And this is clearly visible at Singapore Art Week. Regardless of how eminent artists are represented here, questions of identity concern here, if not every second, then exactly every third. “The local youth are greatly influenced by Western culture,” says Cao Fei. “To understand themselves, many begin to turn to the roots and rethink traditions.”
Among these youngsters is IT developer and photographer Eugene So, who became an artist almost by accident. In the Atypical Singapore exposition at the Design Museum, his Renaissanse City series of works are a kind of remakes of classic paintings, “animated” using augmented reality technology. Including the version of “The Creation of the World”, which So blew up the Internet in 2012: a seller in a vegetable market hands his son a carrot (to which he either reaches out or rejects). The artist explains that this is a reflection on continuity: the younger generation is less and less interested in the traditional family business – and sometimes there is no one to pass it on. The Thai Santi Wanchuan, who inherited the art of knitting from his mother and grandmother, almost suffocated by urbanization and mechanization, reflects on this topic in his own way. His monumental knit work My Local Way Of Life hangs from the ceiling of a former shipyard hangar that housed the Twenty Twenty pop-up gallery of the local art platform Singapore Arts Club during Singapore Art Week. This space itself is also a receding nature: the building has already been bought by developers and they plan to build a hotel on this site.
“The problem of identity for me is not internal, but external,” says the artist, music video maker and author of the two-channel video What Tribe is Thi $? Amanda Tan. – I grew up in a mixed family, but for me there was never a question who I am. But it arises among others: people have a ready-made opinion about me, based on where I was born and live. So I’m trying to get to the bottom of it – what does authenticity mean anyway? “