Lee Weng Choy

Lithobates sylvaticus. More commonly known as the Wood Frog, it is the only frog found north of the Arctic Circle. A tiny, modest-looking creature — lacking in the Hollywood cachet of the Antarctic Emperor Penguin — still, if you needed a poster-boy for surviving against the odds, you could do a lot worse than Lithobates sylvaticus. The frog recently came to mind regarding “Comparative Contemporaries”, something we’ve been working on here at The Substation since 2003. Let me say a few things about this project before returning to our amphibian friend, and, if you stay with me, I promise to eventually address the topic of new year’s resolutions. It’s a roundabout way of explaining our artistic direction for 2008.
Art from this part of the world is on the rise — or so it must seem. From Brisbane to Berlin, Asian artists are all over the place. This year is a banner year for biennales in the East. September alone sees seven biennales and triennials opening; in addition to Singapore’s second edition, there will be shows in Taipei, …

Lee Weng Choy
This year we start the magazine with some materials from two publications from 2007. FOCAS published its final issue last year — its 6th volume, on Regional Animalities — and we publish the speeches from the launch event. Editor Lucy Davis talks about the contents and concerns of FOCAS 6, guest of honour Sharon Siddique reflects on the whole FOCAS project, and Audrey Wong makes a statement about The Substation’s policy on using animals in art. Also online is a PDF version of Article: the SAS Companion. In 2007, along with AICA Singapore, we published a newspaper dedicated to covering the Singapore Art Show. This year, we plan a new edition to cover the second Singapore Biennale, which opens in September. Look out for Article: the SB2008 Companion.

The Asia Art Archive launched its new website in February 2008. With a new interface and user-friendly functions, the AAA website provides access to their online catalogue of over 20,000 titles, and up-to-date information on AAA programmes and projects. The website also features a monthly newsletter, Diaaalogue; an up-to-date calendar of exhibitions and events related to contemporary Asian art around the world; and a regularly updated listing of over 600 contemporary Asian art spaces, resources and websites.
Initiated in 2000 as a direct response to the increasing number of Asian contemporary art exhibitions and events world-wide, the Asia Art Archive is the first non-profit research centre in Hong Kong dedicated to documenting the recent history of visual art from the region. Its mission is to collect, preserve and make information on contemporary art from Asia easily accessible in order to facilitate understanding, research and writing in the field, as well as to promote dialogue and critical thinking through its educational and public programmes.
Visit www.aaa.org.hk

Sophia Natasha Wei
The digital age impacts art-making, heralding a new art form called “new media art”, a term which gained trendy currency in the mid-1990s. And “performance art” sometimes falls under this category. However, as a practicising performance artist for the last couple of years and having observed several performances by local and international artists, I question the fit of performance art in the category of new media art, especially in terms of the local context.
On the world map of art history, the trend of electronically sophisticated performance art pieces stretches from performative video installations of the late 60s, which instructively challenged the artist-viewer relationship, to the now fashionable experimental artworks in the rage.
Today, the projector becomes integral to the realizing of many performance art pieces. In essence it seems fair to say the images from the projector enhances the quality of a performance piece, but does the projector’s presence really warrant the performance’s license as a new media art? What are the intentions of the projector/ projected images as a tool in a live art? Is the …

Lam Yishan
I.
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Spring is a second beginning, a new year in the new year. In the language of symbols, it stands for rebirth, the revival of something dead or sleeping. In the world lived and seen, the sign of new buds emerging from winter tells of something stubborn in natural life: its will to survive. Perhaps that was what I was trying to capture when I took that picture of flowers while on a particularly magical walk through my university in the United States two springs ago. Flowers heralded the end of subzero temperatures, and the promise of the new.
However, T.S. Eliot’s epic poem, The Waste Land, upsets the whole thing — April, cruel? Winter, warm? Picking yourself up after a period of devastation can truly be a difficult thing. Spring, as Ella Fitzgerald famously sang, can really hang you up the most. It …

Lee Weng Choy

Welcome to the new Substation Magazine. As you can see, we are running a little late — our plan was to launch in April. Do visit us regularly over the next couple of weeks, as we’ll be posting more content, getting our archives in order, and adding more features.

Lee Weng Choy
Near where the Library used to be, between the National Museum of Singapore and The Substation is a giant orifice. You can hear a rumbling, sucking sound emanating from it. Or is that just road traffic? Officially, it’s known as the Fort Canning Tunnel. There was even a launch party. While invitations were sent to The Substation, regrettably, none of us made it in the end. Not that you expected it to be an exciting event, but at least you could have then said, in the distant future, to your grandchildren perhaps, that you had attended a tunnel opening ceremony back in the early twenty-first century. Since the Tunnel opened a few weeks ago, I haven’t used it very much, and I suppose that’s why there’s still the slightest of thrills when I do get a chance to pass through it. Of course, it all goes by so quickly. But that’s the point, isn’t it.

I’m not going to speculate how many seconds one saves driving through the Tunnel, or debate whether it was worth the several million to …

Cyril Wong
Like all good things, bad things like the Biennale and its accompanying hype will end. Even the stench of the vomit thrown up by denizens of our local arts scene desperate to support and be a part of that hype will stop smelling too. (I am reminded of how a young person on the local Arts Community e-group actually made the claim that art critics around the world actually liked the Biennale, to which Lee Weng Choy rightly replied, “your contention that the biennale was loved by all international experts sounds as reliable as Donald Rumsfeld’s claim that Iraq had WMD”). 1
A good thing to possibly come would be how since they are unlikely to stage the spectacle of the Biennale a second time, the money can actually be pumped back into developing the arts here again. (Unless, of course, some big fancy international meeting takes place here again, such that we have to put up another similar show in their honour.) Wishful thinking, perhaps?
And there will always be the vomit. Look at what Theatreworks has thrown up recently …