Art raze against time
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August 6, 2011 Saturday
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Aug 6, 2011
Art raze against time
A Binjai Park bungalow, which is the venue of a six-day art show, will be torn down when the exhibit ends
By adeline chia, arts correspondent
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Blown-up pictures of re-enacted memories (background) taken
by Alecia Neo (left) will be among smaller photographs of the
Tans (foreground) in the Binjai Park A Binjai Park Bungalow.
View more photos
No. 43 Binjai Park is an oddity in upmarket Bukit Timah.
Old-fashioned and uneconomical, it is a sprawling,
single-storey bungalow with a huge garden. In the rich
man's neighbourhood of space-maximising constructions
or stylish architectural experiments, it is a understated
blast from the past.
By the middle of the month, the 4,800 sq ft house, built in
the 1950s and believed to be one of the neighbourhood's
oldest, will be demolished.
Its owners, corporate lawyer-turned-winebar owner Tan
Ying Hsien, 49, and his mother, Dr Nalla Tan, 88, a
prominent physiotherapist, counsellor and sex
educationist who is now suffering from Alzheimer's
Disease, have sold the 23,000 sq ft property on which the
house stands.
It is a place rich with memory: Both in the house's
architectural style, as well as the personal memories of its
inhabitants. Those who want to
explore the post-colonial style house before it is torn
down can do so as it is hosting a six-day art
exhibition opening today. The day after the exhibition
closes, the house will be demolished.
Singaporean artist Alecia Neo, 25, visited the house when
she was there to photograph Ying Hsien's wine collection
for a magazine article.
Moved by how special the house was, she asked to
photograph it and Dr Tan, but realised the pictures did not
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Art raze against time
do justice to the complexity and history of her subjects.
So Neo chose to explore the
nature of memory instead, and recreated some
photographs in the Tans' collection, pictures she thought
captured a certain relationship. A portrait of siblings. A
wedding. The birth of a first child.
She then asked families and friends she knew to re-enact
these scenes in the house and re-photographed them.
These blown-up images will be scattered, like their
smaller, framed originals, throughout the house. 'In this
way, we recreate the memories of the Tan family and
create new memories for the participating families,' she
says. There will also be a sound installation by sound
artist Clarence Chung, 25, in the living room. Six headsets
will be spread out on the dining table, each playing a
recording of a dinner conversation from different families.
The exhibition is called Villa Alicia, after the title of a
novel written by Dr Tan about her childhood and the
house in Ipoh, where she was born. 'But I feel there are
references to this house,' Neo says. 'She mentions playing
the piano and looking out of the window to see the
garden - which is also the configuration here.'
Wandering through the L-shaped house, two personalities
emerge: that of Dr Tan's mind as it was struggling with
her disease, and her youngest son Ying Hsien's love affair
with wine - wine bottles are strewn everywhere, on
kitchen counters, in boxes and on shelves.
Dr Tan had scribbled on the living room walls, under
photographs, notes to herself. The photographs have
been removed but the poignant words remain. 'Do not
remove. Nalla in a sleeveless sari blouse.' There are other
random writings. 'My brother gave me alloy'; 'Wild rose in
a wine glass'.
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Her memory started to fail in the late 1990s,
after a high-flying career. She was a 'Renaissance
woman', her daughter Ying Hui says.
Dr Tan was the principal of Eusoff College, a hostel at the
then-University of Singapore, and then a professor in the
university's Department of Social Medicine and Public
Health. A physiotherapist and counsellor, she was also
involved in the trade union and women's movements. She
also championed sex education and spoke at many
schools. In addition, she wrote columns for newspapers,
novels, short stories and poems, and painted. She was
widowed in 1975, when her doctor husband, Tan Joo
Liang, died of a heart attack.
'It would be quite poignant for my mother, since she has
lived here for 39 years,' says Ying Hsien.
After his mother, the bachelor is the one who has lived in
the house the longest, for about 27 years as he studied
and worked in England for some time.
His two older siblings are Ying Hui, 56, a retired lawyer
who has lived in England since the 1970s, and Ying Jien,
55, a record producer who now lives in Tampines. They
are both married. The two of them have returned to help
him move their mother to a house in Duchess Avenue. The
last few days have been spent packing and bidding
goodbye to the house. A short conversation with the
siblings throws up many stories and fond recollections.
Ying Hui says she will miss the well-ventilated building
and the way it is seamlessly integrated into the garden,
and Ying Jien will miss the big garden, which attracts
different kinds of birds. Ying Hsien says that there are too
many memories to pick out. 'What I'll miss is an
amalgamate of everything.'
chiahta@sph.com.sg
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10/08/2011 2:53 PM
Art raze against time
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