SINGAPORE — What sort of images does the term “landscape art” call to mind? Most of us might find ourselves imagining breathtaking views of lush forests and the sort of mountains that cry out for poems to be written about them; a settled, proprietorial sort of contemplation.
However, Thinking Of Landscape: Paintings From The Yeap Lam Yang Collection, now on at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (ICAS), takes a broader, fresher look at landscapes.
As the title suggests, the exhibition is more than just a showcase of a collector’s wide-ranging collection of landscape art; it’s also an examination of landscapes as such, and how we translate those into art.
Going by the selection on display, the exhibition seems to have zoomed out, in a sense, for a wider view of the notion of the landscape, as if taking a cue from the strategies of landscape art itself, which typically offers wide, expansive views.
After all, the show brings together everything from more traditional works in Chinese ink, by the likes of Chen Ping and Yu Peng, to Latiff Mohidin’s charting of his interior mind-scape.
Nor is the show strictly concerned with painting. While ultimately paint on canvas, the works by Natee Utarit and Michael Lee draw from areas beyond painting: Photographic techniques, processes and mass production in the former, while the latter uses architectural plans of buildings left unbuilt to invoke fleeting landscapes of imagined cities.
The layout of the works themselves also seem drawn from the conventions of landscape art, with the gallery offering a number of expansive views at a distance. Effectively, in viewing the exhibition, one enters into and travels through a landscape of sorts — a map of a prodigious collection.
As a counterpoint to this overarching project of mapping landscapes, Hafiz Osman’s Maps And Meetings, which is just next door, takes a more ground-up, organic approach. The show builds on his recent residency in Paris, during which he cycled around all 20 of the city’s core neighbourhoods and invited strangers to draw maps of their home neighbourhoods on his clothes. The result, displayed as a sort of sculptural installation, is a riot of hasty scribblings in red and blue on a mismatched collection of white, second-hand garments; the artist’s own journeys in the city, mapped onto his body in a series of chance encounters.
In returning this project to Singapore, it’s not just the content the artist changed, but the overall approach and processes used, perhaps to reflect differences between the two cities. While the core element of having random people draw their home neighbourhoods remains, these drawings are now arranged in neat grids of identically-sized sheets of paper, putting aside the organic tactility of rumpled clothing, as well as the sense of speedy encounters in motion.
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