After Utopia : revisiting the ideal in Asian Contemporary Art
- SAM
Singapore Art Museum - 1 May - 18 October 2015. In naming his fictional island ‘Utopia’, writer Thomas More conjoined the Greek words for ‘good place’ and ‘no place’ – a reminder that the idealised society he conjured was fundamentally phantasmal. And yet, the search and yearning for Utopia is a ceaseless humanist endeavor. Predicated on possibility and hope, utopian principles and models of worlds better than our own have been perpetually re-imagined, and through the centuries, continue to haunt our consciousness.
Drawing largely from Singapore Art Museum’s collection, as well as artists’ collections and new commissions, After Utopia seeks to ask where have we located our Utopias, and how we have tried to bring into being the utopias we have aspired to. By turns, these manifestations serve as mirrors to both our innermost yearnings as well as to our contemporary realities – that gnawing sense that this world is not enough.