I visited the latest exhibition held in a first-ever collaboration between the National Gallery and the ArtScience Museum yesterday! Minimalism: Space. Light. Object is split among two venues and will be running until mid-April 2019.
Room For One Colour by Olafur Eliasson, 1997. Monofrequency lamps. The photo on the left was taken inside the room, and the one on the right was taken right outside the room, with the lamps illuminating my selfie through the glass windows.The caption for this piece: This room is illuminated by monofrequency lamps that suppress all colours except yellow and black, causing us to see in shades of grey… This approach is also explored in Eliasson’s work Seu Corpo da Obra (Your body of work), on view at the ArtScience Museum, which comprises a labyrinth of translucent coloured sheets. Photos by: PX.Mega Death by Tatsuo Miyajima, 1999/2016. LED, IC, electric wire & infrared sensor. Mega Death is a dark room lit only by blue LED lights – numbers that count down at different rates, until suddenly the entire room plunges into darkness. The intervals are pretty long, so we were lucky to have viewed this piece at the right time to experience it!Ton of Tea by Ai Weiwei, 2006. Pu’er tea. Ai Weiwei was inspired by Minimalist sculptures when he lived in New York in the 80s. This compressed cube of Pu’er tea smelt so good even though it’s 12 years old already!Sunflower Seeds by Ai Weiwei, 2010. Porcelain. The floor of the gallery is covered with numerous porcelain sunflower seeds, all of which were handcrafted by artisans in China.In this overwhelming piece, Ai Weiwei challenges the notion of ‘Made in China’ being cheap mass production. Pretty cool stuff.Void by Anish Kapoor, 1989. Fibreglass & pigment. Anish Kapoor’s works touch upon the concepts of emptiness, space, and “objects becoming space”. This piece is engulfed in a rich layer of blue that extends from the wall towards the viewer and appears to flatten out at its mouth due to the lighting.Anish Kapoor’s the guy infamous for copyrighting artistic use of Vanta Black, so we were originally pretty excited to see a piece with the pigment when we saw his name. This didn’t seem to be it, but was still interesting either way.Wall Drawing #338 by Sol LeWitt, 1971. Coloured pencil. I believe that I learnt about Sol LeWitt in art history, the name was so familiar!What’s interesting about this piece is that the manifestation of this coloured pencil render on the wall is not the artwork – the set of instructions is.Impenetrable by Mona Hatoum, 2009. Black finished steel & fishing wire. Impenetrable looks delicate from afar, but upon closer inspection is made up of painful barbed wires.The National Gallery had other general exhibits going on – the current one being a feature on local artist Lim Cheng Hoe’s watercolour paintings of Singapore. To complement the exhibition, the museum laid out an activity booth in the atrium to let kids try their hands at painting on a postcard. There was a lull when we passed by, so we got our hands wet.I attempted to draw the kindly attendant’s portrait with this tray of kiddy paints.Adele expressing her frustrations with school on the picture on the left. On the right, PX took a picture of Adele and I at the booth.Of course I had my outfit photos taken after we left the museum in search of dinner. Wearing Zara shirt-dress, We Love Colors socks, Timberland shoes, Rawrow bag. Photo assist: PX.
