Heist at the Museum: “Floating Utopias”
At Heist, the team is always on the lookout for interesting cultural events such as movie screenings or art exhibitions. A couple of weeks ago, the Heist team went on a field trip to the ArtScience Museum to experience Floating Utopias (on view 25 May — 29 September 2019). Below are some of the team’s thoughts:
Venus: It was nice to spend an afternoon getting ‘carried away’ by the charming works displayed in the ‘Floating Utopia’ exhibition. Often, when we think of inflatable objects most of us think of big bouncy castles or cute cartoon animals but through the exhibition, I was surprised to see these objects portrayed in a different light. They are no longer a whimsical means of childhood escape but political statements or satire that forces people to ponder about pressing issues. My favourite work from the exhibition is the ‘Survivaball’ by the Yes Men. By inflating a giant Hazmat suit and marketing it as a solution to climate change, it calls to attention how big corporations redirect the negative attention surrounding the damage they are doing to the world through ineffective solutions that make little impact.
Fangling: As a fan of kawaii culture, I have always defined cute to be anything that exuberates innocence, vulnerability, anything that looks soft and round. It is an innate quality of mine to quickly determine if something looks cute or not and I have always been decisive with my judgements. However, when I stumbled upon Momoyo’s Torimitsu’s “I Don’t Feel Comfortable” giant inflatable bunny at the exhibition (see photograph below), I was taken aback and was immediately forced to rethink what it means to be cute. While the giant pink bunny was pink, big, round and carried the qualities of ‘cute’, yet the enormous presence of the bunny as it is hunched over while housed in a small space had somehow caused it to look uncanny rather than cute. It was a bewildering experience for sure! The exhibit also unravelled that this bunny is also the artist’s witty commentary over how the diminutive apartments that the Japanese built can be compared to “rabbit-hutches” as have become the common living spaces of the modern Japanese people.
Sofia: As human beings who walk the Earth, looking above us to the unknown with child-like curiosity can be a magical experience, which resurfaced for me as we strolled through the ArtScience Museum. Prior to the exhibition, inflatable objects rhymed with aerial, exploration, and even advertisement. However after the viewing, a new perspective unfolds and the list expands: disrupting, inspiring, spatial, scalable, whimsical, and even uncomfortable (in reference to Momoyo Torimitsu’s piece Somehow I Don’t Feel Comfortable, 2000). That being said, my favourite piece of inflatable artwork was Luke Jerram’s Museum of the Moon (2019). Inviting the mega-satellite to our Earth was a playful reversed scenario of the moon landing. As people walked around the piece I thought to myself: this time, we orbit around the moon instead of it orbiting around us.
Right: Museum of the Moon by Luke Jerram (2019)
Kajal: I’d been feeling a bit uninspired lately and seeking a new perspective in Singapore. While we often travel for work, Singapore is home base and the lack of urban art sometimes bothers me. So off we went to ‘Floating Utopias’. I especially loved the work by Dawn Ng — Walter, and how she used a playful giant rabbit to draw our eyes to the beauty of urban environments we take for granted. The front lawn of a HDB, a small hardware store, a typical street in the heartlands of Singapore — all places visited by Walter. There were a lot of fantastic pieces in this exhibit, but the quizzical rabbit forcing me to find beauty and inspiration in the mundane was my favourite.
The Grass Is Always Greener On The Inside
Mirror Mirror
Once Upon A House
(2010)
All in all, this was a time of creativity and discovery. Paired with delicious ice cream, an afternoon at the museum is a great way to get our creative juices flowing, an element so essential for the work we do on a daily basis.
