HOME at Sculpture Square; The houseWORK project
Singapore has seen a spate of political art in the last few years, but the politics have always been those of other people. 2003 saw a new temerity as several local artists put political issues at the heart of their practice.
Matthew Ngui, a veteran of Documenta and the Venice Biennale and probably Singapore’s most internationally acclaimed contemporary artist, is not known for his political voice. But his installation HOME at Sculpture Square, presented last autumn at Singapore’s experimentally-inclined Sculpture Square, directed his past exploration of communication into a new, firmly political direction.
Delving into the subject of ‘home’ was always going to offer opportunities for looking at Singapore in a critical light. But Ngui has looked here before and gone away without touching any sensitive buttons—his first ‘Home’, playful and visually lyrical with nary a whiff of social commentary was shown at Singapore’s Substation in 2002.
The first part of the recent installation presented fifteen blown-up photographs documenting local events that Ngui pulled from Singapore’s National Archive. His selection functioned on several levels. Though simply captioned with only a date and brief synopsis of the human story behind each image, the photographs worked as chronological narratives of state involvement in Singaporean private lives through housing issues. The images, largely documenting interiors and events associated with housing in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, prompted an easily read nostalgia accessible to all Singaporeans; going further than nostalgia however, their subtext evoked the underlying tension between public and personal interests. By offering only a few carefully chosen images that were suggestive rather than overtly political in content, the artist succeeded in bringing to the fore questions concerning the place and impact