eNewsHound

Singapore is amazing, and keeps getting more interesting.  It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what is so attractive about this city state, whether it’s the mix of the urban with the exotic, or the global sensibility that seems to permeate everything, or if it’s something that’s just not palpable, but it’s certainly there.  The past decade or so has seen an increase in travel, and its for very good reasons.  There are excellent world class hotels, amazing food everywhere you go, including Italian restaurants, and a cultural scene that is always growing by leaps and bounds.  One of the most fascinating things about Singapore is its ability to adapt to and adopt cultures that are not necessarily native, and that’s one of the many reasons Italian food is so delightfully good here.

It might also have something to do with its geography, with a constant supply of fresh and excellent seafood.  The culinary traditions here are extremely diverse, and the influx of excellent ingredients from all over the world make it a chef’s, as well as a diner’s, paradise.  There are many connections between Italy and Singapore besides the food, and one area where these connections are very prominent is in the art.  Art has a way of bringing collaborators from diverse backgrounds together, and projects are often a way of finding a common language.  Or perhaps it’s a matter of finding different languages that somehow communicate something anyway.  Lucy Davis, artist and professor at the School of Art, Design and Media at NTU has an impressive body of work that bears witness to this in many spectacular ways.

This artist, whose work crosses between visual art and cultural studies, grew up here, and spent a significant amount of time in the U.K. and in Copenhagen, where she studied art and developed her own art practice.  She has done a number of works in performance, installation, photography, and sculpture, and lately has been working with an interest in animality.  Her work does indeed intersect between high art and political engagement, and one of her recent works, The Tree Project, involved the planting of Hibaku trees around the world.  Hibaku trees are trees grown from seeds that were present at the bombing of Hiroshima, so the project is an enormously powerful statement, expressed in a beautiful form.