Art Commandos

1988

The Yin Yang Festival "angels" had developed a fantastic cohesive experimental energy definitely worth revisiting. So how about getting them to take it around the city? How about turning the "angels" into "commandoes" who would strike at the heart of the city, bringing art and free expression to everyday life environment? Vincent Leow who had so efficiently taken the lead of the angels’ team would make the perfect commander while I would monitor the situation from the festival fringe headquarters.
 
A youth hostel on Sentosa was where the commandoes went for a week of "training", attending different workshops: music with the drummer of the band Heritage, dance with Berry Cha Cha, mime with Christina Sergeant, while Vincent led the visual art workshop. By the end of the week, they had put together a performance that took the form of a tribal dance performed to the sounds of makeshift percussion instruments around a modular bamboo structure gathering some of the best visual art pieces. It was performed for the first time in the Sentosa ferry terminal on a Sunday, marking the end of the week. The program that day also included a performance by the band Heritage. I contributed a performance, created earlier on that year in Kuala Lumpur for a friend's birthday, a surrealist dance performed to the tune of Talking Heads' On the Road to Nowhere and inspired by one of the characters seen in the music video of that song.
 
The next day, the commandoes moved their camp to the hall in St. Joseph's Institute, the room now known as the glass hall in the Singapore Art Museum. The artworks produced during the camp in Sentosa were displayed in that room, and the front part of the building was occupied by the installation entitled More than 4. This became the commandoes' base of action for the remaining 3 weeks of the festival, the place where they would gather to prepare their "missions" held over the weekend.

The first Sunday saw them taking the full performance, including the bamboo structure, to places such as the National Museum, Raffles Place and Orchard Road. A lighter version was put in place for the following weekend that saw them travel further by MRT to places such as the Toa Payoh Town Center and Newton Food Center. All this happened before any restriction on performance art became enforced in Singapore. In fact the two artists by whom this restrictions came to be enforced, Vincent Leow and Joseph Ng were actually members of the commandoes and basically had their first experience at public performance with this project. Whenever a policeman approached us and to ask what we were doing, we would just say: "We are part of the arts festival", and they would let us carry on.

Art Commandos

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Fringe Festival Programme Booklet

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Newspaper Review

​This event was featured in The Straits Times on June 13, 1988.
(Article) Commandos of the artistic kind in action.

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