Fridae

If you happened to be walking through the underground tunnel connecting the Esplanade and Citylink Mall, you'd be treated a splendid display of multimedia artworks that should stop you in your tracks.

Ranging from manga (Japanese for comics and/or cartoons) iconography to abstract-realist short films, they are created by Singapore's very own gay artist Brian Gothong Tan.

Having won the prestigious Shell-National Arts Council scholarship in 2003 to study at California Institute of the Arts, the 25-year-old is back in Singapore to mine the mark he's already made with previous installation works like 2004's Hypersurface (created with ex-boyfriend Vince Ong) at Sculpture Square.

His latest exhibition at the Esplanade Tunnel is titled The Mysterious Book of Invisible Children. The long length of the tunnel has been aptly divided into various "book chapters" and each "chapter" bears its own distinctive look and theme. Some "chapters" are lush and dreamy, others are sharp and fragmentary, still others are plain weird.

The exhibition's centrepiece is possibly the evocative 1-minute short film which the exhibition has been named after. In it, a gaggle of schoolchildren play an odd game of hide-and-seek in an anonymous carpark. Using edgy cinematography and rapid editing, the film is a bravura piece of videowork. But its deeper symbolism reflects the larger concerns of the exhibition.

Brian explains that when he thinks of Singaporeans, he thinks of them as schoolchildren who still rely on authority figures to govern their conduct. Despite of or partly because of Singaporeans' reliance on top-down direction, he thinks that many Singaporeans don't form a deep attachment to the country. Hence, the transitory nature of the carpark setting for the schoolchildren's games.

Says Brian, "The carpark is a place that we don't live in. It's a place that we use, but don't form an attachment to. I think of our country as a carpark sometimes."

The theme of ordinary Singaporean as docile schoolchildren is developed further in other works. Three paintings, for instance, portray schoolchildren in a state of deep sleep. They are floating in a blissful space-like environment - some with tubes attached to their heads and bodies (see accompanying picture). Very Matrix, indeed...

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Brian says: "A lot of Singaporeans are in deep sleep. They don't seem to realise that their lives revolve around the ideas of one man or a group of men. Their lives aren't their own." Of course, that "one man" he's talking about is Singapore's former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, now the Minister Mentor. And the "group of men" he refers to is the core of the PAP cabinet.

Lee, Singapore's founding father, becomes the very subject of the first "chapter" of The Mysterious Book. Here, on a large acrylic box, Brian inscribes a dream that he had of Lee: "LKY asked me about Singapore and I told him, 'Singapore will become the city of cities. But I also see the destruction of Singapore in 300 hundred years time. It will be over so fast that people can't imagine that there was this great city that stood in the middle of Southeast Asia.'"

Seated on top of the acrylic box are numerous Astroboy dolls made of paper. Brian says that the Japanese cartoon character is an apt symbol for Singapore - "a robot-child nation with an atomic heart waiting to become human."

Politics aside, Brian also makes several witty references to popular Singapore artworks - sometimes paying homage to them, other times taking pot-shots at them. One work hilariously references Francis Ng's huge concrete "I WAS HERE" sculpture which recently stood in front of the Esplanade, and which was popular with tourists who loved posing with it.

Crafting his own modest ephemera, Brian projects the question "WAS I HERE?" against the backdrop of fleeting video images shot from a moving car. The fragile and impermanent nature of the installation - as opposed to the towering concreteness of Francis' piece - extends Brian's concept of Singapore as a transitory home for its people.

As if to gently mock tourists who have enthusiastically posed before the I WAS HERE sculpture, Brian's antithetical WAS I HERE? even has a dotted box painted on the floor instructing passers-by to stand in it and have their picture taken.

Exuberant and filled with subtexts, the works of The Mysterious Book Of Invisible Children clearly reflect the hand of an artist who is as equally at home with avant-garde digital animation as he is with referencing Singapore art, politics and history.

Some may think that his provocations are skin-deep. Others may find that his art cuts through to a different way of seeing - as good art should.

The Mysterious Book of Invisible Children by Brian Gothong Tan, which is part of the Singapore Art Show, is on till 23 Oct at the Esplanade Tunnel. Free Admission.