It's not every day you're encouraged to make a spectacle of yourself in an art museum. And in a phone booth, no less.
At Trans-Cool Tokyo, a travelling show of 44 works by contemporary Japanese artists - on at the 8Q wing of the Singapore Art Museum until February next year - you can step into a mobile one-man disco housed in a phone booth and dance your heart out for 20 minutes. The booth is equipped with a disco ball, flashing lights, and a pair of headphones to deliver house music straight to your brain.
Inside the booth, the dancers can only see themselves in the one-way mirrored surfaces. Those standing outside, however, can gawk at every move, boogie, strut and pose - throwing up interesting ideas about voyeurism, the ritual of clubbing, and social relations.
The brainchild of artist Kiichiro Adachi, the portable disco is a guerilla art project dubbed e. e. no. 24. The DIY disco was first set up on the streets of a Tokyo youth enclave, where it attracted the attention of many drunken party people, and the resulting video footage of tattooed B-boys and fly girls bopping along to music in it is screening alongside the artefact itself at the museum.
Standing modestly beside his creation, on a recent media tour of the exhibition, Adachi, 30, looks like a surfer dude, with his brown hula shirt and tousled wavy hair. That's a Japanese police car, he says through an interpreter, pointing at a vehicle on the video screen. The police car passes the disco box; the cops think it's an ordinary phone booth. The dancing within continues. The artist smiles. e. e. no. 24 is, in many ways, quintessentially Tokyo, a mix of unabashed hedonism, indulgence, cutting-edge technology, self-enforced merriment and poignant loneliness.
The touring exhibition was conceived two years ago by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo to introduce its collection to the rest of Asia. As its chief curator Yuko Hasegawa explains: 'We wanted to start in Asia first. We thought of a familiar code accepted by Asian audiences. Pop art is very good. So we put together this exhibition.'