Few art galleries can boast of having the 10 Courts of Hell as neighbours, but a temporary creative space in Singapore has staked that claim.
Housed in a building within Haw Par Villa, the storied kitschy park filled with sculptures and dioramas built by the late Tiger Balm tycoons Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, weeks-old contemporary art venue Latent Spaces is a stone's throw away from the gardens' best-known attraction: the gruesome 10 Courts, depicting what happens to bad folk after they die.
In lurid scenes populated by stone statues decorated with Technicolor (albeit now peeling) paint, demons torture the dead: exam cheats get their guts pulled out; prostitutes are drowned in blood; food wasters get sawn in two.
Such gore and mayhem, however, is a far cry from the cerebral works in the minimalist new gallery. Walk through Latent Spaces' glass doors and one is greeted by art pieces such as a signed baseball mounted on the wall, a video projection of cabinets, some aluminium drink cans strung up along the cornice, and fragments of LED signs.
Apart from the wallpaper preserved from the building's past life as an exhibition hall for the Aw brothers' jade collection, the room is bare but for the art, so spare that even wall texts are not in evidence.
The brainchild of three curators - twin brothers Chun Kai Qun and Kai Feng, and arts educator Elizabeth Gan - the gallery opened on April 5 and will remain until October.
"I've been fascinated by this place," says artist Chun Kai Qun, 32, standing among the artefacts in the gallery on Easter Sunday. Unlike many Singaporeans of his generation, who spent quite a few childhood hours in the 1970s and '80s mugging for the camera next to Haw Par's mystical figurines, he first visited the park when he was in his late 20s. He had been making a lot of dioramas, and someone suggested he check out the villa for his research. Once there, he was so transfixed he wrote his master of fine arts thesis on the villa for the Glasgow School of Art in Britain.