Singapore: Yeo Workshop

Hydrographic concerns are salient in the contemporary art of Southeast Asia, a region with deep historical and material ties to the water. Recent years, in particular, have witnessed much art-making and conceptual discourse that relates to seas and rivers, marine communities and ecologies, and boats, maps and other implements of navigation—subject matter that is growing increasingly shopworn. It is to the credit of Taiwanese-American artist Mike HJ Chang, then, that his take on the theme retained its own idiosyncratic sensibility, quietly reveling in its unorthodox methods and vocabularies. “Calendar of Dilation,” curated by artist and researcher Alfonse Chiu at Singapore’s Yeo Workshop, began with a residency that Chang undertook in mid-2018, when he spent two weeks at sea on an oil tanker, traveling from Italy to the Netherlands. The works, beyond embodying ideas of the pelagic, were also informed by the circuit breaker imposed in Singapore last year, and the protracted confinement that framed both occasions for the artist fed into a subsidiary trope: the relativity of temporal experience, when time becomes unmoored from familiar modes of affect and measurement.