International Art News

Lee Wen, Splash, digital print on archival paper (Edition 3/5), 61 x 76 cm, Singapore Art Museum collection

From the 20th of April to June 10, 2012 – Singapore Art Museum
Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real is an exhibition of works by Lee Wen, a multidisciplinary artist and one of Singapore’s most internationally recognised contemporary artists. His earliest known work in a book entitled A Waking Dream (1981) with texts and drawings preceded the manga generation of today and showed evidence of his inclination in using dreams, metaphor and myth-making to manifest a narrative of our perception of life and reality.

Best known for his Yellow Man series of work, Lee is also one of the Singapore artists who pioneered in the field of performance art. Through various constructed personas, his work allow visitors an insight into the artist and provocateur, whose very being is motivated by a strong conviction of justice and idealism, with a persistence to stay true to the self in a highly structured world.

In this exhibition, Lee will be presenting key works spanning two-and-a-half decades alongside more recent ones. The vast selection includes installations, photographs, videos and documentations. Lee will also perform ‘live’ during selected exhibition periods and talk about his experiences and personal development as an artist, covering subjects such as memories and myth-making.

Museum Hours

Eko Nugroho: The Mask, 2008 Acrylic on canvas, 180 x 200 cm

12 March to 26 June 2011 – Singapore Art Museum
Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, 1991 – 2010
Negotiating Home, History and Nation presents the work of fifty-five seminal practitioners in contemporary art from six Southeast Asian countries (Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, The Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia) created over the last two decades. The exhibition showcases pieces of art spanning the early years of contemporary art-making in the region to the present, drawn mostly from the Singapore Art Museum collection. This extensive survey gives audiences the opportunity to form a cogent picture of the diverse realities and threads linking Southeast Asia and its art through inquiries into topics such as nation building, urbanisation, religious and gender discourse from an Asian perspective. Amongst the artists featured are Dadang Christanto (Indonesia), Kamin Lertchaiprasert (Thailand), Suzann Victor (Singapore), Wong Hoy Cheong (Malaysia), Tran Luong (Vietnam) and Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan (The Philippines). Through a broad range of media including photography, video, painting, performance and installation art, the exhibition provides an entry to the specific characteristics of Southeast Asia’s aesthetic language and offers a key to understanding some of the region’s more recent political and social developments. Negotiating Home, History and Nation is a collaboration between SAM director Tan Boon Hui, SAM curator Khairuddin Hori and guest curator Iola Lenzi.

Museum Hours

Natee Utarit, Tales of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 2009, oil on linen, 240 x 200 cm, Singapore Art Museum collection

Until the 20th of  February 2011 – Singapore Art Museum
Predictions of the end of painting have been with us for over a century. Within Southeast Asia however, painting continues to develop as a major medium of artistic expression with its own unique aesthetic sensibilities, and it is in this context that the Singapore Art Museum presents After Painting, a mid-career survey of Thai artist Natee Utarit.

An exceptional painter whose career spans over two decades, Natee’s stunningly vivid paintings have for a long time, been a series of dialogues and debates on established Western painting traditions; his ultimate aim to develop new possibilities for painting. The artist’s recent work, however, has increasingly been commentaries on Thai society and identity, and helps place him among his fellow Southeast Asian artists who continue to use visual art as a way of reflecting on the changing social-political situations in the region. Natee Utarit: After Painting features more than 70 paintings drawn from the Singapore Art Museum, the Bangkok University, the Queensland Art Gallery as well as private collections in Europe, Asia and the region.

Museum Hours