SOTA Art’s Festival 2011 Details

Hi everyone!!

Here are some of the details of the SOTA Art’s Festival 2011 that are coming up in July for more than 2 weeks!!

Presenting – in tune, in step, in flight

SOTA Arts Festival 2011 marks our first festival in our new campus, and offers a blend of traditional and contemporary artistic vocabularies, highlighting creative work stemming directly from our curriculum.

Summary:
The Festival boasts 17 days of music, theatre, dance and visual arts, including a dance showcase, three theatre productions, two exhibitions and eleven music concerts, presented in our purpose built arts venues as well as site-specific locations around the campus. The programme includes works from our partner schools from around the world–China, Australia, Switzerland, Denmark and USA.

The Website:

http://www.sota.edu.sg/events/ArtsFest2011_Students/

General Information:

http://www.sota.edu.sg/events/ArtsFest2011_Students/generalinfo.asp

Events and Registration:

http://www.sota.edu.sg/events/ArtsFest2011_Students/events.asp

Time

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One of three works that were actually finished during the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and a work that I am really proud of.

The final work features a triangular clock with a speaker placed at the back of it amplifying the sound that the inductors inside the clock picks up from the three separate mechanisms. It is also accompanied by a photographic manipulation of a clock taken at different angles and layer one on top of another. Similar to the work Old Man – Motion, this work was slightly inspired by Michael Wesley’s Open Shutter project, playing with the 4th dimension – time.

This piece aimed to emphasize time  as it was and how we are in the flow of it. It is an inescapable element of our lives even though it may have been possibly man made and not a definite numerical thing. Therefore, I portrayed it with only the second hand, emphasizing the movement and the flow of time, but leaving the two other hands which could be said to be “invented”. The sound that is heard further brings forth the notion of the constant passage and flow of time, so much so it can get to our head sometimes. I got the idea from the period before I sleep every night. As I sometimes fine great difficulty falling asleep, I start to take notice of things which are otherwise neglected in our hectic lifestyle, the simple ticking of a clock. Time has always fascinated me and by paying attention so closely to something so mundane as that, it drew out the concept of showing the flow and inevitability of time in my art.

I will be linking another work to this work which has a similar concept. It is also a time piece, but a media work that was done in school. In total, this work took 8 hours to conceive and create.

Theo Jansen

Arthur Ganson

One of my great inspirations and the one who really drove me to make interactive artworks. He is an engineer by training and used his training to create amazing sculptures that use simple mechanics. However, these works of art are entirely hand made, each and every small little detail.

What caught my attention about his art work was how he developed his own tools to create these incredible work, tools such as a gear centering machine and a gear “bending” guide to bend the wires into gears by hand. This drove me for the whole of last year to create “gear” related sculpture, whether in wax casting or in the wood. These project however were not finished.

Nevertheless, he is one example that has shown me how art and the sciences are closer than we think, and it is the arts which gives another layer of depth to the sciences and visa versa.

Red Dragonflies

A film by Liao Jiekai

Synopsis:

Red Dragonflies

An amazing film by Liao Jiekai who is part of SOTA’s Visual Arts and Media Facutly. An amazing part of this film and one of the most captivating aspect of this film is the use of the fourth dimension. time. Due to the ingenuitive utilization of the fourth dimension, there are many different interpretations that can be made about the film. It was made to give the illusion of many time lapses, jumping from the past to present, present to past, back and forth. But it still leaves us to question if that is so, for if it is a chronological film, it still would make sense.

Some might find it confusing, much like some of my friends and I, due to it sequences of the scenes and the places that they occur. But that is the most captivating aspect that brings one to love the film so much. The filmography was also extremely beautiful, with many techniques use that brought the film to life and allowed people to relate to it, similar to how we would view scenes not always as the big picture, but focusing on small details. It also drew me in as the audience and made me yearn for more.

The story is amazingly coherent and fluid. An amazing piece of work altogether!

13 Little Pictures:

Red Dragonflies

Red Dragonflies website:
http://www.reddragonflies.sg/

City in a Bottle: Ice Lit Ruins

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City in a Bottle: Island

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This is the first “bottle work” I ever made, and it only came after one or two years of viewing a similar exhibition at Singapore Art Museum 8 Queen Street (SAM 8Q). However, I forgot the exact name of the exhibition and the artist.

The difference is that i consider that the works I made are sketches in three-dimension rather than the usual two-dimensional. Through my practice and studies, I have realized that I always see things in three-dimensions rather than things on a flat surface such as paper. I usually envision things from all angles and immediately allow the “spontaneous juices” to flow in all my works. This way, people can experience a space, form, etc. from all angles an see it as a person looking from the outside and the way that I see it. Similar to my artworks, I hope to allow people to experience a space and be part of it, and in this way, these “sketches” could be marquettes for future pieces.

Somehow, these small pieces imbues a certain small joy and curiosity within the view and to myself. Maybe it is due to the idea of making something that is not tangible into something that we can grasp. Now, the challenge would be to make it into something that people can experience for themselves, very much similar to interior design and architecture, but more fantastical.

More of these pieces will be put up, some of which are lighted. Sizes range from 1cm in length/diameter and 4cm in height to 10cm in length/diameter and 15cm in height.

Pilgrim: Amazing Grace

One of the sketches I did very early on when I decided to hide words in my drawings. I actually let the drawing flow, having no intention of actually drawing a human figure in the work itself, which was the last thing that I drew in. The drawing started more or less from the left to hand corner and I added on as I saw fit. But in the end, the face somehow gave balance to the drawing and brought it to another level altogether.

Somehow I lost the “art” of hiding words in such drawings and it has been quite tough getting back into drawing such picture. I am gradually getting back into it and attempting to bring such pictures to another level in one way or another.

The words hidden in the picture: Amazing grace how sweet the… Leaving out the last word for people to “complete it”.

Welcome all comments and critiques!

Future Sight

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Future Sight
Plywood
50cm x 50cm x 240cm
2010

This was a project inspired by the theme Form. The only other requirement was that the final piece had to be something larger than oneself.

No rigorous planning or measurement went into the execution of the sculpture. In many ways, I just let the sculpture flow and take shape. It started from a small “box” mad of plywood, roughly 40cm by 40cm then I just added pieces of plywood on and let it take shape to something that was more aesthetically interesting and unusual.

Many of my works in the past year were inspired by Magic: the Gathering “land cards” especially from the set called Ravinca. These lands portrayed cities and places of the underworld, places that every child or gamer would have a burning desire to explore. Thus my goal, from a young age, I desired to make fantasy into reality, or rather the 2-dimensional into something tangible, the 3-dimensional. This way, people would hopefully be able to be immersed into an unknown world or a world of their dreams. This particular work carries connotations to the concept of a marquette of a building in architecture, which gives the audience an all-round perspective of the “design” of a city in the making. However, the fantasy aspect comes from the fact that it is unlivable. Like many fantasy drawings, there are points whereby there is something that is just not right with the drawing and allows it to depart the realm of reality to that of the fantastical.

Exhibited in the School Of The Arts (SOTA) Singapore:
SOTA Art Showcase 2010
SOTA End-of-Year Showcase 2010
SOTA Open House 2011
SOTA Visual Arts Programme Brief

Night Life

This is just a follow up from the “Old man – Motion” work inspired by Michael Wesley’s open shutter project. It marks the final piece that was suppose to be presented in the SAIC Summer Program Exhibition 2010. It is a contrast of two pictures of night and day and the movements that occur in each environment. Both are done using the same technique of photography whiles moving to capture movement around us.

The presentation method was inspired by Michael Wesley’s photograhy to convey the changes of movement. But rather than it being a single exposure over a long period of time, they are made up of a few photos over a short period to achieve a similar effect. The focus was more to achieve the aesthetic appeal rather than just the conceptual.