This piece is best enjoyed with John Cage’s 4’33’’.
I really wanted to be critical with this piece.
As a student and practitioner of mass communication, I am exposed to a lot of good quality design in products and architecture on the daily grind. It helps that I actively seek out good design based on past learnings and by effect, learned biases. This would explain why I often am distressed at art museums and galleries where I don’t understand most of the art pieces on display simply because I’ve hardly studied them with as much fervour as I do with industrial design and photography.
I do appreciate a good pen and a well thought-out office building but a lot of contemporary art (whenever time period up to this moment you wish this defined) curated nowadays frustrates me, as art - like design in any field - should. There is also the subject of subjectivity, so I will present my last visit to the Singapore Art Museum and the National Museum of Singapore in the only way I know how.
On the right was a video and photographs of Melati Suryodarmo dancing in a tight dress on blocks of butter. I watch as they melt under her feet and she falls clumsily multiple times over the 20-minute performance. By the end of it I’m left with a profound sense of what else I could have achieved in 20 minutes. According to her it was about her cultural confrontation with an increasingly buttery diet in her new country of residence and each fall is akin to a significant moment in her life where she falls and gets up again.
On the left, a Singaporean artist laid out a palette of pink in its many different hues across the entirety of that wall and justified it with words.
What.
A Korean photographer created the life-like figure-without-pants out of foam blocks and photographs that were painstakingly taken individually and pieced together. He apparently was trying to tell us about how modern photography and perhaps even surveillance cameras has infiltrated every area of our lives, so much so that it has become this easy to recreate people or events based merely on this medium of art.
K.
This was just creepy.
This was another piece by Melati Suryodarmo called Ale Lino. It involved her standing on an elevated platform and her pushing her solar plexus (midriff area where martial artists usually aim to knock the wind out of an opponent) against one end of the pole for 3 hours. During this time, she explains, she reaches a complete emptiness between the physical and mental.
The Dalai Lama walks into a pizza parlour. He takes a look at the menu and says to the attendant, “Make me one with everything.”
I disagreed with this piece, as the paradoxical suggestions of the sexual signifier (the phallic structure of glasses) against the modern foldable chair did nothing to bring any participation of discourse in the critical dialogue of the 90s.
Moments later I came out of that room where the glass structure was right in the middle of and realised the chair was this facilitator’s.
This was just cool and like, they sprayed some mist to enhance the visibility of them lasers inside the really dark room and people could walk in and disrupt the lasers and encase themselves in the laser beam-constructed cells.
So laser. Much pew. Wow.
Every vial contained a different smell.
I swear one was vomit.
As a piece dedicated to showcase the comforts that the female body parts bring, we are invited to jump into the pile of fun bags that also look like breasts.
Right before this exhibit though, you will also be invited to put on a video headset that shows your position in the room - from above. In your disoriented state, you are then encouraged to make your way through the maze, with relative difficulty, to reach the end location depicted by the red star.
If this was describing the actual process to landing yourself in boobs, somebody got it right.
In this bowl are ingredients to traditional Hainanese chicken rice, a common delicacy in these parts, where one is expected to take a whiff after lifting the delicate clear case covering it.
I noticed this piece after averting my attention from another exhibit that was a tiny bowl containing dust off an artist’s painting, apparently to honour the medium of art.
I couldn’t even.
I walked out of the last exhibit and genuinely thought this was another artistic installation that played to the optical suggestions of the purity of lines that bring within the realm of discourse the remarkable handling of light and the spatial relationship demonstrated by the barrier that mirrored boundaries set by the powers that be.
Sure got me there.
Art will probably continue to frustrate me for the foreseeable future but I guess upsetting our comforts is precisely why it exists. And why my washroom mirror selfie - a commentary on a segment of our generation’s girls who partake in this very act, if you will - may actually command a $4.6 million price tag if someone in the future beyond my life finds enough justification and disposable cash to do so.
I will still be immensely impressed with the work that artists strive to create and put out into the world. We live in a time and place where many glorify the past with the resurgence of retro stylings and fashion, but these people are pushing for a different future. I don’t expect any of these artists to stop what they’re doing and I will continue to make trip after trip of discovery even if it eventually kills me to find out all art is just an exercise in who’s better at justifying intellectual products that could have been devised by 7-year-olds. Even then, this kind of unadulterated cacophony is brave.
If you’ve come this far from my personal Facebook account, I feel like I owe you at least an observation regarding the 2 weeks worth of photographs I’ve posted daily along with seemingly inane prose and rhyme intended as commentary on each day’s events and some of your complaints.
Some of you understood and have made it known to me, thank you;some of you didn’t and have asked me, and I hope I had explanations satisfactory to you;many of you who didn’t have no doubt disregarded me and now view me as a poser as I was informed;
Point is: I don’t give a shit what you think; I give a shit only when you do.
© 2026 gent
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