Just got back from Kuching. A short and relaxing trip, mainly to visit AL (and eat). But being the predictable being that I am, I also threw in a few gallery visits into my itinerary.
To generalise a bit, the art in Kuching is very local, very much in sync with the green landscape and muted colours, as well as their indigenous crafts. Its subject matter covers predominantly flowers, animals, and forest-scapes, mostly on a small scale works on paper. Given the location of these galleries, one might conclude that their target market is tourists.
In the galleries, paintings are interspersed with furniture and decorative homeware, mostly made from teak and rattan. Not particularly exciting, but still charming nonetheless. The art images themselves were very sweet, quite pleasing to the eye, quiet yet colourful enough to hang in one’s home to remind one of more tropical climates. This is a local craft that continues to exist quite separately from the global dialogue of art history and art theory. This is art as self-expression rather than art as critique. Or as they like to emphasize in Singapore, art as “knowledge production”.
So I returned to Singapore to what was quite a busy week in the local art scene, with a slew of gallery openings as well as art talks. The ones that i did attend fit comfortably within my usual conceptions of contemporary art. What one got was a sense of being connected to something more globalised (though not necessarily universal) – An exchange of ideas and art-making techniques that consciously reference international art movements, whether current or historical.
This short trip to Kuching was a nice little jolt of idea-static that made me re-question my own definition of what art is for me personally. It’s inevitably a very naive and childlike line of inquiry, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I haven’t yet reconciled the varying definitions and functions of art, and what art means for different audiences and, dare I say, stakeholders. Was I as egalitarian and open-minded about art as I previously thought I was? Was I too entrenched in my thinking about what constituted good art? Was I forcing myself to shoehorn my own ideas and processes into a form which I thought would be more relevant?
Perhaps this will continue to be a running theme of this online journal, a constant solidification and dissolution of how I choose to define what art actually means to me.
If you’re ever in Kuching, have a quick stroll along the Main Bazaar, and pop into Artrageously Art by Ramsay Ong. AL, NL, and I got a chance to have a quick chat with the artist, who’s really sweet. Also, the Sarawak Laksa and Kolok Mee in Kuching are a must.
And just for fun, I’m starting a small painting on flowers, albeit with the same disassociated strokes and broken layers that I like to use for my other paintings.
