After Utopia: Revisiting The Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art is Singapore Art Museum’s (SAM) latest permanent collection exhibition that examines humanity’s eternal yearning for a better world. Drawing largely from SAM’s permanent collection, as well as artists’ collections and new commissions.

There’s Utopia the TV series (haven’t seen? Go, go, go!), The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, even Gattaca, each offering a vision of the future. If you’re thinking of a perfect future, your Utopia, then the person next to you definitely has a different version of it. So in this exhibition, After Utopia premises the idea of Utopia on four prospects:

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We Have Crossed The Lake by Ian Woo (2009)

“Other Edens” explores the image of the garden as a symbol of the originary paradise to which we long to return, even while reflecting back to us our current imperfections and fall from grace. Also encompassed in this strand are colonial imaginings of exotic dream-gardens overflowing with bounty, beckoning from distant, ‘undiscovered’ shores.

 

After Utopia 6Jurong West Street 81 by Shannon Castleman (2008)

“The City and its Discontents” locates our aspirations to the ideal in the contemporary structures and environments we inhabit, and how these concrete realities fall short of the utopian impulses of architecture and urban planning, such that escape from the city to its opposite (or the  ‘countryside’) becomes inevitable.

 

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Mon Boulet by Svay Sareth (2011)

“Legacies Left” examines the legacy of ideologies that have left an indelible mark on the last century – thought experiments on which societies and nations have been built.

After Utopia 2Mewujudkan Angan (Realizing Dreams) by Yudi Sulistyo (2010-2011)

 

The final chapter, “The Way Within”, journeys into the realms of self and psyche, where, eschewing the grand narratives of history – one utopia after another – a quiet thought lingers: perhaps, the search for the ever elusive utopia lies inward.

 

May 1 – Oct 18. Singapore Art Museum, 71 Bras Basah Rd, Singapore 189555.

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