master chen's ducks

Fra Angelico's The Annunciation - a fresco in a monastery in Florence, heavenly city of the Renaissance, heralding the new magic of perceiving thick and solid objects represented on flat surfaces.

It's a well-known achievement. Since the Renaissance painters have been able to create the illusion of depth by adhering to the geometrical rules of perspective in their painting. The spectator can stand before such paintings and look in, beyond the painted surface, into another world, as fleshly populated and thickly architectural as ours.

On a recent visit to the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) I stood before a Chinese ink and colour painting of ducks by Chen Wen Hsi, a China-born artist who visited Singapore in 1949 and stayed on to paint, teach, and make it home until his death in 1991. The painting was one of the works at the artist's centennial exhibition at SAM until 8 April 2007.

There are four ducks, two swimming from the top and the other two from the right. Their necks are either craning toward the left or else they point their beaks in that direction. There are a few straggly grasses in the foreground across the width of the painting, suggesting a bank that overlaps into the space where the spectator stands. The ducks are paddling in water that is evoked across the paper without any visual clue to its depth except for the positioning of the ducks and the grasses. It is an emptiness in its absence of perspectival clues, in its flatness - as flat as the paper the artist's fingers pressed on; but also emptiness that fills out into meaning and content from the suggestion of webbed feet in the sparing dabs of colour beneath the rightmost duck's body.



Look, no horizon in sight! There extends a space like a hemisphere over the ducks, a space filled out from two arcs you might trace from joining the four edges of the picture diagonally. You might move in this space, hovering over the birds like a god or calling to them from the bank with feet planted on the ground. Or reach a hand inside, as I did, even with the poor substitute of the print in the catalogue.

Master Chen's ducks bob across the papery, watery surface. Do they look east or west? Probably both, following the master's lead.

Willy Wonka's cousin and tropical oompa loompas

On a recent evening noisy notes (my other half) and I were at an event at the National Museum organized by a European bank, part of the round of parties held for Singapore06. There were cocktails, canapes, live music, acrobats, and an exhibition of photographs by a Japanese artist from the bank's collection. The National Museum has not yet re-opened, and I must say it is quite an experience to take the escalator to its new basement level with a glass of wine in hand and to look up at the night sky through the glass ceiling.

There are two rooms in the basement currently displaying artworks from the Singapore Biennale. They were deserted, save for the two of us and the one or two men in suits who had wandered in from the party upstairs. There was a photograph of the Last Supper, wax figures at Madame Tussaud's taken by Sugimoto Hiroshi. There was a series of oil paintings of a man in varying seated poses and brandishing different disabilities called "The Artist Is A Lonely Heart" by Thai artist Chatchai Puipia.

Back upstairs we walked around looking for things to eat. That was when we met a woman in a chef's uniform who courteously showed us the chocolates and other sweets she had prepared.

"What is the name of your caterer?" we asked after eating a nest-like pastry with a hint of aniseed in its heart, and a half-coat of bitter dark chocolate, the name of which escapes me (Malfunctioning memory, the effect of drink and disturbing paintings on a mainly empty stomach).

"I can't tell you. I signed an agreement not to say," she said, "But I can tell you that I own a chocolate factory. And I have represented Singapore at chocolate competitions." Now I know what it means when in story books they say: "with a twinkle in her eye". Noisy notes suggested that she sign a less constraining contract at future functions. She handed him a tiramisu chocolate. "Here, try this."

The smile on Willy Wonka's Southeast Asian cousin's face widened when I said that the rose pastry she had urged me to try reminded me of the Middle East. One second later I got it: "It's like a Turkish Delight." I can easily eat a plate of those. They give me a magic-carpet high. I had two of the rose pastries. (They're called flanner or something like it though they are not at all like flans. "Flannel," insists noisy notes on the drive home, the effect of drink and too many meetings with suits on a mainly empty stomach.)

I am the size of a hobbit and I could see the top of her chef's headgear (another name to look up). She said it again, thinking we might not have heard it the first time, "I have a chocolate factory. We make chocolates for hotels . . . and some companies who say their chocolates come from other places." I wonder if she is a renegade Oompa Loompa. No - she is too pretty.

Noisy notes said, "You can't tell us the name of your company but surely you can tell us your name?"

Chef Jane Chan, you and the chocolates you made and your fabulous chocolate factory in Woodlands, they will always be part of our memories of our first visit to the new National Museum.

academia amnesia

When poetry and poets were deemed dangerous by the Greeks, famously Plato declaimed, "We can admit no poetry into our city save only hymns to the gods and the praises of good men." Around the work of art there was awe, or to use Plato's term, "divine terror". (Ahh, how delicious, such ambivalence.)

In The Man Without Content , Giorgio Agamben explores the transformation of art from the ancients' sense of its overwhelming power to the contemporary experience of aesthetic taste and enjoyment. Art was once firmly in the sphere of interest; now it has become "merely interesting". From its deep and ineluctable oneness with the godly, the spiritual, and the immanent, the work of art has become a thing of subjectivity in its creation and a product for disinterested consumption in its reception. Agamben is not a high priest lamenting the destruction of art's place in the temple or its schism from deities. But he does provide a thought-provoking account of the artist's and the spectator's evolving relationships to each other and to the artwork across the ages in the Western cultures.

For instance: the question of aesthetic taste. The experience of art became a matter of demonstrating one's good taste as recent as the middle of the seventeenth century. Building on Agamben's analysis, it strikes me that the analogy of eating can be useful in illustrating the change in art from soul food ("food" that "feeds" the soul's beliefs and values even as it draws on these to sustain itself in the artist and the spectator) to the selectivity (and almost unavoidably, the elitism and egotism) of what is tasty and what is not.

From the man of taste, one could trace the birth of criticism. There is today many forms of criticism but I cannot think of any that does not begin with the assumption of a good faculty of judgment, that is to say, good taste. Movie reviews, restaurant reviews, book reviews, yes, even this one that I am not-so-covertly writing here. I have found so many good things in this book, but I shall single out one that is particularly resonant. In a quiet corner I found a protest that chimes with my personal disillusionment with contemporary practices of literary criticism and appreciation in academia. He writes:

"Whatever criterion the critical judgment employs to measure the reality of the work - its linguistic structure, its historical dimension, the authenticity of the Erlebnis [historical context] from which it has sprung, and so on - it will only have laid out, in place of a living body, an interminable skeleton of dead elements, and the work of art will have actually become for us, as Hegel says, the beautiful fruit picked from the tree that a friendly Fate has placed before us, without, however, giving back to us, together with it, either the branch that has borne it or the soil that has nourished it or the changing seasons that have helped it ripen. What has been negated is reassumed into the judgment as its only real content, and what has been affirmed is covered by this shadow. Our appreciation of art begins necessarily with the forgetting of art."

When critics forget their place in front of a work of art, when critics forget the role of criticism beside the role of art, when critics dissect the work of art as if it were as still and finite as a cadaver, then the critics turn the academy into a world of amnesia - hollow, shallow, and terrifying. But this is no divine terror. (Ahh, how despairing, such emptiness!)