Envisaging Hollowness in Contemporary Singapore

In discussions of contemporary Asian visual art, the one nation, region, or locality that always seems to escape scrutiny is Singapore. It is too perfect, and thus too boring. We, in the West, as well as in other parts of Asia--insofar as such blanket terms as the "West" and "Asia" can be used to refer to sociogeographical spaces--want our contemporary Asian art to be about oppression, suffering, and the like, because, after all, Asia must always be in a state of transition, turmoil, or conflict. Singapore, on the other hand, appears to have been immune to these struggles, at least in the past ten years. Under the guidance of its resident omniscience, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore in the present moment is a magical kingdom, carefully constructed for maximum sustainable efficiency and comfort. Every conceivable consumer good is available in the glistening malls lining Orchard Road, the streets are immaculately and perversely neat, and the manicured highways conveniently double as airplane runwa ys--just in case extra runways are needed in the event of a surprise attack. And in constructing or partaking of this paragon of efficiency, one never has to work up a sweat, because the air conditioning is on all the time. In the beauty pageant of statistics, Singapore takes the crown with its low crime rates, high literacy, and equally high per-capita income levels. The city-state is poreless, a pristine model of development to envy and emulate.

Yet this apparently seamless environment has become a veritable incubator for art that explores the combinations and permutations of hollowness. The seamlessness of the city-state provokes some contemporary artists to probe beneath the hypermodern facade. What chinks can be found in the supremely well-crafted armor of the ruling regime? What are the gaps that need to be filled? The answers can take substantially different forms. Some choose to view hollowness in spatial terms, both in a purely formal sense, and more abstractly, as the disjuncture between the ruling regime premised simultaneously on "Asian" values and the British colonial legacy. Many artists who use contemporary Singapore as a context for their work have chosen to adopt consciously political, or distinctly reactionary approaches in which hollowness is a metaphor for the rhetoric espoused by the government or the curiously sterilized milieu of the city-state.

It is tempting to attribute hollowness to a regime that arguably replaces real intellectual substance with capitalist desire. Hollowness, however, may also refer to the state or nature of the individual. Expressions of hollowness are often signified by the indifference or apathy of the individual, who, saturated with material comforts, will not or cannot engage with the immediate milieu, but instead immediately sinks into a state of complacency. Given the significance of personal apathy as a manifestation of hollowness, it is not surprising that artists feel a compelling need to communicate, or initiate communication, with the people to see how viewers will react to their art. [1] The artist serves as a mediator, urgently attempting to spark dialogue between the audience and the work.

This said, I am not arguing that hollowness is synonymous with emptiness. Hollowness is a spatially oriented term that connotes absence, while emptiness is a term that bears negative connotations of desolation and alienation. Such connotations do not adequately encompass the variety of meanings embraced by the more ambiguous notion of hollowness. Granted, a reading of hollowness as emptiness is not entirely without validity, since there is, to an extent, a spiritual and emotional kind of emptiness born from the template of control that serves as the foundation for modern Singapore. At the same time, an automatic reading of hollowness as emptiness too readily feeds into another stereotype of Singapore as a soulless, mechanical automaton controlled by an intrusive regime. Such a reading runs the risk of being absorbed without any kind of critical assessment of either the ruling regime or the hypermodern surface that is its creation. More important, the reading makes no distinction between hollowness within Sin gapore and the configuration of Singapore as a hollow entity.

Nor is hollowness equivalent to a state of invisibility. Although it conjures a sense of unoccupied space, it is a highly visible notion that is discussed in many ways Some artists, like Lee Wen, have spoken of hollowness as meaninglessness, while others, such as Amanda Heng, have spoken of it as a state of being waiting to be invoked. It may be also be spoken of as a series of contradictions and disjunctures that connote specific meanings, as in Lim Tzay Chuen's installation "and the boy asked ..." (1999). Or, as Laura Soon's mixed-media Capper Cushions (2000) implies, hollowness can even be a reflection of a contradictory, secret desire to fill blank spaces, and of a state where the intellectual void can never be filled. Like the roads that double as runways, hollowness signifies an overlap of different meanings. The artists who speak of hollowness assume an array of tones ranging from biting criticisms that attempt to pierce the surface to contemplative musings that reflect on the sheltered inside. In ord er to examine the complex matrix of definitions and voices that often coexist within a single work, and to undermine the unconscious tendency to categorize non-Western artists by geographical origin, I have chosen to focus my discussion on single works.