By All Estimates – Please Explain

2:00pm–3:30pm

4A’s series Please Explain invites presenters to rethink, recharge and reimagine contemporary issues through the arts, academia, journalism and related fields. Responding to By All Estimates presented at 4A, an exhibition that brings together works by artists that give form to narratives often obscured by the Singapore’s rapid urban and social development, this edition of Please Explain will feature exhibiting artists Erika Tan (UK) and Moses Tan (Singapore) alongside academic Dr Yvonne Low (Power Institute, The University of Sydney) and Ursula Sullivan, co-owner of Sullivan+Strumpf, the first Australian gallery to establish a presence in Singapore at Gillman Barracks.

Taking the seminal essay Authenticity, Reflexivity, and Spectacle; or, The Rise of New Asia is Not the End of the World (2004) by prominent Singaporean art critic and curator Lee Weng Choy as a key reference for discussion, speakers will explore a range of ideas and relate their own experiences concerning Lee’s central premise that “Singapore imagines itself not just as taking the best from the East and the West—as the inheritor of the great traditions and the latest technologies—but, by offering itself as the paradigm of New Asia, Singapore also stakes a claim as part of the avant-garde of the next stage of global capitalism.” This Please Explain will ask: How has his contention may have further evolved over the past fifteen years? How does the construct of ‘New Asia’ play out in the contemporary arts scene and global imagination? How have past and present institutional and national agendas influenced the way local artists and art markets operate? What is the democratic role of the arts in public discourse? And what role do artists play within Singapore’s investment in its rise as a global knowledge-based economy in the twenty-first century?

Registrations required, via 4A website.