The death of a pet dog is, for most people, the stuff of private tragedy; a footnote or whole chapter in one's maudlin imaginary memoir. For Singaporean artist Vincent Leow, however, it was the impetus for a series of new works musing on death, memory and monumentality - leading, fortuitously, to a mid-career museum retrospective.
The artist's first solo exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum, now on until October 17, is a showcase of more than 50 works drawn from a prolific two-decade career, including some 20 new works created in the past year.
At the show's heart is Andy, Leow's late pet mongrel, who was put down last year after falling into a pond and suffering fish bites that became infected. A photograph of the 14-year-old canine - named after Andy Warhol - greets visitors in the lobby of the museum, hanging over the same black leather armchair, now empty, that Andy is perched on in the image.
Andy the dog, however, goes beyond a dearly departed household pooch. Since 1993, the artist has been making satirical works featuring a bizarre half-man, half-dog mythical character called Andy, too. In an ongoing continuum of paintings, sculptures and installations, Andy grins manically from carnivalesque backdrops, doing grotesque things like exposing his prominent privates, morphing into other combination animals, and merrily dodging or riding on bombs raining from the sky. Andy even makes the leap into the classical Western martyr canon, deliberately styled as Italian painter Titian's John the Baptist. His toothy grin is not unlike Leow's own wide, joker-like version.
'I use Andy as a character to narrate my artwork. Andy is art, Andy is me, you or anyone,' the 49-year-old Leow says.
The creature has been read as a comment on the hybridity of Singaporean identity, with its cross-breeding of cultures in a multiracial society. It was shown at the Venice Biennale, as part of Singapore's four-artist pavilion, in 2007. It can even be a post-postmodern metaphor for Warhol's notion of mass-production and consumption of art, multiplying across time, space and media, spawning related works and, now, merchandise in the Singapore Art Museum gift shop.