MOVING LIGHT, ROVING SIGHT

Ikkan Art Gallery is one of the few venues in Singapore to serve up a consistently fascinating brew of video and new-media art. Ikkan’s most recent exhibition, “Moving Light, Roving Sight,” features a canny mix of contemporary Japanese artists and collectives, whose works are juxtaposed with older pieces by Western media artists. The latter includes Jenny Holzer’s iconic TRUISMS (selections from 1977–79) (2013), a digitally animated collection of over 200 clichés and aphorisms taken from advertising and media. Holzer’s exploitation of language and its intent is as fascinating as it is mind-numbing, making it a worthy accompaniment to Teppei Kaneuji’s 2009 animated piece Tower (Movie). In the video, Kaneuji’s stolid, unmoving structure excretes repetitious, banal imagery and sound, including a bouncing ball, tedious taps and rustles, and oozing gels and fumes. Like Holzer’s discourse, Kaneuji’s babel is insidious—integral to his tower’s essence, yet continuously undermining it. 

In “Moving Light,” older works like Holzer’s are compelling foils to the more recent pieces on display. The venerable technique of stop-motion photography, for example, inspires contemporary film artist Takashi Ishida. He bypasses digital shortcuts to create elegant stop-motion choreography on 16mm film, then digitizes the imagery, which adds depth and modulation to his compositions. In Burning Chair (2013), Ishida has “painted” organic patterns with chalk and water on the walls of a narrow concrete room. His claustrophobic concrete palette swims with intricate strokes of chalk and rivulets of water that unfurl, recede and fade. At Ikkan, Ishida’s fluent compositions seem otherworldly in contrast to Video Sketches 1–4 (1999) by Oliver Herring. Herring also uses stop motion, but with a studied lack of finesse. His goofy mélange of pantomime and absurd tableaux is sheer impudence in the face of Ishida’s polished mannerism. Nearby, a projected still from Douglas Gordon’s 1994 performance piece, Kissing with Scopolamine, in which the artist is seen kissing his reflection on a mirror, faces Naoko Tosa’s abstract video work Organic Geometry 2 (2015). Tosa’s infinite, kaleidoscopic undulations and glittering Rorschach symmetries are solemnly mimicked by Gordon’s mirrored self-reflection.

An interactive work by the digital art collective teamLab, led by Toshiyuki Inoko, was the visual focus at Ikkan. The members of teamLab define themselves as an “ultra-technologists group,” whose multifaceted practice includes animation, performance and design. Their installation at Ikkan is a trippy, ambient experience: visitors enter Flowers and People, Cannot Be Controlled But Live Together – Dark (2015) through an unlit passageway and are suddenly thrust into a virtual Garden of Eden. Digital blossoms glimmer and float across the floor and walls. Grazed by a shadow or the weight of a foot, these flowers take on urgency and bloom, sending out languid tendrils and petals that evolve into pure white light and scatter like pollen. Inoko, in an interview, attempted to explain his motives behind combining the potency and ambiguities of art with innovative technologies, remarking that, “The idea of an exciting future makes life more fun.” Flowers and People is a literal critique of human interaction with the environment, disguised as a lyrical, tangible parable of birth and death—and its gorgeous, addictive technology is, indeed, fun.