by Michele Adriaens, 22 Apr 2012 |
Hema Lata is a Fine Art (Sculpture) student at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) who transforms humble paper into art. In 2011, she participated in ‘New Asian Imaginations: (Re) searching the Arts in Southeast Asia’, a symposium held at NAFA, as a sculptor for the performance, ‘Borobudur Re-Visited’ and received the Ngee Ann Kongsi Scholarship for Diploma Studies. Hema is now exploring the idea of the reading experience through sculpture, drawings and visual mind-mapping.
“In my work, I break down paper to build new forms. I work mainly with paper as a medium because of its intriguing qualities that I continue to learn about every time I rework it into something new – be it found paper materials, for instance, books and discarded cardboard in What It’s Like to Get Through Books and Momentary Refuge or ready made paper Iris and Thinking. I am intrigued by the strength and versatility of papers when they are reworked – the two qualities I continue to challenge as I keep working with it. Working with paper also allows me to explore the spectrum between drawing and sculpture. Very often, I find myself writing or drawing on paper before cutting them out to build up forms which challenge the possibility of how the flat pieces of cut-out drawings can be stacked up to form sculptures – in Thinking and The Cat Who Went Bananas.”
by Michele Adriaens, 6 Feb 2012 |
Singapore’s only art walkabout, OH! Open House, visits Tiong Bahru on 18, 19, 25 and 26 February. This year’s event expects to take 1500 strangers on tour into the heart of Tiong Bahru. Fifteen artists have installed their artworks – spanning a range of sculpture, photography, video, installation, interactive media – in six real life homes in the conserved and postwar apartments.
The tour will be touching on some of the issues there like gentrification, the clash of old and new, Eastern and Western through both the tours and artworks. For example, one of the artists is tackling the Speak Mandarin campaign, which has created a barrier between dialect speaking generation and the young. There will also be unique photo opportunities into private and intimate spaces of Tiong Bahru. Some highlights also include a reconstruction of an artist’s bedroom and life in its entirety using only plastic tape, an interactive light installation that will track 1500 OH! visitors, a site-specific project with Singapore’s first Monkey God temple, a scientific lab located in a bathroom dealing with what else – waste management and a social sculpture to create a new Tiong Bahru food court.
Confirmed artists are Ang Song Nian, Cindy Salim, Dilys Ng, Gilles Massot, Green Zeng, Isabelle Desjeux, Jying Tan, Lavender Chang, Marc Gabriel Loh, Mark Wong, Patrick Storey, Race Krehel, Sokkuan Tye, Stephen Black and Zhao Renhui.
OH! will be open from 4pm till 9pm on 18, 19, 25 and 26 February. The tour starts at Tiong Bahru Community Ctr, 67A Eu Chin Street. $15 tickets are sold at the door, and the last tour leaves at 8pm. Visit the website for details.
by Michele Adriaens, 15 Dec 2011 |
Click to watch the video.
Tok Wei Yuan gradutaed with a diploma in Fine Arts (Sculpture) from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. He is currently pursuing a Bachelor in Fine Arts (Photography and Digital Imaging) at Nanyang Technological University, and is exploring ways to utilize both disciplines through a series of stop motion animations.
“My work is based on the concept of nature being constantly in a state of flux, and highlights the responsibility and impact of the actions of humanity on the world. The World As We Know & The End Of The World As We Know It, is a collab with Marni Rose Long Dworkin , and addresses the idea of how nature evolves and adapts, changing visually overtime in reaction to changes in their habitats -examples include food supply, climate, invasive species. We believe that this process has become accelerated due to our (humans) actions as a species, to the point where all of nature we know now would be different in someway in the future (either due to extinction or evolution, from something as minor as a longer beak to something as major as a new species hybrid), and all that we would have left of the animals now would be photo and text documentation in fiction and science. And even that, would eventually be lost. Hence, the work is taken to it’s logical conclusion and set on fire. But the act of burning something is also in some fashion, an act of preservation, based on my Chinese heritage, where objects burnt are sent into the keeping of one’s ancestors.”
