Artistic Developments

Spent an afternoon feeling sort of arty down at The Esplanade. Basically we were there to enjoy the excellent musical Chicago, and enjoy we certainly did. But after that we found ourselves in the Jendela visual art space and, by a stroke of good fortune, got chatting with one Tan Chwee Seng, who was the artist-wallah whose works were on display.

He'd called the set-up wasteland which of course put me in mind of Old Possum and the bleakness of modernity, fisher kings and such like. But it seems Mr Tan had nary a thought of all that. His wasteland seemed to be a meditative space within, where the empty land was simply waiting for transformation. This all sounds terribly philosophical, but generally our confab was practical, down-to-earth stuff. For example, he explained it took around three hours to put the orderly dots (a motif appearing on quite a few prints) on the freedom of the earth/waste below. And the problem with the freedom was you didn't know when it was finished.

Come to think of it, I've never had a conversation with any kind of artist that didn't get down very quickly to the nitty-gritty of things.

Oh, and the stuff on display was really appealing. The textures emerging from some of the monochromatic prints were gorgeous. But, sadly, the exhibition finished today.