Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

The Artists Village (TAV) started as a community of artists operating in zinc-roofed huts with real farmers and farm animals, representing a time when nodes of activities took place in and around particular sites and artists during the 1980s and 1990s in Singapore. This paper theorises TAV, not only as an ‘experimental colony’ of artists as historicised by art historians, but as initiators of public art’, in operationalising art’s publicness where artists redressed the separateness of art from everyday life through interventions in the National Museum Art Gallery (NMAG). In particular, Tang Da Wu’s communicative interaction is discussed through Koh Nguang How’s photographic archive where Tang’s radical approach to facilitate interventions at NMAG were attempts to decolonise and ‘perform the museum’ to and for the public. Presented as open-ended, collaborative, and free access events, I argue that these workshops, seminars, and performances shifted the social function of the museum into a public forum and a space for pluralism. Tang’s mobilisation of public spaces and the use of his body in communicative actions was an extension of his commitment as a public artist to local dialogues, where the re-territorialisation of the museum enabled art to being ‘lived’ and experienced by people.