Native revisions—a new morphology

Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore

11 February – 12 April 2017

LASALLE College of the Arts

Chua Chye Teck, Noh Suntag, Anup Mathew Thomas, Tomoko Yoneda

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The title of this exhibition was adapted from an earlier more innocuous title by Anup Mathew Thomas. Native ball and revisionsis the title of a 2014 series of panoramic colour photographs of an indigenous ball game being played again in Kerala, India. The old rules for this game are a little fluid and the game gets going nearly anywhere that is convenient. There are two of these photographs in the exhibition along with other major works by Thomas made between 2008 and 2016. In using Native revisionsas a title for her exhibition, curator Melanie Pocock focuses on scenography that is adapted and imprinted over what was there before.

For her ensemble installation, Pocock chose the work of four artists—alongside Anup Mathew Thomas (India) there were Chua Chye Teck (Singapore), Noh Suntag (South Korea) and Tomoko Yoneda (Japan). Each of the artists envisages processes of returning to and photographing familiar places, places to which they are or were connected. Each work idiosyncratically presents a contingent sense of place and photographic image. Place or what is ‘natural’ (or native) is drawn as temporal and changeable, effected by seemingly intangible qualities given to time and people.

Pocock marks out this direction early in her catalogue essay where she draws attention to how postmodern narratives have generalised national markers of identity. ‘Native’ has come to represent exclusive content in terms of the culture industry. One could say that the overwhelming pressure on contemporary artists is to identify ‘place’ within what are relatively new national cultural systems. This sort of arm-twisting can be seen in the work of Chua Chye Teck who is represented by Beyond wilderness (2014-16), a series of black and

Anup Mathew Thomas, Scene from a wake, 2016. Installation view, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts, 2017. Photograph Geraldine Kang.

Noh Suntag, The strAnge ball, 2004–07. 6 digital prints, each 54 × 81cm. Courtesy the artist.