Interview: Liao Jiekai

The piece was not conceived like the way Newton discovered gravity after seeing an apple fall from a tree; it was not an immediate surge of inspiration, but rather a long drawn journey of research, interviews and looking at the installation site. It is a project that evolves at every step of the way, even right now. I did quote from Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" in my artist statement, and I think that in recent years, my practice had been drawing more influence from literature compared to any other art forms.

 

When I first received the commission, I visited SAM and walked through the site where the Panorama exhibition was still on. More than looking at the art works, I got interested in the construct of the gallery space; how the place assumes this neutral state of a white cube and recedes into the background as the art pieces take center stage.  Inspired by the SAM building and architecture, I decided to make a work about SAM because I don't want to see it as a Museum. I am curious; I want to investigate the history of the place through the process of art making.

 

I don't think that it is about having any form of reconciliation between past and present, because time is always presented as a continuum in everything around us. New things grow old as old things disappear. One very interesting discovery was that the newly constructed buildings in SAM contain architectural motifs that are a simplified or stylized version of the ones in the preserved/restored buildings. It helps distinguish the past and the present, to make clear the very distinct periods of history. After all, the building's current identity as a Museum will also eventually become part of its history, and an even larger one at that.

 

I must admit that I began the project as a cynic, thinking that there is a certain bias towards our colonial legacy in the preservation process in Singapore; colonial buildings tend to be favoured for preservation while modernist buildings like our former national library and national theatre have to go and make way for development. But as I move on in my research, I realised that these debates are much more complex, and like all other people, we want to simplify things because it makes it easier to justify our cause: whether it is preservation or progress. Preservation is also a doubled edged sword at times; a building may be preserved and restored in its physical form, but depending on the new social function or institutional identity it assumes, perhaps a certain spirit or aura about the place will be lost, that I feel is more precious than anything else. I think that the more important question that we should be asking ourselves, is why are we preserving, and what does progress mean to us?

 

Working on a close-to-obsolete medium like film is very challenging in this part of the world. I had to purchase most of my second-hand film equipment, and to process and print the film in America. It is also challenging because film is not a medium I usually work with - the last time I used celluloid film was in 2006 as a student in Chicago. There were many things and processes I have to familiarise myself with again in order to get the project going.