From Tan Seow Wei’s petri dish drawings to Chow Chun Fai’s animations of repainted film stills, artists from Eniminiminimos: Artists Who Make Things Small II, challenge the typical global “size fetish” that equates physical size with importance. This group exhibition explores the beauty, complexity and significance of “smallness” in contemporary art, and features works by ten artists from Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, United Kingdom and the United States of America.
Curated by Singapore artist Michael Lee Hong Hwee, the exhibition showcases a wide range of approaches in exploring miniatures in contemporary art, including drawing, video, printmaking, model, sculpture and installation.
Artists
Chow Chun Fai, Chun Kai Qun, Cornelia Erdmann, Justin Wong, Michael Lee Hong Hwee, nofearsam921, Suki Chan, Tan Seow Wei, Tang Kwok Hin, Thomas Doyle
(Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, UK, US)
Curator
Michael Lee Hong Hwee
(Singapore)
Opening Reception
5 Nov 2009 Thu
7.30pm
Jendela (Visual Arts Space)
Level 2, Esplanade Mall
Curator's Tour
7 Nov 2009 Sat
3pm
Jendela (Visual Arts Space)
Level 2, Esplanade Mall
Duration of Exhibition
6 Nov 2009 Fri
– 3 Jan 2010 Sun
Jendela (Visual Arts Space)
Level 2, Esplanade Mall
Mon – Fri: 11am – 8.30pm
Sat & Sun: 10am – 8.30pm
Open on public holidays
Free admission
Curator's Notes
Two observations drove this exhibition. One is the ‘size fetish’ that dominates the world more than ever. From boob size to leg length, film budget and concert duration to building height to the scale of art installations, there appears to be no valid argument against the idea that big is good. Correspondingly, any condition, vision or outcome less than the enormous seems, by comparison, meek and uninspiring.
Another motivation for this exhibition is a widespread sense of binary thinking in regards to issues of time and craft in the context of art. The minute scale and detailed crafting of material appeal most to the miniaturists, the skilful craftpersons who could spend long durations of time to complete amazing feats like painting a landscape on tiny grains of rice. Little things appeal, of course, also to childlike, feminine or ornamental sensibilities. Making small works may be an occasional or temporary foray for the contemporary artist, whose underlying ploy, if not outright or long-term goal, is to move around the biennale circuit through works physically sizeable, that arrest attention, at least partially or initially, by sheer size. The discipline of miniature craft and the contemporary art scene seem to be two almost mutually exclusive worlds.
To consider the miniature in contemporary art, then, is to sidestep both the simplistic equivalence of size with significance, as well as the association of the small scale with particular understanding of craft, gender, age and ornamentation. Small things stir us, as Susan Stewart suggests, to “compare our measures of significance to what is given in nature and in culture” (“On The Threshold of the Visible,” 1997). They ask us if bigger is necessarily better, truer and more beautiful. They do this by pulling us away from our busy routines to look at objects and images so that, through the play of scale, we can reconsider our place in this world. Surveying little objects or miniaturised versions of things allows us to feel psychologically larger and more powerful. Yet this apparent sense of ‘superiority’ is often not unaffected by feelings of awe towards the high level of sophistication in material crafting, and towards the vast and deep unknowns beyond what is visible to the busy, naked eye. By incurring the maximum of time on the minimum of space, miniatures’ function goes beyond offering intricate beauty or showcasing crafting skills; its highest calling lies in slowing us down to reflect on issues relating to power, relationship and the environment.
Eniminiminimos: Artists Who Makes Things Small began in January 2008 with a probing question: “What are the roles of being, having, making and using small in the larger scheme of things?” Presented in Studio Bibliothèque, an artist’s studio housed in a unit of an industrial centre in Fotan, Hong Kong, the inaugural installment of this exhibition featured the work of 12 international artists (based in Singapore, Hong Kong, Huddersfield and London) working on a variety of art forms and contexts. In its current second installment beginning in November 2009 in Singapore, Eniminiminimos retains six from the first batch of artists while adding four more, two of whom are based in two additional cities: New York and Tainan (Taiwan). The main aim in casting a wider global net is to inject new voices in the investigation of ‘the politics of small.’
Among the common debates involving miniature art is its definition. Most define the miniature by size (e.g., max. 2 inches) or scale (e.g., max. 1:6). Some take a more traditional understanding, relating the word miniature to its Latin origins such as minium (the red lead paint used in illuminated manuscripts). Others regard the miniature primarily in terms of the attitude and strategy of detailed representation, making no restriction to the physical size of the work. It is this third, most encompassing version that this exhibition adopts as a working definition of the miniature.
Though both using linework to depict objects or people, the miniature drawings by Tan Seow Wei and those by Cornelia Erdmann pursue quite different aesthetic sensibilities: Tan whispers private stories to those willing to invest the time to examine, as a laboratorist might, her microscopic figures and objects all crafted by hand. Erdmann, whose fluorescent lights illuminate her digitally reduced illustrations of domestic furniture and personal objects from behind while glaring into the viewers’ eyes, suggests that human perception is far more nuanced and complex than straightforward.
In contrast to the emphasis on individualism and originality in Western modernity, Eastern cultures have long regarded the necessity and beauty of imitation as a basis for invention, even through to the contemporary context. The artist nofearsam921 Su, who endeavoured to create a replica of João Onofre’s video, Untitled (Vulture in the Studio), was immediately confronted with a creative challenge. He asked himself: “Where the hell can I find a vulture in Taiwan?” In his remake of the video, as we watch a stand-in, in the form of a ‘gigantic’ sparrow, rampaging through Onofre’s studio-lookalike, we can be forgiven for forgetting or not knowing that whatever furnishes and belongs in there are indeed painstakingly crafted miniatures. For Tang Kwok Hin, the little ironies and stories of everyday life could be had without any ‘new’ creation or replication but by gleaning inherent figures off everyday objects. By using the classical sculptural method of subtraction, Tang first extracts characters from consumer goods like drinks bottles and pop-cultural forms like comic books as ‘found miniature prints’ and then restages them in new scenographies and narratives.
In the busiest parts of the city, the building rooftop offers the largest piece of the sky and the most private space for the extremest of human interactions. Chow Chun Fai lifted the confrontational rooftop scene between the two main protagonists Tony Leung and Andy Lau in Infernal Affairs, painted key frames in it as miniatures and then ‘returned’ them in sequence into a low-fi animation. Perhaps the constraint in physical space in land-scarce Hong Kong and Singapore has turned its dwellers, artists or not, to look inward and to keep their belongings and work to ‘manageable’ sizes; miniaturisation and minimisation serving as coping strategies.
Besides being a tactical mode of making do with limitations, going small may well be a form of critical intervention into the simplistic equivalence of size with power. The dreamlike interactions between the big and small people in Justin Wong’s Flash animation brings to attention the inevitability of emotional ambivalence in interpersonal relationships, such as the desire to resist while seemingly complying, to dominate when being dominated, to harm by helping. In contrast to Wong’s graphic depiction, Chun Kai Qun’s expressionistic dioramas of junkyards examine adult anxieties whilst urging us to re-entertain our inherent need for play, spontaneity and (childlike) irreverence. Comprising geological and architectural forms, the paper sculptures of mine (Michael Lee’s) are aimed at carving ‘safe spaces’ to review the neglected, forgotten, silenced or condemned.
The reminder that human beings are not infallible could not be terser with the recent spates of disasters, whether natural or man-made. Suki Chan’s spread of black models of small derelict houses across the floor – a visual pun equally reminiscent of sites of flood, fire, quake and war alike – points poignantly to the transience of life, a reality that is underpinned by paradoxes of humanity: To gain ‘civility’ often means to lose ‘primitive’ abilities, such as the instinctual awareness of whether and when catastrophes will strike. Audiences of art are often divided into two main types: the impressionable based in ignorance and the jaded due to knowing too much about the “art game.” Thomas Doyle suggests a third way: to experience art and life with a sense of dark humour. His miniature landscapes with human figures subtly give form to the tensions and violence stirring beneath the gloss of interpersonal harmony. As if jibing at the phrase, “Small is beautiful” (which also happens to be the exhibition venue’s programming theme for the last quarter of the year), Doyle’s work cautions us against the naive merriment about miniatures. While big is not always good, as his work and those of others in the exhibition demonstrate, small is also not necessarily or only beautiful.
(An earlier version of this essay was first published in the brochure for the first installment of the exhibition in January 2008.)
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