a work that directly engages the issues of publicity and tourism-like taking the Merlion to one of the world's most prestigious art events. But this project is also about getting the government and corporations in Singapore to shift mindsets. For all the investment in Singapore art, for example in buildings like the US$400 million Esplanade-Theatres on the Bay, the authorities are still hesitant to put their trust and faith in artists. This trust and faith actually costs them nothing."

Why not?
Lim got the enthusiastic support of the Pavilion commissioner, Deputy CEO of NAC, Khor Kok Wah, as well as an endorsement/ recommendation from the NAC's CEO, Lee Suan Hiang. There was a time when the artist felt his artistic idea would become reality. However the Singapore Tourism Board, the owners of the eighty ton statue, finally said no after some back and forth discussions with the artist. Lim had even appealed to the Prime Minister and the President of Singapore to support the project.

Still a success!
A personal comment by Eugene Tan, the curator of Lim's exhibition: "After the failure to move the Merlion to Venice for the Biennale, I was apprehensive that Tzay Chuen's intended installation might perhaps be too subtle for the context of Venice and overlooked. However, I was proved wrong, judging by the positive reception to Tzay Chuen's work. The strength of the work lies in the way it engages with different audiences through various levels. Some viewers became aware and fascinated by the artist's intention to move the Merlion, while others were simply pleased to have found clean and functional washrooms at their disposal. In the latter, this led to long queues to use the washrooms, which attests to the success of the Tzay Chuen's intention to challenge and break down the boundaries between the experience of art and life in a particularly pertinent and poignant way."

A comparison from my home country comes to my mind. In 1971 Christo and Jean-Claude proposed to wrap the "Reichstag", the German parliament building in Berlin. It took them 24 years to get approval from the authorities and realize their project. Eventually in 1994 the German Bundestag (parliament) debated for 70 minutes and voted on the work of art. The result of the roll call vote was: 292 in favor, 223 against and 9 abstentions. In the end the project was a huge success.

Art Education:

For Our Community, By Our Community

Art Outreach strives to promote art-literacy through its dedicated volunteer teachers and some artistic fundraising.

Art Outreach was set up in March 2003 to address a pressing need in Singapore. Its mission: to promote art appreciation and literacy by providing systematic, in-curriculum, art education, free of charge directly to local schools. The programme was awarded IPC tax status under the National Arts Council's 'Support for the Arts Fund' in February 2004. Now, two and a half years later, the organization has expanded to serve approximately 6000 students each month and demand for the programme is at an all-time high. Art Outreach is now faced with the challenge of meeting this dem and by recruiting more volunteer teachers and raising the funds needed to grow the programme.

AO Students at ART Singapore 2005

AO Volunteer Teacher in local classroom

The Art Outreach programme aims to dispel the discomfort many people feel when discussing art. The programme is not about difficult art theory or coaching children to be art experts. Rather, the programme works to demystify art and make art accessible to all. This is done by exposing school children to a wide range of art media and genres, and by equipping them with the basic tools for talking about art.

The volunteers that make up Art Outreach's teaching force are from all walks of life. They include business executives, teachers, lawyers, architects, retirees, as well as senior level students. Each month, these volunteers undergo training on a new art topic, which they then take into local classrooms and share with students. The programme encourages members of the local community to take an active role in impacting the lives of young people and developing Singapore's arts landscape.

All Art Outreach teaching materials are specially designed for the programme, with a new art portfolio being created every other month. Portfolios cover an extensive range of art movements and genres, ranging from The Evolution of Portraiture and The Fundamentals of Design, to Public Sculpture in Singapore and The Life & Art of Georgette Chen. The curriculum provides a balance of Eastern and Western art forms, with special emphasis placed on Singaporean and regional art.

AO Students at ART Singapore 2005

About Art Invitational

On November 17th 2005, Art Outreach will hold its second annual fund-raising event, Art Invitational. A charity art auction & dinner in aid of Art Outreach, this prestigious event will be held at the Four Seasons Hotel. Art Outreach is supported again by international auction house, Christie's, to put up for sale works by eleven top artists. The auction will be conducted during the course of the evening in two sessions, with each session simulating an Art Outreach classroom lesson.

The first session will feature works personally donated to Art Outreach by four important Singapore-based artists including Cultural Medallion winner Goh Beng Kwan, as well as Milenko Prvacki, Chen KeZhan, and Delia Prvacki. This group of works will thereafter be featured in an Art Outreach educational portfolio, to be used as classroom teaching materials. The second session will offer works donated to Art Outreach by the Land Transport Authority of Singapore. These works appear in the permanent finishings of seven stations on the MRT's North-East Line as part of the LTA's "Art in Transit" project. These specially commissioned works are by seven prominent locally-based artists, including Tan Swie Hian, Sun Yu Li, Matthew Ngui, Ian Woo, Poh Siew Wah, Vincent Leow, and Lim Poh Teck. These works will make up the new LTA "Art in Transit" portfolio.

Funds raised from this charity art auction will pay for the creation of new teaching portfolios, as well as the recruitment and training of more volunteer teachers. Art Outreach aims to provide free art education to 8,000 students a month by the end of 2005. The ultimate goal is for the programme to eventually be available to all Singapore schools, reaching over 25,000 students each month.

Rhythmic Exuberance (First Aeroplane Landing in Singapore) Pon Siew Wah, 96 x 135cm Digital print on canvas Farrer Park MRT Station, to be auctioned at Art Invitational 2005

If you would like more information on Art Invitational 2005, please contact: Pene Ng, E: enquiries@artoutreachprogram.org, T: 6873 9505
If you would like to volunteer with Art Outreach, please contact: Aarti Hemnani, Volunteer Coordinator, E: vc@artoutreachprogram.org, T: 6873 9505
www.artoutreachprogram.org

When Blood turned Green

(A journey into underwater art)

by Tan Haur

The times when an accident acts as a catalyst leading onto a string of discoveries, a breakthrough, best illustrated by the story of the apple falling upon Newton, is a common enough phenomenon. I was the happy benefactor of one such accident. On one of my early diving trips near Phi Phi Island off the coast of Thailand, I cut my palm upon a coral. It was the pain that made me realized that I had sustained a cut, and when I looked at my palm to assess the damage, I was mesmerized to see green blood oozing out from the wound. All divers know that red light does not travel far into water and the greater the depth the more it has been absorbed. Yet the shock that came along with this perception of green blood overwhelmed me. It rocked me, and the pain notwithstanding, I was transcended into a new level of awareness. Suddenly the beauty, color and the magnificence of the submarine environment took on a fresh dimension, it screamed out to me. There and then I was moved to record, translate and share the glories of the underwater world. But how does one do this?

coral (abstract art) Mixed media

Back home, I pondered and assessed the medium of approach. As curator of the epSITE (digital art gallery) in Singapore I am very much into IT. This is the trend, and we are but riding the first crest of the IT wave. Over the past years I have been studying and researching the way IT will impact the art world, how artists will react with digital media and the new art movement this medium will bring about. In particular I have been pursuing the interrelationship between art, IT, body, mind and soul, the five elements. What is the relationship of these elements in the production of contemporary artistic expression? What conflicts would arise between the human mind and the microprocessor of the modern machine? Can the artists utilize computer to decode and translate sketches into pixel-databases, analyze them and reproduce them making them the Art of the new Millennium? What about a change of the environment? Facing a constrained environment say the confines of a satellite, the moon or 30 meters underwater, would these be the new inspirations for artists?

ocean (digital painting)

I was determined to try. But how does one draw underwater? What is the media? One morning I woke up with an idea - a white board and pencil. That should permit me to sketch. But what type of pencil should I use? While musing on this, suddenly these words came to my mind "To be or not to be". I decided to dive with 2B pencils, which turned out to be the correct choice.

Of course the next step was to enlist the support of my fellow-divers. For safety reasons one does not dive alone. Divers employ a buddy system to look after one another. So forewarned, my fellow-divers would swim around me while I sketched. Sketching underwater must be a rare happening; on quite a few occasions fish swam between my white board and me. The sketching act aroused their curiosity and made them swim in close to observe my drawing equipment. Within the hour we are back onto the boat and upon reaching shore, I scan the sketches.

Once back home I proceed to work on my scans with the impressions of the dive fresh in mind. This is most exciting and challenging; the translation, the coloring, painting and interpretation into digital database. Using painting software, I render my scans of submerged landscapes into strong and captivating images. Of course work on a computer must, for health reasons, never be prolonged. I stop and take a break whenever necessary. And IT means that when the pictures are finished all it needs is the click of a mouse to share my images on the Internet. Sketching underwater is a relatively new art form; it requires steady diving skill to support art creation in a challenging environment. Inspirations from the unpredictable nature force and frequent meditation by the sea have certainly influenced my philosophy in art.

Tan Haur sketching underwater.