Fresh off a tour of Singapore’s current gallery offerings, Adeline Chia recounts the dreamscapes and hollow-eyed monkeys she spotted along the way.
The first work you encounter in Tropic of Perception, a group exhibition at Singapore’s Ames Yavuz Gallery, is Pam Virada’s Seaside Highway (2025), a frosted, green-tinted window mounted perpendicular to the wall. Printed at the top of the glass panel is a mysterious text: ‘She was thinking about the scene of one of the videos. They arrived at a plaza, theatres on all sides. Fountain in the middle. All lights were out.’ Below this text fragment is a greenish video-projection of a river flowing through the arches of an aqueduct. It is a mesmerising sight until a subtle skip in the footage – blink and you miss it – reverses the direction of the water’s flow. Through a blend of cleverly chosen elements, Virada’s work plays on levels of transparency and legibility: the blurriness of the frosted-glass window; the enigmatic text about emptied cities and stages; and the blip in the water flow. Everything feels pregnant with meaning, but exactly what that meaning is remains just out of reach – like the vague memory of a dream.
With its evocative ambiguity, Seaside Highway provides an apt introduction to an exhibition about the mutable, unstable process of human perception. Featuring the works of six artists, Tropic Perception explores how ways of seeing and understanding can be fluid. You could argue that this is one of the fundamental qualities of art, where meaning is open-ended. But such curatorial exercises are always pertinent in a world in which the rigid bifurcation of perspectives has caused and will continue to cause division and strife. Moreover, the artworks here are rich and subtle – and I left with a feeling of ephemerality not just when it came to human perception but to all things.
