Not News
Lai Yu Tong at DECK
By ants chua
Lai Yu Tong, ‘Newspaper Painting No. 21 & 44’, 2018, 2019, synthetic polymer paint on newspaper, 76cm x 62cm each. Image courtesy of the artist.
You’d been saying we should go out sometime. I said, sure, let’s go see some art. You arch an eyebrow when we get there. DECK, where Yu Tong’s work is exhibited, is a set of shipping containers stacked on top of each other, a modular building that has been painted a deep grey. The corrugated steel casts vertical shadows on itself, ebbing and falling in relief, interrupted by sliding glass doors that allow for entrance and exit. The new kid on the block, surrounded by older once-white buildings. Those are already short and stout by Singaporean standards, but DECK sits even lower, slouching. Not the artiest looking place, I guess?
The glass door leading into the gallery says, “SLIDE HERE please do not touch the works”. How long it has been since the L and T have been taken their leave, and where have they have travelled instead? Though the lights are switched on inside, the glare means we can’t see into the gallery, only the reflection of ourselves walking towards the glass door, the trees bordering the road behind us, and the clouds against the bright sky. Once through the door, you and I are hit with a blast of air-conditioning, and we sigh with relief. “They must spend a ton on air-con here,” you remark, “because the walls are all metal and the building is a dark colour.”
I say dove grey. You say fog grey. I’ve never seen fog. The humming of the air-conditioning fills the space. We complain, instead, about the brilliant equatorial sun, the blistering heat that we’ve just escaped, the thin glass door the only thing standing between it and us. We walk in, and the ground floor gallery is filled with framed sheets of newspaper, maybe ten sheets in total. “Newspaper, of all things,” I say, trying to joke with you. “Guess they’re trying to cut costs.”
“The art scene here really is trash, huh?” Your reply isn’t what I thought it would be. I can’t tell if you’re joking so I fake a laugh for good measure. These days, in this country, I no longer know where to look.
Gallery 1. Newspaper Paintings (2018, ongoing) is exactly what it sounds like it would be. Yu Tong has painted on newspaper sheets and then framed them, isolating images like islands of colour in a sea of white, brushstrokes wending their way between them like waves. Some of the sheets are creased, struggling to stay straight under the weight of paint. They’re held up by the frames that pull them into taut plateaus, trapping them flat against the wall.
The exhibition guide says something like, the artist makes no attempt to hide the brushstrokes. I can see his hands. “Working with images in a time of image saturation, Yu Tong employs gestures of collection, appropriation, reduction, and arrangement as primary modes of artistic production.” Do you see them? Or is it just me?
I don’t remember when we give up trying to make sense of it, but we do. We walk to the second floor, the naked steel clanging like cymbals under our feet.
Gallery 2. Mostly empty. The white walls hold a single shelf, at about eye-level. The shelf holds photos of people smiling – 350 in total – snipped from the newspapers. The largest is the size of a palm, and the smallest, the size of a thumb. They’ve been scanned and reproduced from paper then printed on clear acrylic blocks, arranged on the shelf to encircle the space. Despite my hope otherwise, you look unimpressed. “So many fake smiles,” you say. “Doctors and chefs and lawyers and athletes.” We sit in the middle of the room on the unvarnished wooden bench, a planet orbited by the ring of glazed faces.
I wish I’d said to you, “Maybe that’s the point.” It’s clever, I think, and darkly funny. With the second gallery’s installation, whose name I forget, but is something along the lines of, It’s all perfectly fine (nothing is wrong), the artist is conscious of and works with the white walls of the gallery. In Gallery 1’s Newspaper Paintings, the whitewashing and erasure is made obvious, the brushstrokes assertive and brassy. But in Gallery 2, the structures around us whitewash on our behalf, erasing before we realise there is anything to erase. Maybe I’m just projecting.
We get ice cream after and share a scoop as we walk. Green tea flavoured – I chose. “What’s your go-to ice cream flavour?” You ask me to guess. It takes me embarrassingly long, but at the end of the day we’ve established that you don’t really like tea flavours, but you do like chocolate, especially with espresso as an affogato.
“Though like, coffee here just isn’t as good. Back home they roast it fresh.”
“Is it just because every time you try and order kopi the aunties laugh at you?”
Lai Yu Tong, 'Everything is absolutely alright and perfectly fine (nothing is wrong)', 2018, installation of 350 images, UV print on acrylic, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Chua Chye Teck.
“It’s really rude, you know. I can’t imagine any other place in which that’s considered acceptable customer service!”
I tell you that I am heading to a dialogue on “foreign interference in Singapore” after this. I use scare quotes, trying to signal that I use the phrase with some irony.
“For a young country, and one that’s so international, y’all are really strangely anti-foreign.” There’s no resentment, which I am surprised by – you’re a foreigner in my country. Shouldn’t you want to be welcomed?
I try to change the subject, hoping you haven’t seen the confusion flickering across my face. “What did you think about the exhibition?” You thought it was an interesting commentary on national identity. I raise my eyebrows, and you say, half in jest – “What, I can’t say that because I’m ang-moh? And isn’t all art about where you’re from?”
You’re right, in some way, it is, but I wouldn’t admit it. “It wasn’t about national identity; it was about consumption! And images!” I retaliate, feeling defensive, a feeling that’s familiar though I can’t quite pinpoint why. And if you pressed me, I doubt I could tell you what the exhibition was about, really.
“Well, I think it can have many meanings. That’s what makes it strong.” That was the one thing I didn’t quite like, actually – I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was trying to say. But I keep my mouth shut. To avoid sharing more of my thoughts on the art, I tell you about Lee Kuan Yew calling air conditioning the greatest invention of all time. I tell you about Cherian George, a professor mysteriously pressured to leave local teaching positions in higher education, and his book, Air-Conditioned Nation. I tell you about reading the newspaper comics on Sunday mornings, how I would weigh the pages down with my cereal bowl and then regret it when the condensation from the cold milk made the pages soggy and the jokes unreadable. The comics section has steadily shrunk over the years – from two and a half pages of colour on Sundays to one, to now: a paltry half-page, printed in black and white – and no one reads the papers anymore, using them, instead, to wrap glassware and line garbage bins.
“Anyway, you should try and make more Singaporean friends. We’re not all like that, you know.”
“I have Jaacob and Vlad and Quynh. And it’s not my fault Singaporeans are unfriendly.” I’m incredulous, and my face shows as much, which is the only reply I can offer right now. I think you’re hurt that I don’t believe you, but I’m hurt that you’ve said that, so I keep a sulking silence, attending to the rapidly melting ice-cream.
“You know, when I first got here, I tried to join this rock-climbing group. I bought new shoes, and a chalk bag, and I was so excited because when I was at home there wasn’t a rock-climbing gym nearby. I got there and this man walks up to me, swaggering like he owns the place.”
“And maybe he did, I didn’t ask. The first thing he said to me was, ‘You foreigner ah?’ He didn’t even ask my name.”
“Quynh – you’ve met her – do you know how long she’s been here? 10 years. She probably speaks more Singlish than you. She’s not a PR, just on a Work Pass. I asked her why she doesn’t apply for PR and she said that she couldn’t risk it. I didn’t know there was a risk, I said to her. And she said, I couldn’t handle it if they don’t give it to me. My heart might break.”
You’re speaking slowly and I can’t tell if it is your accent pushing your words apart, or if the spaces between are for emphasis. I can’t meet your gaze.
We continue to walk, the skyscrapers of the business district in the hazy blue distance, steel and glass both behind and before us. The sun beats down on us, or maybe my face is hot and blushing, sweating from the sudden heat. The skyline rises and falls like breath.
On one of the framed sheets of newspaper, Yu Tong carefully painted around photos of produce, cheeses, meats and fish, his brush hugging the curves of lush mangoes, fatty bacon, and a glistening roast chicken, to name a few. On another: a cluster of people around an engine part the size of a man, and a man pointing at a model of an airplane. Yet another: a bridge arcing out into the sea, reaching a vanishing point in the hazy blue horizon. You squinted. We couldn’t see what is on the other side. We had no context for any of the images – except, perhaps the groceries, which are clearly from an advertisement of sorts. I return to them. The drumsticks, the advertisement proclaims, are EXCLUSIVE. The chicken is FRESHLY ROASTED IN STORE. “Supermarket,” you said, examining them. “Singapore doesn’t grow food, right?”
Yu Tong’s work continues to haunt me because of how much care was put into preserving and elevating what we would normally see as disposable and banal. It was absurd. Framed, painted newspapers? It’s a commentary on throwaway culture, and how our country takes and uses and discards. It’s a commentary on the oversaturation of images. It’s about feeling surrounded, watched, surveilled by the constant performance of positivity and excellence that we see in our day-to-day interactions with image culture. It’s about wealth, and when wealth borders on overconsumption. I am greedy for images. I am overstuffed with images. I am projecting my image onto these images. Maybe it is about national identity. It’s brilliant. It’s hilarious. I can’t understand it. The artist intended this, I’m sure.
The exhibition guide was printed on an A4 envelope in neon orange. Written by a Caterina Riva, an Italian curator, it notes that Yu Tong’s bios consistently shift, but always describe him as “a Singaporean artist”. The newspapers are from the singular broadsheet in the country The Straits Times, but the images are not all familiar to me. Carrie Lam. A protest. A wind farm. A tiny thumbnail of a mountain range. They weren’t at all familiar to you either, and I wonder aloud what kind of news you get across the Atlantic, forgetting that it’s been years since you lived anywhere else but here.
Even the groceries, I’m sure, are not from here, but probably travelled here in temperature-controlled freight. I was so drawn to them. You asked me why. “Because of the shapes. They’re round.” I feel silly for having such a juvenile answer. But most of the other images are rectangular, you see, so you can see the background of the photo and the framing by the original photographer. So you have rectangle photos within the rectangle frame of the broadsheet page, within the rectangle frame of the artwork. Russian doll, but three rectangles. The groceries, though! Meticulously outlined in white, the brush following and outlining. A salmon stared up at us, its eye a perfect, dead circle.
Oh – Everything is absolutely alright and perfectly fine (nothing is wrong). That’s what it’s called. I find this out long after the exhibition has closed when a friend mentions it to me in passing and share it eagerly with you like a talisman. Before this I’d returned to it over and over again, asking if you can remember what the smiling faces piece was called, each time coming up empty but asking anyway, hoping that the question itself might hold the answer.
“You know, that makes me think it was about tragedy. We’re so used to it nowadays that it’s like nothing is wrong. And like, the randomness of news – the stories just get plonked next to each other even when they don’t even relate you know?” The condensation from your kopi-peng edges its way across the sticky coffeeshop table, steady and sure. I dip my finger in it and trace the outline of your hand as you tell me this, wondering about the spaces between us, where your breath ends and mine begins. “Yeah. It’s strange. And you see the smiling photos and it’s like, I’ve seen this one, I know why he’s smiling. But the rest I’m like, what are you so happy and proud about?”
What else is there to say, if not about the paintings? We sit at the coffeeshop – I’ve ordered the drinks – and think back to the refrigerated shipping containers run aground in the middle of the island, smiling faces glazed and glaring on a white wall, imported produce lush and gleaming in frame. Nothing is wrong, but like my country my eyes are always trained on the borders, prickling and ready to play defense.
Lai Yu Tong, Everything is absolutely alright and perfectly fine (nothing is wrong), 2018, installation of 350 images, UV print on acrylic, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of artist.
DECK is now working on creating a permanent building for photography art to be ready in 2023. Its annual fundraiser 'Mirror' at Hvala at CHIJMES, taking place on 17 July 2022, will feature its Charity Collection of works by artists such as Jonathan Liu, Lim Sokchanlina and Manit Sriwanichpoom for sale, which is also fully available online. Over multiple sessions, 'Mirror' will additionally feature DECK-inspired tea blends and a music performance by Weish. Do consider making a tax-deductible donation through the purchase of a fundraiser ticket and/or an artwork! Click here to register for the annual fundraiser, or click here to go directly to the Charity Collection.
About the writer
ants chua is an amateur adult. an Associate Artist of Checkpoint Theatre, they write, direct, and perform. ants cares deeply about a number of things, including but not limited to: understanding and shaping culture, queer intimacies, and how to befriend stray cats.
