Curatorial Notes on ‘RECAST’
Singapore artists Anthony Chin and Green Zeng at starch
By Berny Tan
Over the years, we have republished parts of long-form writing, from catalogue essays to book chapters. This practice is now formalised as part of our ‘Excerpts’ series. To read other writings from the series, click here.
Anthony Chin, ‘日南製鐵 Rinnan Steel Mill – INGOT’, 2021, Japanese shin guntō steel blade, digital print of steel ingot, 100 x 10 x 5cm (sword), 14 x 10cm (print). Image courtesy of the artist and curator.
'RECAST' is a collaborative exhibition presenting the recent works of Singapore artists Anthony Chin and Green Zeng. Showing at starch from 19 June to 10 July, it focuses on little-known histories of Singapore and the surrounding region through sculptural installations and videos. Berny Tan penned this curatorial note, which appears in the zine accompanying the exhibition, available for free at starch. It can also be found online here.
There are ghosts in this exhibition. I don’t mean that it possesses an element of the macabre, or that the artworks are memorials to people that have since passed. I mean it in the most matter-of-fact way I possibly can. There are human bodies here, or echoes of them. There are the people who serve as proxies for those who lived many years ago — the actors and non-actors who appear in Green’s videos, speaking words and ideas that belonged to another, noisier Singapore. There are the objects, too, that speak of those who laboured to bring them into existence — the frozen facsimile of a rock that Anthony collected from the Causeway, which must have been placed there initially by the hands of one worker among thousands.
Installation view, Green Zeng, ‘Industrial Unrest (20 March 1962)’, 2021, two-channel HD video, aspect ratio 16:9, colour, sound, 11 minutes (left), 20 minutes (right). Image courtesy of the artist and curator.
Maybe it is bigger than ghosts. There are spectres that loom, a fog that envelops entire countries and regions. There are the conflicts that so utterly changed the course of our history — the Second World War, and the Cold War that came after — and there are the nations that felt they had a right to own others, to deem far-off lands their territories and to determine their fates. There are the governments and the armies whose wills mobilised us en masse; or immobilised us, or silenced us. They prescribed our laws, our ways of life, even what we might do for leisure. Yes, they are here in this room.
Anthony Chin, ‘TROPHY – object’, 2020, vintage American basketball trophy, sweat-salt, epoxy resin, 10 shirts, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and curator.
I am thinking of these ghosts and spectres — I am thinking of the way Anthony and Green choose to revisit the events of the past — I am thinking of their works as reverberations of that which came before, which were in turn reverberations of whatever transpired before that. I am thinking of reverberations in a different, more material way, as layers in the process of making, removed from but inextricably linked to their source. The salt, for example, which Anthony collected and crystallised from the sweat of basketball players, then made into the body of a trophy. Where it touches the metal plate, a greenish tinge has started spreading in the months since he made this work, unintended by the artist. Reverberations can take on a life of their own.
Installation view, Green Zeng, ‘Letters to the Press’, 2021, HD video, aspect ratio 16:9, colour, sound, 19 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and curator.
I am writing this before we have moved into the space, but I am thinking too of another kind of reverberation; how the exhibition will sound, a different kind of aural / oral history. I imagine that I will hear decades-old opinions on whether labour strikes should or should not proceed — whether a worker might choose the inaction of their own body as a means of resistance — while, every few minutes, the steel blade of a sword hits the surface that grinds it down, drowning everything. It is a sound that would not feel out of place in an industrial setting, those factories that might have ground to a halt when workers thought it necessary to refuse the conditions of their labour. It is a sound that is both interference and accompaniment.
Exhibition view of ‘Recast’, 2021. Image courtesy of the artists and curator.
If I had to represent a reverberation visually, I would first leave a blank core defined by a single outline. Another line would be drawn around that first one, following its shape but larger and more amorphous, and then another line, and another. We perceive narratives as having a core, as a way of saying things out loud when it is otherwise so easy to leave them buried. But there are also the spaces around these (hi)stories — their reverberations, softer, not quite the same sound or shape. The photographs, objects, documents, letters, transcripts, and all these artefacts that lie in their wake. The people, — including us, today — whose lives have been so irreversibly shaped by forces so much bigger than us. Sometimes, it is in speaking around a history, speaking in and from the margins, that one speaks about a history too. Or tells us, at least, that something can no longer be said. A blank core where a story — another version of it — should be.
“We perceive narratives as having a core, as a way of saying things out loud when it is otherwise so easy to leave them buried. But there are also the spaces around these (hi)stories — their reverberations, softer, not quite the same sound or shape.”
