The best there is in Asia

Thai artists enjoyed a great evening at the recent Prudential Eye Awards in Singapore. Not only did Sakarin Krue-on win lifetime-achievement honours, but the pop-rock band Slot Machine was there to claim the Visual and Pop Culture award.

The ceremony at the Marina Bay Sands was the third for the Asia-wide awards, which recognise emerging contemporary artists and the best exhibitions, galleries, institutions and art critics promoting the scene.

This year, with Culture Minister Grace Fu officiating, there were 10 awards in five categories. The prize for Best Emerging Artist covered digital and video, installation, painting, photography and sculpture. The winning artwork in turn covered social, economic, geopolitical and environmental issues along with the rendering of personal experiences into universal feelings.

“The contemporary-art scene in Asia is vibrant and growing and many young artists from the region have much to offer Singaporeans,” Fu said. “A strong ecosystem in the art sector is essential in realising our goal of becoming a vibrant cultural city.”

It was Thai and Cambodian artists who carried off the grand prizes, though. Three other Thais were also short-listed for prizes, which carries with it the chance to have their work shown at the Marina Bay Sands ArtScience Museum.

Slot Machine – hard to believe they’ve been around for 16 years – were praised for their “unique Thai sound”, generated through guitar melodies and vocals rooted in traditional Thai music. The band “blurs the borders of art and shows a contemporary aesthetic drive”, the judges decided.

Led by singer Karinyawat Durongjirakan, the quartet performed their hit “Klerm” and the new single “Give It All to You” from their forthcoming CD “Spin the World”, their first English-language album. It’s produced by six-time Grammy winner Steve Lillywhite, who’s previously worked with U2, Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel.

Sakarin’s installation “Monkeys in My House” was one of the highlights of the “Thailand Eye” exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London last year. His thought-provoking, Buddhist-inspired works have been seen at the Venice Biennale and Germany’s Documenta. 

Cambodian artist Sareth Svay was named Overall Best Emerging Artist as well as Best Emerging Artist in sculpture. The 34-year-old-artist, who escaped from home as a refugee, dedicated the twin triumph to “freedom of expression in Cambodia”. 

Sareth’s innovative sculpture “Warning House” is made of recycled boxes and plastic and is meant to depict a refugee camp. His “Stake or Skewer” is contrived from black rubber sandals hangs on a wooden pole, a metaphor for corrupt communism and the tragedy of war.

Sareth, born in Battambang, was seven years old when his family fled the Vietnamese incursion, reaching a refugee camp on the Thai border. He stayed there for 13 years. A French volunteer taught him to draw. The subject matter is easily imagined.

“Sareth Svay’s story is incredible and inspiring,” said Niru Ratnam, director of the Prudential Eye Programme. “His artwork draws on a very specific context, but transcends that. He produces works that are funny, poetic and confident.”

Sareth’s two prizes added up to US$70,000 (Bt2.5 million) and come with the promise of a solo exhibition at the Start Art Fair later this year, hosted at the Saatchi in London.

In the digital/video category, Vietnam’s Trinh Thi Nguyen topped Thais Sutthirat Supaparinya and Anupong Charoenmitr with the complex video piece “Letters from Panduranga”. 

In the piece, she continues testing the line between documentary and fiction as she portrays a Cham community whose roots reach back 2,000 years to the Champa kingdom. Their homeland has been chosen as the site of Vietnam’s first two nuclear-power plants. In the midst of this affront to faith and history, “Letters from Panduranga” becomes a portrait of the artist. Nguyen spent several residencies in Ninh Thuan between 2013 and 2015, struggling with questions of accessibility and the permissibility of speaking on behalf of others.

Sutthirat’s three-channel video installation, “When Need Moves the Earth”, examines the environmental impact of large-scale electricity production at the Srinakarin Dam in Kanchanaburi and the Mae Moh Lignite mine in Lampang. Documentary footage of daily work at the plants combines with scenery along the Mekong River, pre-construction photos and astonishing imagery of explosive blasts clearing away land, the dust from which creates “abstract paintings” on the lens.

Inspired by the experience of losing his mother, Anupong’s “To Face” and “Clock” convey messages of confrontation and the passage of time. 

Shot in a pig slaughterhouse, “To Face” has an employee on one screen facing the doomed animal on the other. “Clock” mingles re-edits of the 1949 film “Blood of the Beasts” about horses being slaughtered and the 1931 animation “The Clock Store”.

In an upset win, Manish Nai of India took top honours in painting with his 2014 series of abstracts, “Untitled”. It has 100 newspapers in 19 different languages that are distributed daily in his homeland, a remarkable feat of layering that addresses the diversity in Indian society.

The chief contender had been the Thai entry, by Tawan Wattuya, which featured blurred watercolour portraits of politicians, beauty queens and anonymous teens.

Champion in the installation category, Taiwanese Huang Po Chih continued his “Blue Skin: Mama’s Story” theme with “Production Line – Made in China & Made in Taiwan”, recounting his mother’s working life from farm to factory and back to the farm. Complete with machinery and books on the subject, it examines the process of making denim shirts amid renderings of his immigrant mother and a native factory worker.

The runners-up were Indonesian duo Indieguerillas, whose “Tamen Budaya: Face off Face Dinner” has a two-wheeled dining table, and their compatriot Adiya Novali, whose “Conversation Unknown” comprises 3,500 sketched portraits of people involved in the arts in Indonesia. 

Two Bangladeshi artists were short-listed this year, a first for their country. Shumon Ahmed’s archival photography series “Metal Graves” won in that category, earning a cash prize of $20,000 – sepia images of old ships and the ship-breaking community in Chittagong. 

In second place was Singaporean Robert Zhaw, who delved into the changes the city-state has undergone in the past two decades, while Zhang Wei of China was third with “Artificial Theatre”, a series of computer-manipulated portraits of Aung San Suu Kyi and Vladimir Putin. 

Hong Kong’s Spring Workshop was declared Best Contemporary Art Institution, and the Para Site in the same city earned Best Exhibition bragging rights for “Great Crescent: Art and Agitation in the 1960s – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan”.

 

WORTHY WINNERS

You can see the winning entries of the Prudential Eye Awards through March 27 in the ArtScience Museum at the Marina Bay Sands. 

Fing out more at www.marinabaysands.com/museum.