this past saturday: a late lunch with heidi at artease at serangoon central — i’ve not seen her for easily a year (i think it was at joel’s wedding early last summer, though only in the bubbly gaiety of large groups of friends and light conversation, and the last time we actually had a sit-down conversation over a meal was in boston, in 2011. even as a young mother of two she is as always easygoing, never harrassed, always a careful listener and thoughtful in response, and always so calmly competent. i could strive to be more like her.thence up on the circle line to addy’s, had some gyokuro, and we drove to the CCA at gillman barracks to see the new exhibition. although i had been excited about it, we both found it underwhelming and disappointing (except for the video installations, which were in their way mesmerising, but perhaps not quite suited to this exhibition. we didn’t stay long and moved on to the other galleries instead. at space cottonseed i found something almost as colour-OCD as i am, and with as rigid self-imposed rules — moon hyungmin’s “numbers” series, canvas after canvas of what are merely pixellated colours, but which are tiny 1x1 squares painted on, not computer generated, and obeying an internal formula: he derives from a year’s issues of a certain magazine — the new yorker, say — ten of its most frequently used words and colours, and then assigns each colour to each word by their respective frequency of appearance, and then paints these colours onto a canvas of 100x100 little squares, with colours appearing in the correct proportions. it is exactly the kind of colour compulsion i understand instinctively, even as i recognise that his rules (and mine) are almost fanatically meaningless but personally necessary. at partners mucciaccia there were the works of piero pizzi cannella, though almost all the pieces on display had sold (!), and at shanghart singapore xuzhen’s alice-in-wonderland-unsettling shanghART supermarket — addy was trying not to laugh. at the michael janssen next door, jeremy sharma’s works — stark and energetic.
drove out to wessex village (and remembering my last visit for this year’s artwalk with des) and got dinner at colbar — i must make von go when he next comes back. a little like the time we went to raw, only much more authentic and other-era, and there’s something to be said for that particular style of localised-western food (a wholly acquired taste).
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird