The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

Lives and works in Singapore Work in progressforthe 1996 Triennial Zai Kuning has always emphasised that his work is process-based. Each of his installations, performances, dances, theatre pieces and musical arrangements are interconnected and develop from previous works, and each work is deliberately unfinished.The work displayed at the Second Asia– Pacific Triennial can be interpreted as a direct development of three earlier installations: Document 92 from the 'New Criteria' exhibition, Singapore, 1992; Dream in a white room with a big window shown in Kassel, Germany, 1994; and While we are deep asleep, Singapore, 1996. In the first two pieces, Document and Dream, Zai Kuning sealed his art objects at the galleries where they were to be displayed (the first objects being sculptures, the second, figurative drawings). This sealing of work can be read as a gesture of resistance against the commodification of art. The emphasis, however, is on gesture: some time after the Document show ended, the National Museum of Singapore bought the artist's boxed-up objects. Even an erased object, as long as it has a trace-in this case, its boxes-can be commodified. The point,therefore, is not to read the resistance literally, that is, as an attempt to prevent a specific object from becoming a commodity. Rather, Zai Kuning's sealing-not-displaying his work is a metaphor for the instant loss of presence that afflicts any object in the capitalist society of the spectacle. In contemporary society, the contemplation and 108 I ART I s T s : sou T H AND sou T H- EA s T A s I A consumption of images dominates all other modes of communication. Objects can no longer assert their specific history as their primary meaning, but they are subjected to possibly endless appropriations of their image. In addition to being a struggle against commodification, the artist's emphasis on art as a process is an attempt to resist the predominance of art-as-image. Zai Kuning's recent work has shifted from an interest in sealing objects, to the sealing itself as object. For the installation While we are deep asleep he made 600 wax objects that resembled larvae or wrapped pieces of red meat. Approximately 200 of these pieces of 'meat' were placed on an equal number of white pillows and arranged in a grid on the floor of the Black Box Theatre, Fort Canning Park. Now the site of the Singapore drama group, TheatreWorks, Fort Canning Park was once Bukit Larangan (Forbidden Hill) because the Malay Sultan lived there and it was off-limits to commoners. The palace site was then taken over by British coloniser Stamford Raffles for his residence, and the hillside became a British cemetery. Zai Kuning's use of wax is an ironic response to the problem of representing the dead. Leo Bersani has written that, 'the possession of others is possible only when they are dead; only then is nothing opposed to our image of them'. 1 Perhaps it is inevitable that one would see the pieces of 'meat' as representations of the dead of Forbidden Hill.These pieces of meat, however, are themselves nothing but layers of wax used to seal/conceal nothing. While we are deep asleep suggests that at the centre of our remembering of the dead-which is always also an attempt to possess them-is a radical emptiness, a nothingness that we can never completely cover over with the narratives we tell ourselves to make sense of the past. In the companion pamphlet to the installation, Zai Kuning ruminates: 'Life is full of unexpected things and surprises, darkness and humour.That is what mesmerises me: while you are deep asleep, in sweet meditation and contemplation and loving silence, something happens in between. Leaving you to ponder-what makes all these things related?' Lee WengChoy, Writer,Singapore 1 Leo Bersani, The Culture ofRedemption, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1990, p}