In The Realm of Plenty

Posted on 19 January, 2012

Milk and Honey
Brian Gothong Tan
Goodman Arts Centre

The centerpiece: an installation featuring a block-like structure rising up from a field of
small pyramidal shapes, a towering slab punctuated by a grid of fluorescent windows.
The juxtaposition of little construction crane models at its feet immediately calls to mind
the rash of large-scale building projects proliferating across the local landscape in recent
years. On the reverse side is an illuminated death’s head – a grinning skull – flanked by
four skeletal figures, the iconographic tradition of the evangelists mutated into a memento
mori. The implication is clear: here is a pessimistic forecast of the social and human cost
of rampant “growth” (a recurrent buzzword of the powers-that-be), with economic progress
metonymized by infrastructural amplitude.

The rhythm of religious signification finds a coda in the dinner setting laid out on top of the
edifice. Complete with wine glasses and bowls of ceramic fruit, the opulent tableau evokes
flickering intimations of the last supper, but, more directly, the resemblance to a votive
altar, adorned with offerings of food and drink, is inescapable. The work thus functions
as a palimpsest of layered allusions: an architectural model as (quasi-)religious icon as
commentary on current socio-political realities; the architecture doubled as an altar bearing
oblations masquerading as the trappings of the good life – or at least fine dining – at the
conjunction of which a pointed observation about the blind faith in material affluence may be
made.

Welcome to Mr. Tan’s neighbourhood: the little red dot as the promised land, “flowing with
milk and honey” (Deut. 6:3).

Local artist Brian Gothong Tan’s latest show, “Milk and Honey”, imagines the experience
of contemporary Singapore as a Janus-faced vision: at once an Elysian paradise, “a land of
unusual fertility and abundance … positioned as a thriving, throbbing, modern city” (in the
artist’s own words), and a far more disquieting dystopia, where – unfurled across the wall as
a series of photographic portraits – the fervent orgy of patriotism associated with National
Day celebrations becomes instead a meditation on the issue of collective identity.

These images are probably the most compelling pieces in the show. Five Singaporeans were
made over in white body paint, with a swathe of black over the top half of their faces, and
rendered in extreme close-up. On the one hand, the practice of painting one’s face in the
national colours, red and white, for the annual N-Day festivities has been displaced by an
almost funereal palette, with a mute, steely gaze staring back unflinchingly at the viewer
from behind the veil of dis-colouration, the individualized portraits seeming to demand a
fully reciprocal regard as a disavowal of those state-sponsored processes aimed at fostering
a compliant citizenry. On the other, emerging from beneath the enforced anonymity – the
visage explicitly limned as a mask – is the intimacy of the human body observed at close
range, belying the hard precision of the painted edge slashed across the face: so scrupulous is
Tan’s camerawork that anatomical minutiae, from the capillaries in the white of the eye to the
webbed indentation of lines that coat the chapped skin of the lips, become assertive presences
insisting on their tactile immediacy, in the manner of, say, a lover’s body, the details of

which represent a quotidian yet powerful corporeality. Here, then, is a nexus of universal
identification so fundamental as to elude the grand narratives of nationality, ideology, and
ethnicity.

Elsewhere, the paradigm of textural differentiation further reinforces the conflict which Tan
locates at the heart of the (his?) Singapore experience. The smooth surfaces of the building
installation, the hi-gloss of the photographic works, the seamless movement of the imagery in
the film – which, screened on the wall in a partitioned niche, melds together a cycle of iconic
symbols, from the SIA logo to the Merlion to the figures of Stamford Raffles and Lee Kuan
Yew, into a continuous virtual loop – all serve to suggest, at the level of the material and the
metaphorical, the moneyed glitz of Singapore’s urban landscape, transformed by the pristine,
gleaming exteriors of landmark developments like the Marina Bay Sands complex and the
ION mall, among others.

Set against this are a series of smaller pieces which take as their point of departure the artist’s
growing concern with the micro-scale of lived time: “… much of my recent personal work
has been about trying to slow down time. I have taken up woodcarving, drawing, ceramics,
collecting and cultivating moss – activities which force me to devote a period of time in
solitude and quiet concentration.”

They’re all here: lichen-encrusted figurines and tree bark; notebooks filled with sketches and
doodles; wooden heads of religious figures; even bottles containing water collected from
various catchment areas around the island. Not only do they imply the sort of spaces eclipsed
by flashier commercial entities, but which nonetheless remain vital to the life of the city,
the textural array and heterogeneity of these objects – possessed of rough, grainy, cracked,
scarred surfaces – present a telling contrast to the other displays. They articulate, in their
material configurations, physical traces of those protracted processes which Tan speaks of,
durational gestures of “slow[ing] down” that resulted in richly varied fields of tactility – the
measured hand of time inscribed, literally, into the textural.