Small Singapore Show 2.0: Taising Conversation 

2018

Curated by Jason Lee for The Artists Village, Small Singapore Show 2.0: TaiSing Conversation was a project that paired up artists from Taiwan and Singapore. They interacted with one another via virtual communication platforms with the intention to explore the notion of ‘conversations’ and how it could serve to discover, learn and connect. For a couple of months they first exchanged views on various issues through on-line conversations. From this process of learning about one another's daily life, the artists created works responding to the content of these conversations and reflective of their respective urban environments: the TaiSing conversations.

I was paired with C&G Art Group, in fact a couple made-up of Margot Guillemot from France and Chiu Chieh-sen from Taiwan. They had met while Chieh-sen was studying in Montpellier where Margot is from. They then moved to Taiwan where they now live. The idea of a collaboration using emails and web platform reminded me of a similar project I had worked on in the late 90s with Joyce Ng. Joyce was a Malaysian who lived in Johor Bahru and commuted daily over the causeway to come to work in Singapore. Driven by economic necessity, she did so with thousands of other people who had to spend two to three hours a day to complete the exhausting return journey. This endless back and forth of human crowds was a defining aspect of the region's identity. The then-emerging email platform seemed a suitable tool to give it form. It allowed us to exchange and work on digital images regardless of the physical distance.

For over a year, this virtual reflection of the very real human traffic flow developed as an artistic dialogue that transcended the political artifice drawn across the Straits of Johor in 1965. But after a while, the images started being overworked, victims of the endless possibilities offered by digital manipulations. In the end, the project never became the exhibition we had hoped for. Yet there was definitely good stuff there, so I kept the images in a corner of my computer where they waited twenty years for the images of Taiwan sent by C&G Art Group and the dialogue that made them at long last complete. Margot and Chieh-sen on the other hand used my images of Singapore and the google map of my daily moving around the island to develop a 3D map of Singapore in which the places I visited the most often were turned into object with 3D printing. It was superimposed on a transparent acrylic sheet with a map of their own daily moving around Taipei and the 3D representation of the places where they spent the most time.  

Exhibition Invite & catalogue

Exhibited Artworks

Art works by Gilles Massot

Art work by C&G Art Group

Opening night in Taipei

Small Singapore Show 2.1: Taising Conversation 

The exhibition was subsequently brought to Singapore and presented in the gallery Supernormal in February 2019
I AM MA.
As simple as that.
And I work on the space between things.
© 2017