Open Call 2011 // Meet the Artists

Open Call 2011 // Meet the artists

The Substation is proud to annouce Bruce Quek as the recipient for visual art, and Ho Wen Yang and Sherry Tay as recipients for performing art.

Open Call, established in 2008, is one of The Substation’s flagship programmes, supporting local artists and developing critical, rigorous artistic practices in the fields of visual and performing art. The artists selected for Open Call 2011 will realise their projects in September this year, as part of The Substation’s SeptFest programme celebrating the art space’s anniversary.

The Substation caught up with the recipients and spoke to them about their projects, themselves and about their interests in art.

Bruce Quek
Open Call 2011 Recipient for Visual Art

How has your focus and interest in art and art making developed over the last seven years, and what mediums and concepts do you find most interesting?

I’d say that I started out with a material-driven approach to sculpture – in other words, sculpture not as a representation or symbol, but as the experience of the play of physical properties. For instance, one of my earlier works involved the suspension of a few, fine strands of fishing line from a ceiling, at heights roughly corresponding to the distribution of human height. It isn’t meant to mean anything; it’s just a sort of perceptual event. What I do now may seem a little distant from that point of view, but I think that starting point continues to have an influence on my work.

Following this, I began to take a greater interest in conceptual investigations, as applied to the context of an artwork on a number of levels, especially that of the distribution of information. At this point, my connection to any particular medium basically evaporated, and the methods and techniques I adopted were derived from the ideas I wished to explore. It tends towards a sort of analytical dryness, but it’s largely rooted in an interest in Zen and other schools of thought.

Of late, I’ve been interested in more excessive subjects – you could take the proposed project as an early example, insofar as it actually has content of a sort. I’m not able to nail it down to any particular medium or concept – strange emergences and sudden shifts in perspective, maybe. I realise that this is incredibly vague, but I guess I’m referring to events like the emergence of the Redemption movement in America, which has taken the tax code and other legal structures to produce a sort of bizzare folk religion. A more familiar example might be the arms race between spammers and CAPTCHA developers, which has apparently resulted in CAPTCHAs so indecipherable that segments of the human population are beginning to be shut out. These examples don’t seem immediately pertinent to art, but I think they reveal general patterns that could be applied elsewhere.

You seem to be quite interested in exploring the nature and interrelation of art, display and context. What about these topics you find interesting, and how you have you dealt with these themes previously?

If you think about these contextual and infrastructural elements as staging and ambiance, the question that might well be asked is, what isn’t interesting about them? Taken together, they form a considerable part of the overall experience of encountering an artwork – as a stable ground, if maintained within the prescribed limits. Finding out what happens when you tweak the settings was a significant part of some of my earlier works.

For instance, Incidental Traces consisted of everything that goes into an exhibition, apart from actual artworks. It wasn’t so much about placing the pedestal on a pedestal and leaving it at that, but tinkering with the process of contextualisation itself, while alluding to information flow and encryption.

I took a different tack in Untitled (2006 – 2009), in which the artworks were excised from the conventional infrastructure of distribution and display, and subsequently grafted onto a separate system of distribution – furtively slipping them in between the pages of random library books. As far as the infrastructure was concerned, this offered a certain amount of populist appeal, in being so widespread. At the same time, it offered the possibility of a chance encounter with the work. In the end, the work was terminated by re-injecting it into a conventional display, with proper attribution, since the individual elements were anonymous. They’re still out there, of course, and I don’t doubt that there are plenty of people unaware of the termination who might continue to encounter it, rather like the isolated Japanese holdouts after the end of the second World War.

What is your proposed Open Call project about, and how does it develop and expand on the themes and concepts you’ve worked on in the past?

Strictly speaking, I wouldn’t say it’s about anything. It contains and conveys information, but I would be hard-pressed to say that it expresses something in particular. I suppose another way of looking at it is that the fact that such a quantity of information does not convey meaning is what the work is about. That there are gaps between information, meaning, information-formation and meaning-formation that are too-often papered over.

In terms of themes and concepts explored, I would say that this project is something of a departure from my previous works – it has content, of a sort. True, it draws on things I’ve previously explored, such as the examination of infrastructural elements and information flow. However, the overall presentation takes a far more performative approach, and I’ve not dealt with anything specifically social in the past.

What relevance do you feel this project has, in terms of the kind of art that we’re seeing emerge in Singapore at the moment?

I believe that this project is most relevant in encouraging an expansion of artistic presentation, beyond simple show-cases or displays, with their attendant, papered-over assumptions. At the same time, the information presented has relevance to a wide variety of social issues, so the work itself may serve as a useful tool in helping artists and activists evaluate their responses to these issues. On a more general level, I hope that this project will engender interest in the implications of how information is packaged and presented, within the context of a discussion or debate.

Ho Wen Yang and Sherry Tay
Open Call 2011 Recipients for Performing Arts

Tell us a bit more about your proposed project, what exactly is it about?

We’re going to be exploring the notion of feedback. From the concept itself and the open workshop/rehearsal process, to the eventual performance theme and structure, feedback will be our guide and inspiration.

We plan to use a motion tracking device from the Kinect system to generate and manipulate sounds based on the movement of the artist. It will be a long series of experiments, culminating in a performance, which itself, may turn out to be the largest and most interesting experiment of the project.

Sounds interesting, but what can audiences expect from the production?

Expect the unexpected! This will not be a conventional dance performance; the audience would be required to be perceptive, receptive and even participative. Audiences may be performing and watching at the same time! Since this is a process-oriented production, the audience will also be welcome to attend our rehearsals and give… feedback!

Wen Yang, how does this project relate to and develop on your personal interest in music and dance, and Sherry, how does this develop on and explore your interests in dance?

Wen Yang: My main specialisation is in dance accompaniment, for both choreographed and improvised dance, the musician always has a certain autonomy over the artistic outcome by injecting personal interpretations into the music, and thus affecting the dancer(s). This project reverses and challenges this normal process and forces me to ‘surrender’ fully to the dance. The incorporation of technology is also the first time I’m using my computer engineering knowledge with the arts in a special way – not along with the arts or as an enhancement to the experience, but technology in this project forms the platform where the artistic concepts and process will be developed from. It will be a challenging process and collaborating and experimenting with dancers and movement artists to generate a sensible system to map motions into sound, will be exciting and revelatory.

Sherry: This is a very unusual setting for me, my choreographic process usually starts with the music and then the dance is created with the music in mind. However, in this situation, I’ll not only be a choreographer, but a composer as well. I’ve always enjoyed watching dancers ‘sing’ with their bodies, and now that I can literally make that happen is truly fascinating. Another aspect of this project is that I’ll get to collaborate with varied groups of movers. It’ll be an interesting process to meld the different aesthetics and personalities together, and I’m thrilled to be given this opportunity to embark on this adventure.

What relevance do you feel this new proposed project has, and what contributions do you feel it can make to contemporary Singaporean art?

This project is based on the concept of feedback, a very innate and essential, but often unnoticed part of our lives. We hope that this project can heighten all our (audience included) awareness of the various kinds of feedback around us, that we are responding to, as well as the feedback that we are providing to others. Not just the common verbal feedback that most people associate with, but every single movement, event or even possibly a facial expression, a vibe that may have a causal effect on ourselves, others or the environment. With this heightened awareness, we can perhaps have a better understanding on how we behave, how we learn, and perhaps take greater responsibility for our actions.

Living in a fast-paced country where we are arguably becoming less in-tune with our inner-selves, not having time to reflect and ‘feel’ our environment and actions, we feel that social relevance, highlighting the often ignored but yet essential parts of our lives is important. The convergence to multidisciplinary arts in the contemporary scene also poses the challenge to incorporate different disciplines sensibly and not unnecessarily, not with any of the elements as an ornament or enhancement, but with all the disciplines intertwined in a way that the artistic outcome cannot be realised sensibly without one another. So the social relevance of the concept, embracing multidisciplinary practices, and the novel use of technology are the main contributions we feel that this project makes to the art currently seen in Singapore.

More information about the performance and visual art Open Call events will be made available shortly. For more information about the Open Call programme, please visit www.substation.org/opencall