Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in. Singapore Contemporary Art, Edited by Jeffrey Say and Seng Yu Jia

New Art, New Concepts, Cheo Chai-Hiang

1. Total rejection of formalism
2. Strong emphasis on the personal and emotive
3. Incorporation of objects not previously considered art
4. Precedence of artistic process over finished work
5. Use of simple materials and ordinary objects
6. Emphasis on mutual interaction between materials and process
7. Avoidance of reliance on visual experience as a point of departure
8. Audience participation

Creative Rebelliousness and the Aesthetics of the Postmodern, William S W Lim

• "Post modernity is all-embracing... it's main characteristics are pluralism, tolerance of differences and creative rebelliousness."
• "Modernism aspires to the sublime... it believes that in order to be art at all, art must be something beyond art."
• Aesthetics of the post-modern:
• Challenging the sublime
• Cultural turn
• Dynamics of process

Artist as mediator - on Amanda Heng's Art, Wu Mali

3 key themes:

1. Gender
1. Mothers under patriarchal Chinese culture
2. Mother-daughter relations
3. Place of women in society
2. Cultural identity
1. Nation-race relations
2. Cultural memory
3. Globalisation
1. Population migrations
2. Urban transitions

Quotes

• "Art, besides being new, also has to possess intentionality and particularity in order to strike a sympathetic chord in the viewer's heart." (Ho Ho Ying)
• "It is more thought provoking to be subtle than to be blatant." (Cheo Chai-Hiang)
• "When the outcome drives the process, we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome, we may not know where we're going, but we will know we want to be there." (Bruce Mau)
• "The distinction between carving and modelling is also a distinction between a sense of outwardness and that of inwardness; whereas the carver reveals and discloses, the modeller imbues objects with an inner life." (TK Sabapathy)