SINGAPORE — A picture, the old saying assures us, paints a thousand words. However, the latest exhibition at Ikkan Art International, called Ambiguous Portrait Of A Cunning Linguist, suggests, at least, that it’s not that cut and dried.
The show brings together a surprisingly diverse range of artists and artwork. It’s got big names like Lawrence Weiner and On Kawara, younger artists such as Dawn Ng and Nicola Anthony, as well as the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia. You might call it eclectic, but given the underlying theme of verbal imagery in art, it’s hard to see how it could be otherwise.
Many of us are used to a gulf between words and images — on this side of the line, there’s literature, and on the other, there’s visual art. It seems like a simple distinction to make, but simple distinctions are rich material for artists to pick at, play with, and re-imagine in all manner of strange and fantastical ways. As the show’s curator, Andrew Herdon, notes, our minds work in both visual and verbal modes, and language allows for a more direct path to think beyond the immediate appearance of what’s in front of us.
As you might expect, there’s a variety of approaches on show. Perhaps the most intriguing, in being a little out of place among fine art, might be the collection of drawings and photographs of Russian criminal tattoos. The drawings range from home-brewed simplicity to florid complexity, and offer a glimpse into the rituals and violence of Russia’s criminal underworld. To an outsider, they might be nothing more than random imagery, but they convey nuanced meanings to the insider — a reminder that language can conceal as well as communicate.
Another type of concealment in language takes the form of censorship, which is addressed to great effect in Glenn Ligon’s The Red Portfolio, consisting of little more than white-on-black printed text. They’re terse descriptions of sexually graphic scenes, originally from a campaign mounted to censor the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, and now re-appropriated as art in their own right. The difference between the images’ descriptions and the stark lack of those images (similar to the pieces by Tom Gallant on show) generates a cold, anticipatory tension, and free-wheeling imagination of what those scenes might have looked like.
The show’s young artist contingent also includes two photographs from Dawn Ng’s Everything You Ever Wanted Is Right Here series. Short phrases (with a humour akin to urban artist SKL0 or Sticker Lady’s) are cut out of photographs of local scenes — for instance, a collection of security cameras bears the legend, Kind Of Kinky. With its clean design and emphasis on the here and now, it’s hard to shake the impression of looking at a tourism campaign from a parallel universe Singapore.
As a whole, the exhibition offers many ways to think about language and art — some breathtaking, others not quite — an overall impression, as it were, of the ambiguity set forth in the show’s title.
Ambiguous Portrait Of A Cunning Linguist runs until July 27, noon to 7pm, Ikkan Art International #01-05 39 Keppel Road. Closed Sundays, Mondays, and public holidays. Free admission.
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