Singapore Biennale 2011 - Life as Art

If you are one of those who feel contemporary art is moving too fast and far into the abstract and conceptual, try wrapping your head around the works by the "boy band" trio, The Propeller Group (TPG).  Their art may just push you over the edge. 

"We are a collaborative," says Tuan Andrew Nguyen (furthest left), the founding member.  And the group consists of another American educated Vietnamese, Phu Nam and their close American friend Matt Lucero.  All in their mid 30s,  they don't exactly qualify as a "boy" band as such, but they have the savvy and knowing of the "new black", ahead-of-the-curve citizens of Silicon Valley - all educated in the arts in California, referred to fondly as their "Cal-Arts days way back in 2002".

Exactly what's a "collaborative"?  Their skills-set compliments each other, and they all have media background - producing music videos, documentaries and TV commercials.  Formed in 2006, TPG's works stretch the world of contemporary art to its mind twisting limits.  Each work forces you to ask, what is contemporary art?  Or is it even art?

First off, they don't physically do the work, at each stage, they hire or commission other professionals.  "Yes, you can say we are like a boy band," says Tuan.  "Except we are NOT the band, but the people behind it."  Confused?  It gets better.  They consider themselves the "creative think tank" behind every "project".  So typically, on any project, the trio puts their collective and creative minds together and gets various groups as "partners" in the process.

For the Singapore Biennale 2011, which stretches from 13 March to 15 May, their contribution is "TVC Communism 2011", TVC is TV Commercial (The work is actually commissioned by the Singapore Biennale).  What a visitor sees at the National Museum is a video installation that captures a brainstorming session that had gone on for five days to create "a cutting edge global media campaign promoting and gaining positive brand identity for communism".  This project is done in conjunction with TBWA, the award-winning advertising force behind mega campaign successes for companies like Apple, Nissan and Adidas.

The participants in the video are the actual staff of TWBA Vietnam.  The next stage (which is not part of this Biennale) involves them making a pitch to TPG, with storyboard and animatics (mock-up of the actual television commercial using images, music and voice overs).  Once TPG approves it, the trio will raise funds to get the 30-second TV commercial produced.  So it involves hiring professionals for it.  "If we have enough money, there is no stopping us hiring an Oscar winning director or actor for the commercial, someone like Angelina Jolie?" Matt asks jokingly.  But that sly smile that is almost covered by his moustache and beard seems to add, "We are serious, we want the best."

And at this stage, it is just starting to get interesting.  When the commercial is produced, TPG will put on their "poor-artist" hats on again to raise funds.  More money?  Yes, they need money to buy airtime in TV channels, spread it virally online, produce commercials for the commercial so that the world audience will get a chance to see it.

Before you enter the room of the video installation at the National Museum, there is a text at the entrance telling you, "This installation is the first step in realising the actual television commercial and getting it broadcast worldwide."  Another text below betrays the art, "All political systems and ideologies need their PR and advertising people," it says.  "The Propeller Group, a collaborative art group located in Ho Chi Minh and Los Angeles, are on hand to pay tribute to the process of working with cultural producers situated outside the art realm...this video of a round table advertising brainstorming session is shot from the outside-in into an inside-out panoramic view of how advertising processes politics.  The advertising campaign becomes the work and the television commercial becomes a video artwork."

"All TV commercials want you to buy something, like a watch, or try to get you to do something, like vote for someone," says Tuan.  "Our commercial is like any out there in the ocean of mass media.  What separates us from the commercial output is the intention of our work."  More often then not, producers of mass media don't question themselves of the ramifications of what they put out there in the world.  "Which is ok," says Tuan matter-of-factly.  "That's how things are, whether we like it or not.  But that is the distinguishing factor between art and media.  The intention of the work - we want to pose questions every step of the way, at every point of the process."  He pauses and then adds, "Ultimately, we try to create disorder, hoping that disorder in such particular instances can become another 'sense of order' to an audience that may be all too afraid of change, or not accepting of other possible ways of engaging with their current cultural or social structures."

All of TPG's projects swim in the real world, and are part and parcel of what the contemporary world is interested in.  For instance, when Oliver Fricker was sentenced to five months in jail and given three strokes of the cane for spray-painting a MRT coach, the TPG commissioned renowned graffiti artists to paint on a wall in a street in Singapore.  "The graffiti is still there," says Tuan with pride but without any trace of brag as he flips his iPad out showing a bigger than life image of a man being painted on the side of a shop house with a group of by-standers looking.

"We want to bring art out of the confines of a gallery into the real world," says Matt.  "Every stage of our work involves dealing with different people and we discover different issues and problems - that's life."  And that's art to them.  At every phase, the "audience" is different, everyone involved becomes collaborator and/or audience of the work, and in the most successful cases they become both.

TPG uses every form of media as its medium.  They describe themselves as artists obsessed with the media who try hard not to be limited by the medium.  "Media controls every aspect of our lives today, it is the single most powerful form of engagement.  Because of the media, people in the US protested against the Vietnam War; in Vietnam the media was used as propaganda against the Americans," Tuan looks at Matt. "And that's only the political domain.  The media is even more pervasive in popular culture from music videos to drama and movies.  Michael Jackson's iconography is very powerful today, like Elvis.  If used strategically, you can do unimaginable stuff with it."

TPG's "TVC Communism" is aligned to the theme of the Singapore Biennale 2011, which is "Open House" - where the entire Singapore is "opened" for the public, as audience, to see the everyday and routine as "art".  Says Phu Nam via email, the only part of the trio who could not make it for the Biennale, "Art isn't and shouldn't be an isolated cultural phenomena separate from life.  It should not be limited and made stagnant by how it's categorised.  If someone says art can't be on TV or vice versa, a TV commercial can't be consider art, well we think the opposite."

Looking through the broken prism of Ronald Ventura

If you are in danger of suddenly becoming very rich and are on the look out for an investment alternative, consider art.  Good Chinese and Indian contemporary art are expensive (yes, in millions).  Southeast Asian Art is still “affordable”.  And even within Southeast Asia, top Indonesian modern and contemporary artists have also headed northwards to the million dollar mark.  But good Filipino art is still within reach, if you act fast enough.

And the name on everyone’s lips for Filipino art is Ronald Ventura.  I know his art, but it suddenly occurs to me I have not even seen a photograph of him.  Roberta Dans, the owner of the gallery who represents him in Singapore, keeps me company as we wait for the poster-boy of the Filipino contemporary art scene to arrive.

At 38, Ronald Ventura is already on top of his craft.  Part of the excitement of meeting him is to find out how he plans to up his game.  He hasn’t given any hint of what his new series is, or any time frame of when collectors can expect any new work.  So for now, if you can get your hands on any work of his, grab it!

He is considered one of the most successful contemporary artists to have emerged from the Philippines.  At the Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong in October 2008, a painting showing a head of a man in a gas mask littered with colourful Disney figures titled “Nesting Ground”, sold for HK$2.18 million or S$390,000.  The sound of the descending hammer that sealed the bid echoed across the Southeast Asian art world as loud as the gasp of those in the auction room – Ronald Ventura had just set a world record for any Filipino contemporary art at auctions.  A Singaporean whispered to his shocked companion, “Two years ago, I could get any piece by Ronald Ventura for 10 or 15 thousand.”

Collectors should know that wisdom is never punctual and hindsight is a rear view mirror for “what ifs” and “should haves”.  From being a hip and affordable artist where collectors could commission works for about 15 thousand dollars to essentially an “untouchable”, Ronald Ventura’s career has been nothing short of meteoric.  Today, anyone with a piece of his work holds it like a new found treasure, equivalent to standing on a piece of property in a good location; the feeling is one of exhilaration from ascending worth.  Following “Nesting Ground”, last year “Natural Lies”, his satirical painting of a boy with a long nose, hit a new high, also at Sotheby’s for HK$2.54 million.

When Ventura finally arrives, it is as if I have known the man all my life.  Even behind dark brown shades, I expect him to be soft spoken and not quite willing to explain his works beyond the obvious.  I senses an old soul in the body of a young man.  He dismisses the whole “overnight success” connotation – if anyone thinks of him as an overnight wonder, well, it’s been a long night, quoting a certain diva from Hollywood.  His fingernails wear remnants of dark coats of nail paint.  A stainless steel ring holding a Damien Hirst-esque human skull hangs heavily on his middle finger.  “I made this ring,” he says matter-of-factly.

Art visited him early.  “I knew the alphabets from A to J only, but I could draw a door or a Japanese robot,” says Ventura.  He knew his calling and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.  He also taught art for almost ten years before throwing himself lock, stock and paints into being a professional artist.
Although he has a distinct and instantly recognisable style, style is just a medium.  “It’s what I have to say that matters.”  And boy does he have a lot to say for an introvert.  Dark doesn’t even begin to explain Ronald Ventura’s world where canvas after apocalyptic canvas depict a world where humanity has been sucked out and man has been automated to digital precision and dumbness.

His son has been his compass and model for many of his paintings since he was five.  He observes how his son reacts to the environment around him.  From his paintings, it is not difficult to sense his apprehension, even fear, for the kind of world his son will be growing up into.  Different layers of alienation as theme run through all phases of his career, and Ventura approaches every empty canvas with this heavy responsibility and heavier images.

His first solo exhibition, “All Souls Day” in 2001 wrestled with the issue of gender and conditions of men and women have to deal with.  But his landmark show was “Human Study” in 2005 at the Art Centre in Metro Manila, where images conjured a kind of “contemporary hell”.  Then, while the images disturbed, his virtuosity as both a painter and sculptor caught the attention of the discerning art world leading to his ground-breaking show, “Mapping The Corporeal” at the National University of Singapore in 2008.  In the words of curator Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, he laid the “groundwork for an investigation of the com-modification of the human body, paranoia and religious consciousness in modern societies.”

Ventura’s torment of the human condition attracted the attention of Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York in 2009, a gallery in the Chelsea area that specialises in the contemporary art of Southeast Asia.  The gallery objective is to put the spotlight on some of the most exciting trends in contemporary art, and Ventura’s “realities” fit the gallery’s search then to a T.  Titled “Metaphysics of Skin”, it was Ventura’s border-less world of the complex mutating environment that humans had to live in.  “My inspiration comes from all places,” says Ventura.  “In the Philippines and everywhere in the world.  Art is universal; you can develop something not based on your motherland.  My art has no nationality.”

Quite apart from the atomic visuals on show, Ventura introduced his now famous “Zoomanities”, a battalion of mutant-men sculptures waging war on the very notion of sculptures itself.  In fiberglass, resin, plastic, metal, silver, bronze, mostly hand painted, were gas-masked figures, human with animal heads, tattooed creatures with no name – all culminating into a cast of mutant rejects of an unrecognisable world.

From the hyper-realistic, to something borrowed from art history or memories from animated Disney fairy tales, the artist’s ability to juxtapose these images results in works crowded with fantasies without boundaries.  Despite of, or indeed because of these nightmare realities, every exhibition of his is keenly awaited.  Exhibitors, galleries and collectors hold a collective breathe when he unleashes a new series.

What’s next?  All Ventura lets on is a project with Sotheby’s.  His current works are still silently exploding in his head as he continues to find new means and mediums to express his dismay.  I sense a quiet and resolved disappointment of a lack of moral code today.  His colourful Disney figures continue to visit as immortals and observers, not relevant to his totally stunned-to-silence human figures and faces, these figures seem to ruminate over history’s failings and its discontent.

If there is light at the end of his desperately dismal tunnel, that would be his ceaseless energy to inquire through various forms his almost inexpressible world.  And we, as audience will be cautioned and made aware through his wondrous creations, the perils of complacency and contentment.