LATER THIS MONTH, Singaporean faces will beam down from the Reuters video wall in New York's Times Square, while New Yorkers will peer down from the Caltex House LCD screen at Raffles Place in the heart of Singapore's financial district. Titled People's Portrait, the hi-tech video project by Chinese artist Zhang Ga will be part of the inaugural Seni Singapore 2004, a two-month international visual art festival that opened on Friday.
Bringing together 90 artists from 14 countries, Seni (the Malay word for art) is dedicated to the theme of 'art and the contemporary'. 'We want to position Seni as a prequel to an international Singapore Biennial in 2006,' says National Arts Council chief executive Lee Suan Hiang. 'This is also part of our overall plan to have an annual event to showcase visual arts. Next year, we'll have a Singapore Art Show that will focus on Singaporean arts.'
Lee says he hopes the festival will do for the visual arts what the now well-established Singapore Arts Festival has done for the performing arts. 'We want to generate a new audience for visual arts and raise the level of appreciation,' he says. 'We also want to raise the profile of visual arts in Singapore, nationally, regionally and internationally.'
National Archives of Singapore chairman Kwok Kian Woon says he's optimistic Seni can achieve this. 'To really develop an art environment and a deeper artistic culture in Singapore we need opportunities for artists and audiences to engage each other,' he says. 'Seni, as a two-month event, is part of that larger role that has to happen in Singapore.'
The S$800,000 (HK$3.7 million) festival started on Friday night with Insomnia48, a free, 48-hour non-stop party at the Arts House. Visitors watched Yogjakarta's Venzha and the House of Natural Fibre - a group of hard-core tattoo artists who generate soundscapes with electromagnetic waves while tattooing (not for the faint-hearted) - or saw the eerie video retrospective of Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, who reads to corpses in mortuaries.
'The idea is to create an artistic community for 48 hours that includes the public,' says Insomnia48 curator and TheatreWorks director Ong Keng Sen.
