What kind of stories are inscribed in the folds of your skin, the flutter of your eyelids, the lining of your inner cheek?
Embodied Archive, the second installment of the Singapore Art Museum’s multi-year curatorial project Lost & Found, is a fascinating proposal on how the human body can be regarded as a living, breathing archive — a site that holds memories. A relatively small exhibition housing only nine works, the month-long show connects seven emerging and established contemporary artists through this theme.
Since I first intimately encountered (institutional) archives as a young researcher scouring through materials, I have always found that the archive intrigues. It fascinates me to no end to observe how it encompasses and revives memories beyond the conventional histories fossilised in books. These stories recounted in archives seem to have their own languages too — a little elusive, hesitant to speak, yet resounding if you pay attention. Studying the archives means that I speak in many tongues too.
Naturally, the exhibition’s premise piqued my interest. What languages does the living body — just like an archive — use to process and store its lived experiences? How do these bodies/archives articulate these experiences and communicate with one another, when given the space to do so?
Bodies in movement
Embodied Archive foregrounds the dialogue between the living body and the archive from the get-go. As we set foot into the exhibition space, the erratic, energetic movement of yellow paint across a 7-metre-long white canvas commands our immediate attention. Lee Wen’s Anthropometry Revision: Yellow Period (after Yves Klein) No. 2 (2008) is luminescent almost; the yellow hue — closely associated with the artist’s Yellow Man series — makes the work glow distinctly under the dim exhibition lighting. A closer look hints at the story behind the work: a handprint spotted! A fingerprint on the canvas!
For, this canvas emerges from Lee Wen’s reinterpretation of the French artist Yves Klein’s Anthropometries series, in which nude women performed as “human paintbrushes” to create abstract paintings. Every yellow splatter and body print on this white canvas is a record of embodied movement by Lee Wen and his two collaborators, begging the question: can an artwork be an archive too?
At the same time, we must approach the work up close, break the yellow mass down into the recognisable shapes of feet and hands, to begin to comprehend its story. This is an exercise visitors have to undertake when encountering other works in the exhibition: this practice of close visual reading. Here, the language of movement can only be unravelled if we take the time to observe the work carefully and bear witness to these three bodies in dialogue.
Archiving bodies
Beckoning us with the lively chatter of its video component, Bad Dream Rocking a.k.a The Rocking Malay(a) (2024), by Au Sow Yee and Chen Yow-Ruu of Her Lab Space, sits diagonally in conversation with Lee Wen’s work. Here, ideas of the body as an archival vessel manifest in a different form altogether.
Bad Dream Rocking centres on the renowned Malay folktale “Si Tanggang” (in which an unfilial son turns into a stone), presenting various iterations of the tale through audiovisual and textual means. On one side of the installation, transcriptions of the story as told by undocumented children born and residing in Malaysia form a shadowed outline of the Batu Caves, a site said to be the remains of Si Tanggang’s ship. On the other — and here the exhibition design, harking back to the dance of Anthropometry Revision, choreographs our movements as well — is a vibrant cinematic adaptation of the folktale, where the agencies of its individual characters are brought forth and explored.
In this installation, Her Lab Space represents an archive of voices whose identities are not easily categorised within a bureaucratic system of citizenship. The language of movement in Lee Wen’s work extends to Bad Dream Rocking as well, in documenting populations that have been moving for decades. Perhaps, these aural and textual records pose an alternative type of existence for the voices in Bad Dream Rocking – whose corporeal forms remain unrepresented and invisible?
More than skin deep
At this juncture, the curatorial exhibition design took a fascinating turn. While I gravitated towards the video component of Bad Dream Rocking, Embodied Archive gradually began to expand in my line of sight. More of the exhibition space came into view, revealing the rest of the works previously hidden behind the wall hosting Anthropometry Revision. I could not help but notice the parallels, intentional or otherwise, between this curatorial gesture and the gradual process of exploring the archive.
Furthermore, just like the living body, an archive never exists in a silo. Sinews of connection between a body/archive and other bodies and entities are constantly cultivated. Wandering past Anthropometry Revision and Bad Rock Dreaming, we are introduced to the other works in relation to what we have already seen.
Intrigued by this now-expanded site, I found my eyes transfixed by the textures projected onscreen in Lee Kang Seung’s Skin (2024). In this video work, the camera follows a performance by the queer, 80-year-old dancer Meg Harper, in slow, moving shots of her body and especially her skin. Every wrinkle, bump, and mark on the skin registers Harper’s lived experience of her long-standing dance practice. The scale of the video projection creates an especially breathtaking experience: an intimately up-close display of an ageing body, languidly moving, feeling almost foreign in today’s media representation of bodies. Skin images the body as an archive quite literally, powerfully demonstrating that knowledge can be inscribed upon our very bodies through muscle memories and physical traces.
Tip of the tongue
It seemed fitting to next encounter three works by Tiyan Baker — mouthbreather (2023), MY MOTHER’S TONGUE (2022), and nyatu’ maanǔn mungut bigabu (2021) — that explored the buccal as a way of sensing the world. While situated in conversation with Lee’s film, Baker’s works propose the mouth, rather than the skin, as a means of containing and transmitting embodied knowledge. Here, the mouth is a symbol documenting the artist’s evolving relationship with the Bukar language, her mother’s native tongue spoken by the indigenous Bidayǔh people, over the course of two years.
In mouthbreather, Baker presents video documentation of a lush green Bidayǔh village, but framed unexpectedly through her teeth, tongue, and oral cavity. The humour of this framing does not distract us, however, from what Baker intended to articulate from the tip of her tongue. The running text overlaying the video grieves the loss of knowledge linked with vernacular languages, like the ability to whistle and call birds and other animals.
Eye to eye
Finally, a glint reflecting off a line of miniscule mother-of-pearl shell pieces invited me to approach Gregory Halili’s Karagatan (The Breadth of Oceans) (2016). Forming a glimmering horizon, Karagatan from afar was not unlike a nighttime scene of fishing vessels at sea. Once I came closer, I was immediately immersed.
On 50 mother-of-pearl shell pieces, Halili has painted hauntingly realistic depictions of human eyes, representing the eyes of fisherfolk, boatmen, divers, and merchants residing and working in coastal areas across the Philippines. A closer look at these shell pieces yields a yet higher reward; there appears to be scenes of coastal landscapes reflected within some of the irises.
In this vista of gleaming shells and eyes, Karagatan poses each eye as a receptacle bearing traces of a seafaring life. It is in this meeting of gazes — of these eyes and I — that intimate exchanges of lived experiences can occur.
Whichever form the archive exists in — handprints or voices, mouths or eyes — the last line of Baker’s mouthbreather expresses my sentiments exactly: “The reason you can see these things is because you can name them.” Stories contained in muscle memory or tucked between folds of skin can only be accessed if we speak the languages (literal or metaphorical) they are articulated in. But while you and I might be unfamiliar with some of the languages and lived experiences in Embodied Archive, I encourage you to lean in, listen, and observe — to try and learn the many ways bodies/archives can speak to us about the world.
___________________________________
Lost & Found: Embodied Archive runs at the Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark till 24 Nov 2024. Find out more at singaporeartmuseum.sg.
Header image: Installation view of Lee Kang Seung’s Skin (2024). Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.
