Recent currents of a multi-disciplinary practice at starch
By Bruce Quek

Installation view of 'Untitled’ by Song-Ming Ang at starch, Singapore, 2024. Photo by Third Street Studio.

In his first solo exhibition in Singapore since 2020’s ‘Music for Everyone: Variations on a Theme’, Song-Ming Ang’s latest show at starch is, intriguingly, untitled. The show brings together the bulk of Ang’s work since the pandemic, during which he rediscovered his love for making experimental music, and a deep immersion into learning the methods and techniques of live electronic music and modular synthesis.

Setting aside the overall framing of ‘Untitled’ for now, my attention is immediately drawn to ‘Pulses’ (2024), a multimedia artwork which plays out on a projector and speakers, to the right of the gallery’s entrance. Alone amongst the audible artworks in the show, ‘Pulses’ is not confined to sets of headphones, but instead washes across the entire gallery, subtly inflecting my perception of just about everything else in the show.

The visual aspect of ‘Pulses’ is one of shifting, hypnotic patterns in black and white, abstract to a degree that defies recognisability—at times, they might recall the complexity of fractals, or the visual artefacts of a glitching monitor. This synthesised video suggests less an attempt to convey narrative and meaning, and more an exploration of the capacity for emotional evocation without representation.

In a similar fashion, ‘Pulses’’ soundtrack is composed of synthesised sound. Though at times you might find moments of recognition in fragments of fleeting sound—here, what could be a car’s horn, blaring, and there, what could be an air raid siren—these moments are ultimately elusive, withdrawing almost as quickly as they emerge. In searching for what unifies this synthetic audio-visual composition, however, the strongest impression is one of driving purpose and determined movement, though one that is hard to put into words.

Beyond ‘Pulses’ itself, the show’s next most prominent aspects are twofold: first is ‘Felt Feelings’ (2024), an installation of white felt sheets along the walls of the gallery. Its appearance calls to mind acoustic tiles and panelling, which gives a hint to the work’s non-visual properties, gently reducing echoes and altering the gallery’s acoustic environment. This subtle detail, along with how ‘Felt Feelings’ also functions as a visual framing element to the exhibition’s wall-mounted works, contributes to an overall sense of the exhibition as less of a collection of discrete artworks, and more of an integrated whole.

Secondly, in a similar vein (although not an artwork in its own right) are the seats and speakers which take up much of the central area of the gallery’s ground floor. A more typical approach would have been to install such elements only as required for a show’s talks and public programmes, but in this case Ang has chosen to have them in place for the show’s entire duration—as a nod to the centrality of his show’s various programmes, which have included a listening party, a reading, a conversation, as well as a forthcoming concert.

Returning to the exhibition’s more discrete aspects, perhaps the most immediately legible work in the show is ‘Words’ (2024), which is dispersed throughout the space, both on the walls and, in a larger format, on free-standing wooden boards. Each individual text has a particular focus, but as a whole they are all exercises in difference and repetition—’This poem will not’ lists the various things that the poem in question will not accomplish:

This poem will not save the world

This poem will not eradicate poverty

And so it continues. ‘Various circles’ describes, as you might expect, various circles: “Circles on top and below one another. Circles touching, crossing, caressing, bumping, and melting into each other.” They all have a particular rhythmic quality, which might recall John Cage’s Lecture on ‘Nothing’ (1950), or the motorik beat associated with German krautrock music - endlessly driving and ramifying, pushing at the limits of semantic satiation.

This sense of rhythm is also particularly evident in Ang’s ‘Voltage Drawings’ (2021), inspired as they are by the principle that any voltage at any point can only rise, fall, or remain constant. Drawn on graph paper, some are immediately suggestive of quantities rising and falling, while others suggest abstract landscapes, or diagrams of obscure purpose. His ‘Isometric Drawings’ (2024), while possessing a similar sense of rhythm in their patterns and textures, also lend themselves to a playful sense of exploration, at times resembling doodles on scratch paper, reflecting a process of trying things out in practice.

Exploratory play is also at work at the innermost point of the exhibition, with the video ‘Dandelions’ (2023) on the mezzanine floor. In this short video, Ang and his daughter ramble through a residential neighbourhood, picking dandelions and playing with them. It feels like the heart of the show, with its screen enshrined by an arrangement of dandelions—offering a kind of payoff to noticing that the exhibition’s various cinderblock plinths are adorned with dandelions.

The spatial rhythms and layered interiority of the show are further emphasised by one of its key elements, Ang’s box set, ‘Waves and Currents’ (2024), which is available for purchase. Calling it an element of the show may not be entirely accurate—the show certainly contains the box set, and yet the show, writ large, can also be thought of as contained within the box set. That sense of layered interplay, of rhythms and patterns repeating at various scales, is amongst the open prompts towards exploration that make this show what it is.

‘Untitled’, a solo exhibition by Song-Ming Ang, is on show from 13 to 28 April 2024 at starch, 81 Tagore Lane, Tag.A building #02-11. The space is open from Thursdays to Sundays, from 1pm to 7 pm. A concert will also be held at 7pm on 20 April 2024.