Jantung Pisang

I conducted a workshop on 13 October, 2006 at the Singapore Biennale. The theme of the workshop was “Play and Myth”. This was displayed by Jantung Pisang (heart of the banana), the banana plant is used in many aspects of our life in various cultures. In some places the newborns are kept warm in the banana leaf, in other places the deaths are buried with parts of the banana plants. Many myths and ghost stories are related to the banana plants.
We were given parts of the banana plant and a banana leaf each to create a table from which we could enjoy a meal later on. We first explored the various parts of the banana and looked at the textures of the stems, made cross sections, etc. We also explored the banana flowers. In a group of four (Luo Yong, Ruth, Charlene and myself) we started making up the table. It was a group work whereby our earlier explorations were put into practice. While we were building up the table we got creative in coming up with new ideas on how to make it more complete and we ended up even having bowls made of the banana flower petals.
To select our food, we went down to the canteen and chose food that was very contrasting in colour to make a nice make up of the table. The end result of our effort was a real communal rice table and the rest of the workshop participants (excepts the Muslims who were fasting) all joined us to eat the food. It was also interesting to see how the other groups had come up with quite different designs whereas we all had access to the same materials and given the same concept.

Bathing

Bathing, 1977
Video (color, sound); 4:25 min.



A woman is lying in a bathtub with her eyes closed. In the background the splashing from a running tap can be heard. The camera pans across the woman’s body to dwell on her face, which just protrudes above the surface of the water. The woman runs her hands through her hair. The movement is frozen and for a few seconds remains arrested on the monitor as a tonally alienated, black-bordered image. Then the camera continues with its observation. The woman begins to wash her hair with shampoo. Again the movement is halted. She continues with her hair washing, puts her head underwater a few times, and finally leans forward to remove the rest of the shampoo from her hair. This sequence is repeatedly interrupted through freezing the moving image at particularly ‘picturesque’ moments. While the protagonist’s natural and relaxed-seeming movements are transformed into extremely light, pastel color sequences, the darker colored, arrested images reflect well-known motifs from art history, familiar to us especially from Impressionist painting.
In Bathing, as in his Mirror Road, Windows and Objects with Destinations, Hill uses the camera and image processing devices to explore the malleability of electronic colors and image density.

The Divine Viola

Personally, I find that Viola's work is very moving, thought-provoking and just... out of the world. You see, his works have this kind of ethereal feeling to it. To describe it in a word, his works is ineffable.





This work is entitled the Ocean Without Shore


Let's hear Viola's opinion on his work...







What do you think?

Da Wu's Whip!!!!

Tiger's Whip is an installation and performance piece by Tang Da Wu performed in 1991 in Singapore's Chinatown. It consisted of ten life-sized tigers made from wire mesh covered with white linen. Tang, wearing a sleeveless white garment, dragged one of the tigers behind him. A modified version of the installation is in the Singapore Art Museum. It features a tiger with its front paws resting on the back of a rocking chair, which is draped with a piece of red cloth and with a phallus painted on it in red. The work highlights how the tiger is being hunted to extinction for its penis, which some Chinese believe has aphrodisiac qualities. In February 1995, the Museum chose Tiger's Whip to represent Singapore at the Africus International Biennale in Johannesburg, South Africa. Another of Tang's works in the Singapore Art Museum is an untitled sculpture often called Axe (1991), which is an axe with a plant growing out of its wooden handle. It is regarded as an early example of found art in Singapore.

In my opinion, Tiger's Whip is such a symbolic work that contains a lot of interesting undertone and message. I am pretty much symphatetic about the conditions where tigers are hunted just for their genitals. In China, i heard that the government has been discussing about the possibility of creating a so-called 'Tiger's Farm' where tigers are being reared due to the increasing demand for tigers' genitals by the increasingly affluent chinese. Sounds outrageous??

WELL, the idea of eating tiger's -peep- is just gross!!

Gary HillI -- Innasmuch as It Is Always Already Taking Place. 1990

Sixteen-channel video/sound installation with sixteen modified monitors recessed in a wall. Edition of three. Coproduced by The Museum of Modern Art and the artist. Courtesy of the artist and Donald Young Gallery, Seattle. Photo: Alison Rossiter, courtesy of Donald Young Gallery.
The sixteen stripped-down monitors in Hill's Inasmuch . . ., which range in size from the eyepiece of a camera to the dimensions of an adult rib cage, are set on a shelf recessed five feet into the wall, slightly below eye level. The size of each monitor corresponds to the size of the particular section of the body recorded on the video loop: a soft belly that rises and falls with each breath, a quadrant of a face with a peering eye.

The arrangement of the monitors does not follow the logical organization of a human skeleton. Representations of Hill's ear and arched foot lie side by side; tucked modestly behind them is an image of his groin. On a torso-size screen, smooth, taut skin stretches over the ridges of bone that shape the human back. The image fills the frame, and the monitor, given its equivalent size, is perceived as part of the body: an enclosure, a vessel. Monitor and image exist as a unified object, as representation, as a living thing.



The long, nervelike wires attached to each monitor are bundled together like spinal chords and snaked along the shelf, to disappear from view at the back of the recess. Although it unites the system of monitors, this electrical network emphasizes that the body parts are presented as extremities, without a unifying torso. The hidden core to which the components of the body are attached serves as a metaphor for a human being's invisible, existential center: the soul.

Ola!
I got this interesting article about Gary's work from MoMA website.
What do you think?

Introduction

Hi there,


We are Hani, Jin Jin and Ying Ting. This blogs are made in order to show our greatest affection and appreciation towards three artists that have an enormous impacts in our lifes and maybe your life too!!


So, let's start this blog with a short introduction of our beloved artists. They are....


Bill Viola


Bill Viola (b.1951) is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading artists. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. For over 35 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast. Viola’s video installations—total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound—employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. They are shown in museums and galleries worldwide and are found in many distinguished collections. His single channel videotapes have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically, while his writings have been extensively published, and translated for international readers. Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way.


Bill Viola received his BFA in Experimental Studios from Syracuse University in 1973 where he studied visual art with Jack Nelson and electronic music with Franklin Morris. During the 1970s he lived for 18 months in Florence, Italy, as technical director of production for Art/Tapes/22, one of the first video art studios in Europe, and then traveled widely to study and record traditional performing arts in the Solomon Islands, Java, Bali, and Japan. Viola was invited to be artist-in-residence at the WNET Channel 13 Television Laboratory in New York from 1976-1980 where he created a series of works, many of which were premiered on television. In 1977 Viola was invited to show his videotapes at La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia) by cultural arts director Kira Perov who, a year later, joined him in New York where they married and began a lifelong collaboration working and traveling together.

In 1979 Viola and Perov traveled to the Sahara desert, Tunisia to record mirages. The following year Viola was awarded a U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship and they lived in Japan for a year and a half where they studied Zen Buddhism with Master Daien Tanaka, and Viola became the first artist-in-residence at Sony Corporation’s Atsugi research laboratories. Viola and Perov returned to the U. S. at the end of 1981 and settled in Long Beach, California, initiating projects to create art works based on medical imaging technologies of the human body at a local hospital, animal consciousness at the San Diego Zoo, and fire walking rituals among the Hindu communities in Fiji. In 1987 they traveled for five months throughout the American Southwest photographing Native American rock art sites, and recording nocturnal desert landscapes with a series of specialized video cameras. More recently, at the end of 2005, they journeyed with their two sons to Dharamsala, India to record a prayer blessing with the Dalai Lama. 


Music has always been an important part of Viola’s life and work. From 1973-1980 he performed with avant-garde composer David Tudor as a member of his Rainforest ensemble, later called Composers Inside Electronics. Viola has also created videos to accompany music compositions including 20th century composer Edgard Varèse’ Déserts in 1994 with the Ensemble Modern, and, in 2000, a three-song video suite for the rock group Nine Inch Nails’ world tour. In 2004 Viola began collaborating with director Peter Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen to create a new production of Richard Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde, which was presented in project form by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in December 2004, and later at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York (2007). The complete opera received its world premiere at the Opéra National de Paris, Bastille in April 2005.

Since the early 1970s Viola’s video art works have been seen all over the world. Exhibitions include Bill Viola: Installations and Videotapes, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987; Bill Viola: Unseen Images, seven installations toured six venues in Europe, 1992-1994, organized by the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Kira Perov. Viola represented the U.S. at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995 with Buried Secrets, a series of five new installation works. In 1997 the Whitney Museum of American Art organized Bill Viola: A 25-Year Survey that included over 35 installations and videotapes and traveled for two years to six museums in the United States and Europe. In 2002 Viola completed his most ambitious project, Going Forth By Day, a five part projected digital “fresco” cycle, his first work in High-Definition video, commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Bill Viola: The Passions, a new series inspired by late medieval and early Renaissance art, was exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in 2003 then traveled to the National Gallery, London, the Fondación “La Caixa” in Madrid and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. One of the largest exhibitions of Viola’s installations to date, Bill Viola: Hatsu-Yume (First Dream) (2006-2007), drew over 340,000 visitors to the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. In 2007 nine installations were shown at the Zahenta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; and Ocean Without a shore was created for the 15th century Church of San Gallo during the Venice Biennale. In 2008 Bill Viola: Visioni interiori, a survey exhibition organized by Kira Perov, was presented in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. 


Viola is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1989, and the first Medienkunstpreis in 1993, presented jointly by Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, and Siemens Kulturprogramm, in Germany. He holds honorary doctorates from Syracuse University (1995), The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1997), California Institute of the Arts (2000), and Royal College of Art, London (2004) among others, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000. In 1998 Viola was invited to be a Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles and in 2009 received the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts, MIT. In 2006 he was awarded Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government. Bill Viola and Kira Perov, his wife and long-time collaborator, live and work in Long Beach, California.

Gary Hill

Gary Hill (born in 1951, Santa Monica, California, U.S.) is an American artist who lives and works in Seattle, Washington. One of the pioneers of video art, Gary Hill has exhibited his video and video installations worldwide (Artfacts 2007). He is represented by Donald Young Gallery of Chicago.

Gary Hill's work is especially significant due to his incorporation of text in video art, evident in works such as Incidence of Catastrophe 1977-78. Hill began working with video, text and sound in 1973. He was influenced by the intellectual orientation of conceptual art which dominated art of the 1970s. His reading of the writings of Maurice Blanchot, in particular, provided him with ideas relating to the way in which language impinges on phenomenological experience, and a notion of 'the other' stemming from the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. Such reading informs Hill's visual-poetic explorations of the interrelationships between language, image, identity, and the body. For example in Cabin Fever he uses the binary opposition of light and darkness to convey the notion of an interaction between a self and an ‘other’.[1] He has also explored immersive environments, as seen in his 1992 piece Tall Ships.

Hill's work thoroughly exploits the capacity of video to offer complex nonlinear narratives that encourage active engagement on the part of the viewer. In Roland Barthes' terms, Hill’s video narratives can be understood as ‘writerly’ texts.

Tang Da Wu

Tang Da Wu  is a Singaporean artist who works in a variety of media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, installation art and performance art. Educated at Birmingham Polytechnic and Goldsmiths' College, University of London, Tang gave his first solo exhibition, consisting of drawings and paintings, in 1970 at the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He began engaging in performance art upon returning to Singapore in 1979 following his undergraduate studies.

In 1988, Tang founded The Artists Village. The first art colony to be established in Singapore, it aimed to encourage artists to create experimental art. Members of the Village were among the first contemporary artists in Singapore, and also among the first to begin practising installation art and performance art. There, Tang mentored younger artists and informed them about artistic developments in other parts of the world. He also organized exhibitions and symposia at the Village, and arranged for it to collaborate with the National Museum Art Gallery and the National Arts Council's 1992 Singapore Festival of the Arts.

In January 1994, the National Arts Council (NAC) stopped funding unscripted performance art following a controversial performance by Josef Ng that was regarded as obscene by many members of the public. From that time, Tang and other performance artists mostly practised their art abroad, although some performances were presented in Singapore as dance or theatre. For his originality and influence in performance art in Southeast Asia, among other things, Tang won the Arts and Culture Prize in 1999 at the 10th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prizes. The NAC eventually reversed its no-funding rule on performance art in September 2003. Tang was one of four artists who represented Singapore at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Tang has expressed concern about environmental and social issues through his art, such as the works They Poach the Rhino, Chop Off His Horn and Make This Drink (1989) and Tiger's Whip (1991). He believes in the potential of the individual and collective to effect social changes, and his art deals with national and cultural identities. Tang has participated in numerous community and public art projects, workshops and performances.