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<\/p>\nSINGAPORE \u2013 An exhibition of 15 women South-east Asian artists at Gajah Gallery is based on the story of Persian queen Scheherazade and how she transfixed others with her stories to protect herself and her loved ones.<\/p>\n
Dramatis Personae: 1001 Lives opens on Oct 29 and is curated by Joyce Toh, marshalling works by women artists from seven South-east Asian countries. Like Scheherazade, who whetted the curiosity of her murderous husband king each night by leaving him on a cliffhanger with her fantastical tales, the works speak to women\u2019s \u201cstrategies of survival\u201d.<\/p>\n
Toh, in a preview of the exhibition mid-installation, gestures at the eclectic contributions from ceramics, glazed and cracked to look like a flayed angel, to vessels woven from \u201ccreepy\u201d human hair.<\/p>\n
\u201cCreating art is also in a way like creating yourself, and we all exist in different personae. We are introverted with a particular friend, then loud with others. It\u2019s not hypocritical. We create new lives for ourselves,\u201d says the independent curator.<\/p>\n
The roster is an esteemed one, from the late I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih from Indonesia and the Philippines\u2019 Nona Garcia to Thailand\u2019s Imhathai Suwatthanaslip and Singapore\u2019s Suzann Victor.<\/p>\n
Even when no human face is discernable, the works can be taken as revelatory self-portraits, Toh says.<\/p>\n
In Garcia and Victor\u2019s cases, their subjects\u2019 faces have been deliberately obscured.<\/p>\n
Garcia, who once fetched the highest prices in all of South-east Asia at auction, is known for her photorealist paintings of the back of people\u2019s heads.<\/p>\n
The work selected is from a rare series where Garcia applied her signature approach to her artist friends. Toh says Garcia would give these to her sitters for free \u2013 a strategy of collective survival.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was a remarkably generous gift. It\u2019s interesting that at one point, especially in the 1990s, it was all these women artists from the Philippines who were fetching record-breaking prices.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is equal homage and solidarity in Imhathai\u2019s offering, which uses hair collected from Murniasih\u2019s home after her death to create porous, egg-holding vessels.<\/p>\n
Toh says Imhathai has expressed anxieties about using her own hair as she ages, an artist reframing her sense of self as physiology changes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat really reflects the poignancy of an ageing body,\u201d Toh says, and further speculates on the wooden eggs in the Murniasih hair vessels as a posthumous act of restitution: \u201cOne of the difficulties that Murniasih had in life was to be able to have children.\u201d<\/p>\n
Enthralled with the theme, Singapore artist Sarah Choo Jing has begun a new series, in which she has collected stories of women she met at various locations and crystallised them into stills reminiscent of Hong Kong film-maker Wong Kar Wai\u2019s style, shot in Singapore supermarket aisles, a laundromat, stairwell and a theatre.<\/p>\n
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Sarah Choo Jing\u2019s series features stories of women she met at various locations and crystallised into Hong Kong film-maker Wong Kar Wai-esque stills.<\/p>\n
PHOTO: GAJAH GALLERY<\/p>\n
These stylised figures with coiffed coloured hair, backless dresses and sunglasses look glamorous in their melancholy, and are sure to tempt visitors into reading the accompanying scripted text providing a window into their hidden stories.<\/p>\n
Choo says each is a composite. \u201cI am drawn to people who are often ignored or overlooked. They have very fascinating lives to me. I think also about how each individual becomes a performer, whether conscious or not. Even while talking to them, I\u2019m very cognisant of that.\u201d<\/p>\n
She traces her filmic influences to Wong, but also American surrealist David Lynch, the attention to quiet rhythms of Belgian film-maker Chantal Akerman, Taiwanese film-maker Edward Yang\u2019s sensitivity to the interiority of urban lives and American director Todd Haynes\u2019 highly constructed visual worlds that creak with otherwise overlooked tensions.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not necessarily interested in recreating a particular cinematic aesthetic. What interests me is how these different visual languages can come together in a still photograph. Everything has to exist within a single frame,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Toh says she has tried to capture the breadth of South-east Asia in the selection of artists \u2013 who include one from Myanmar and another from Papua, Indonesia \u2013 but is not always successful. Brunei, Cambodia, Laos and Timor-Leste are absent from the line-up.<\/p>\n
She prefers to think of the show as female-focused rather than a women\u2019s artist show, what with all the preconceptions \u2013 including affirmative action \u2013 that come with such a label.<\/p>\n
Dramatis Personae is a stage to reckon with the rich complexity of women\u2019s subjectivity.<\/p>\n
The artists here concern themselves with friendship, Freudian theory, motherhood, regional myth, artist rights and even the Galleon trade between Mexico and the Philippines over 250 years from the 16th to 19th centuries.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Wawi Navarroza\u2019s Sheherazade: Nine Lives, A Thousand Faces (The Burden Of Representation, Self-Portrait).<\/p>\n
PHOTO: GAJAH GALLERY<\/p>\n
With the example of a maximalist self-portrait by Filipino artist Wawi Navarroza, who holds up a mirror while surrounded by Cebuano and batik textiles and pageant ribbons that read \u201cOriental\u201d and \u201cFilipina\u201d, Toh bids visitors re-examine their instincts.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt first, you go \u2018Yes, of course, a female artist, totally self-absorbed.\u2019 But bend a little closer and you will see the mirror\u2019s facing the other way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Book It\/Dramatis Personae: 1001 Lives<\/p>\n