11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Stealing the trapeze (still) 2016 / Two-channel HD video: colour, 4:11 minutes / Courtesy: The artist / This project has been supported by the National Arts Council, Singapore NOTES 1 Unnamed yachtsman, ‘Malay yacht racing’, The Singapore Free Press , 18 April 1885. Charles Lim’s artistic practice develops from an extended engagement with the complex histories and shifting geographies of the sea, and the culturally conditioned ways in which we navigate them. Informed by field research, his maritime excursions interrogate familiar perceptions and accepted accounts, revealing the sea as less a pristine natural environment and more a territory shaped by culture, commerce and politics. Begun in 2016 and encompassing works across different media, Lim’s Stealing the Trapeze project charts the contested history of a key instrument used in competitive sailing around the world. The trapeze is a counterbalancing rope system that attaches to a high point on the mast of a racing boat and hooks onto a crew member’s harness. This equipment allows sailors to brace themselves against the boat, lean back to an almost horizontal posture and use their bodies as a sort of live ballast, enabling narrow-hulled boats to pass through the water with less resistance. Through photomedia, sculpture, archival research and found objects, Lim explores competing claims about the invention of the trapeze as it migrated across continents and cultures. While historically it has been understood as a Western invention of the interwar years, earlier reports unearthed by the artist reveal that a similar apparatus, known locally as the dugang, was in widespread use by the indigenous peoples of the Riau Archipelago — as a typical feature of the traditional Malay kolek (racing canoe) — for generations earlier. A firsthand account from 1885 by a British-born Singaporean extols the superior speed and agility of the native koleks, with their dugangs, over trapeze-less European sailcraft, enthusing about the revolutionary impact of a device in which ‘every man is so thoroughly a component of the boat’. 1 Lim — a former Olympic sailor — draws on this material to suggest how British and New Zealand yachtsmen, exposed to South-East Asian boat design during the colonial period of the British Empire, appropriated the trapeze and claimed it as their own. While Stealing the Trapeze casts doubt on the chronicles of self-professed pioneers, such as the British conservationist Peter Scott and his text ‘The trapeze’, it is also a cheeky allusion to Lim having stolen a book containing Scott’s 1938 text from the British school he attended as a teenager. The stolen library book is displayed by the Singaporean artist as act of both confession and reclamation — a subversion of the historical narrative, which recurs frequently in Lim’s work. A spirit of competition characterises Stealing the Trapeze , implied not only in the rival claims as to the trapeze’s authorship documented by Lim, but also in his deliberate pairing of two model boats, sets of rigging, and variants in trapeze design within the installation. A two-channel video pitches a Western catamaran and traditional Malay kolek against each other, juxtaposing conventions of sailing between the two geographies and revealing differences in cultural codes. Filmed partially in slow motion, the video shows the trapeze placing the body in immediate relationship with the water, its rhythmical, almost acrobatic movements in concert with the wind and ocean —man, boat and the elements as one. NINAMIALL BORN 1973, SINGAPORE LIVES+WORKS INSINGAPORE CHARLES LIMYI YONG ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 140 — 141