a bird flies into the mirror

Appetite is proud to present a bird flies into the mirror in collaboration with the Michelangelo and Lourdes Samson Collection. 

“It has been an honour and a pleasure to collaborate with Appetite on this exhibition, featuring selected works by Filipino artists from our collection of Southeast Asian contemporary art. This selection is particularly meaningful, not only because Philippine contemporary art still forms the core of our collection, but also because these works draw from, expand on, and ultimately question conceptual and stylistic concerns in Western art history. These works ask fundamental questions about art and perception: What is a painting? What is a drawing? What is an image? How should we look at art?

Grounded in the sophisticated use of mediums and materials found in contemporary Western visual language, these works contemplate the legacy of the colonial history that shaped the way artistic knowledge and culture is disseminated and absorbed locally, but also reflect on the underlying socio-economic conditions of artistic production in the Philippines. Seen in dialogue with the long history of Western Art, the works ask us to question what we think we know about art – its history and development – in our part of the world.”

– Lourdes Samson

a bird flies into the mirror brings together the works of six artists – Raena Abella, Poklong Anading, Annie Cabigting, Roberto Chabet, Nona Garcia, Wawi Navarozza – who adopt conceptualism as a self-reflexive artistic strategy. These artists, especially Chabet, are recognised to be pioneers of conceptual art in the Philippines and more broadly, Southeast Asia. The exhibition highlights artists who have yet to be widely shown in Singapore and extends ongoing critical discourses of conceptual art and regional practices.

Michelangelo and Lourdes Samson’s longstanding dedication to collecting significant Southeast Asian contemporary artworks – in particular, their strong commitment to championing Filipino artists – highlight to us the perpetual conversation that exists between contemporaneity and its response to art’s historical canon, but does so in relation to the complex and diverse inheritance of Southeast Asia’s own cultural and historical landscape.

The artworks in the exhibition offer multiple layers of reading – utilising vernacular expressions and appropriating visual codes to respond to the specificities of local conditions, in order to unravel fixed notions of art and meaning. In doing so, they play with the illusion of the surface, and challenge what the image can reveal, reflect and refract.

The exhibition is open to the public from 12 April, 2022 – 16 July, 2022.
Click here to book an exhibition tour.
Walk-ins are available on Fridays and Saturdays, 11AM – 2PM.

Widely acknowledged as the founding figure of conceptual art in the Philippines, Chabet adopted conceptual strategies as a counterpoint to the rigid structures brought about by modernist movements in the 1960s. His search for meaning – not just in abstraction, but also in the value of commonplace objects in everyday life – transformed materials into both object as well as metaphor for the vagrancies of contemporary life. Pale Blue Memo (2011) combines the structure of a clipboard with a canvas, painted in a seemingly continuous solid block of colour. Pale blue, a colour that Chabet has used repeatedly throughout his practice, may allude to the hue of the ocean, but it is also said to be the colour that is scattered most. Playing with the boundaries between painting, object and sculpture, Pale Blue Memo raises questions about what it is to be an object in and of itself.

Anading’s Line Drawing (1998/2017) takes the form of a durational video that records the performative act of drawing lines. With the rise of video and recording equipment’s rising availability and popularity in the 90s, Anading became one of the first artists to experiment with the medium of video and to consider its potentialities with drawing, performance and video art in Southeast Asia. A doubling effect – of walking and drawing a series of lines one by one, then of a camera recording what is being drawn – questions what is observed. Reacting to the traditions of mark-making and painting, Line Drawing (1998/2017) takes the basic act of drawing as a performative gesture, as the artist walks, draws and films himself in a self-reflexive and circular process.

An example of Navarozza’s ongoing explorations with self-portraiture, I Want to Live a Thousand More Years (Self-Portrait After Dengue, with tropical plants and fake flowers) (2016) disrupts the continuity of the photographic image through layers upon layers of digital collage. She photographs meticulously staged and vibrantly exuberant scenes and places herself within them. Drawing on Filipino writer Nick Joaquin’s notion of the “tropical gothic”, Navarozza harnesses the visual language of syncretism, pastiche and ornamentation unique to the Philippines to simultaneously reflect and critique the complex understanding of self. The artist, inhabiting both the roles of creator and figure, playfully stretches the lines between artifice and truth, reveling in the visual ambiguity where the internal and external meet.

Similarly playing with the veracity of the photographic image and in an adjacent process of cut-and-paste to Navarozza’s, Nona Garcia’s “Above Water” and “Above Land” series physically dissects and assembles elements from numerous found photographs to build up a three-dimensional scene within a frame. Drawing on images of natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes which have engulfed domestic interiors and whole buildings alike, they create haunting landscapes that hover between the real and imagined.

Curated by:
Clara Che Wei Peh
Seet Yun Teng

With special thanks to:
Michelangelo and Lourdes Samson