A Singaporean artist is taking his love of words and information and turning it into art. The resulting masterpieces, which will be displayed in a show in Hong Kong, offer commentary on censorship, the freedom and availability of information and truth, and the influence of cultural and governmental practices on media.
The artist used pages from the most prominent newspaper in Singapore to construct his works of art. He took something exact and tangible — the front page of a newspaper, designed to impart information — and blurred the words and information on the page to make it abstract and unreadable. The artist took transparencies of the pages and superimposed them on one another to strike up an irresistible rhythm and repetition of stories, pictures, and headlines.
In one such piece, headlines expressing concern about the spread of a financial downturn compete for space with a double image of a worker pushing a wheelbarrow full of unknown goods. In another, a handful of the same image of police officers in uniform offers a commentary on the repeated but obscured headline: “What divides Hong Kong?” There could be a lot of answers to that question, especially depending on the context. The most obvious is political, including Hong Kong’s relationship with China, but the vagueness of the headline is the crux of the artist’s point.
The major Singaporean newspaper is often criticized of referring to certain controversial subjects obliquely. For example, the artist was frustrated with the way the newspaper covered a story about an award-winning movie addressing the death penalty. The headline didn’t mention the death penalty at all. The artist said that he wished that people would say what they mean, especially the institutions that are tasked with providing valuable information to people. When they cannot address the difficult subjects, how are the people supposed to obtain enough information to shape their own views of the subjects?
This isn’t the first time the artist has used newspaper as his preferred medium for making art. Just two years ago in China, he included bundles of newspapers in his exhibition space and asked that visitors do with it as they liked. As a result, many of the newspapers got shredded. The artist said he was inspired by seeing the tied bundles of newspaper waiting to be delivered in the mornings. That moment of information not being available, however brief, caused the artist to question everything.
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To read more about the artist’s work, as well as to see a few examples of the pieces, go to http://www.scmp.com/culture/arts-entertainment/article/2133921/singapore-artist-uses-straits-times-illustrate.