Chun Kaiqun

Race For The Prize, 2008, Installation, Dimensions variable

Chun Kaifeng

The Optimist

2007

 Mixed media

40 x 65 x 65 cm

Chun Kaifeng

The Ride Of A Lifetime!

2008

Mixed media

50 x 60 x 45 cm

Chun Kaifeng

Parklife

2008

Mixed media

60 x 80 x 50 cm

Chun Kaiqun

Forgotten Eyes

2008

Stereoscopic viewer and reels

(Below: stereo-pair images)

Chun Kaifeng

Untoys (Series of 10 Sculptures)

2008

Mixed media

Dimensions variable

Chun Kaiqun

Unfinished Adventures (I Will Brave Hell For The Fun Of It)

2008

Silkscreen and pencil

50 x 35 cm

Chun Kaiqun

Unfinished Adventures (UFO Catcher)

2008

Silkscreen and pencil

50 x 35 cm

Chun Kaiqun

Unfinished Adventures (Give Me Back)

2008

Silkscreen and pencil

50 x 35 cm

Chun Kaiqun

Unfinished Adventures (Super-NES Powered Ecological System)

2008

Silkscreen and pencil

50 x 35 cm

Chun Kaiqun

Unfinished Adventures (The Last Ride)

2008

Silkscreen and pencil

50 x 35 cm

Wang Zineng

I don’t like nostalgia unless its mine
Lou Reed

Kaifeng and Kaiqun are of the 80’s generation – like myself. In fact, the three of us were born the same year in 1982. Thinking about our generation, I am reminded of a new colleague of mine, a slighter older lady born in the 1970s (she wouldn’t reveal which year) who disapproves of our generation. To her, we are individualistic, self-centred and impatient to get somewhere – all of which are supposedly antithetical to the values of kids born in the preceding decade – the 1970s – and manifested more problematically in larger proportion with the 90’s generation. You cannot quite get us to concur with her, obviously. The unsurprising truth one is reminded of from this is the fact that generational gulfs exist; each generation speaks circumspectly of its own thrills and biases; its own heroes and villains; its own aspirations and insecurities.

This kind of generational variegation is what drives nostalgia, or more specifically, the particular appeal of nostalgic exercises. They don’t “speak” to everyone; and that is their particular charm. Nostalgia is, in effect, a form of exclusionary connection – reaching out (only) to those who bear shared experiences, to thosewho were there, who saw and touched and felt and were moved. And this is in fact one of the most delightful things about the ideas and the works in Kaifeng and Kaiqun’s first joint exhibition, For Mr. & Mrs. Children. The duo does not purport to any kind of universalism or broad mass appeal; they do not seek out grand historical episodes to dissect, and neither do they quote perfunctorily from current affairs. Instead, the twin brothers draw their materials and locate some of the essences of their works from particular childhood episodes familiar to a typical 80’s generation Singaporean child. In this regard, their works assume to speak most poignantly to their generational peers – and unabashedly so.

The duo speaks simply and fondly, and one wonders whether it is the same for all those who bear a tender regard for the past. In an e-mail inviting me to contribute a catalogue essay, they stated simply and without adornment that “what ties the works [in the exhibition] together is that they are all ‘children’ things”. And seemingly so – but with interpretative twists and a distinct character we increasingly come to associate with them. Their three-dimensional works, carefully and painstakingly assembled, are faithful to craft’s emphasis on the skill of the maker’s hands. There is an unmistakable fastidiousness in their process. Like a child cradling her precious teddy bear, they handle each exhibit, half-done or complete, lovingly and speak of it with overflowing exuberance – twinkles in their eyes – on the ideas that belie the works.

For the exhibition, Kaifeng has meticulously assembled various household odds-and-ends like hair curlers, orange juice squeezer, scissors and pens into vehicular toys that look seemingly ready for war. His Untoys, a series of ten sculptures, distill the mock seriousness in children’s play, reaffirming how it becomes a microcosmic world of belligerence, competition and victory – values and phenomenon manifest in the adult world. But these values are further percolated in child’s play and become more pronounced. The whimsical imaginary is strong in Kaifeng’s works as he comprehends and physically realises new functions for commonplace objects. Beneath the veneer of cuteness in his scrupulously-made scaled-down Ferris wheel in The Ride Of A Lifetime! is a metaphorical reminder of the lingering presence of an Uncle Sam-type policing state that grants one freedom, but a freedom that is conditional and bounded.

Kaiqun’s Race For The Prize, a miniature installation of a drain (Long Kang, as we call them) harks back to those days of child’s play when the storm canal was the great, venturesome alternative to the playground. Even as bumbling unconscious children, we knew the canal to be the edge of safe play, where transgression meant plunging to the depths of lurking danger. But the canals were where the tadpoles and the guppies could be found in their elements; and that gave us such indescribable thrill. Race For The Prize dramatises the sense of danger; what with the watercourse replete with all conceivable forms of nasty physical obstacles. Overcoming these obstacles become the chief objective of players. In the work, what is formerly fun and unmediated then comes to assume a serious visage. Kaiqun makes pointed reference to the first Formula One race to be held in Singapore in September this year. The latter is the embodiment of a certain type of “unfun” the brothers feel strongly against – fun estranged from spontaneity and given to intense commodification and conscientious design upon commercial and tourism revenues.

In these works, the duo recalls the spirit and specific features of play not unfamiliar to a similarly-aged young Singaporean person. Memories begin from the playgrounds of childhood. Instead of stowing them in the past, Kaifeng and Kaiqun think and work with them as entities in the present tense, relating them with a contemporaneous immediacy. At its core as an exhibition, For Mr. & Mrs. Children plumbs a pervasive feature of life – when play becomes leisure, and fun becomes recreation. A value is tagged on the simplest of pleasures, transforming the naturalness of play into a ritualised and systematised entity. If our (budding young) adults are in actuality outgrown children, having had the magic carpet of play pulled rudely from under them and thus incarcerated from having fun, then the question begging to be asked is clear – what about today’s kids?

Cast us back to those days
of children’s play,
in 1980s and early 1990s Singapore.
Less than 5 feet tall were we all
it never seemed we should recall
today what stowed tales
mean in history’s pale.

 It may be trite to repeat but indeed, history repeats itself. More so in the context of urban Singapore than elsewhere. One’s memories of the past, especially of childhood, is progressively being effaced in the choruses of voices propagating the remaking, repositioning, repackaging, and reinventing of Singapore. Architectural critic Rem Koolhaas’ infamous declaration of Singapore as tabula rasa springs to mind. Singapore – a razed plane for a genuinely new beginning? Kaifeng and Kaiqun’s works – overtly concerned with the fleetingness of play and bygone days of childhood – do, at a fundamental level, express a deep-seated consciousness of the violation exercised upon Singapore’s physical landscape. The duo’s lament over lost play reflects a resistance to the erosion of one’s mental landscape caused by urban flux and dislocation.

The official and definitive tagline of Singapore’s urban aspiration – a great city to live, work and play – highlights the inherent artificiality of Singapore life which my generation has imbibed whilst growing up. The Singapore Flyer and the Formula One race here in September are only the two most recent manifestations in a long train of “experiences” and “representations” created and peddled by the city’s urban and tourism planners. In drawing and commenting upon them, Kaifeng and Kaiqun decry the effacement of natural play. No longer do people know any other way of having fun except in a consumerist way.

And so Kaifeng’s model, Parklife and Kaiqun’s series of five drawings, Unfinished Adventures, are presented as fictive nightmarish arenas – the abode of ghouls, ghosts and injurious grief; where fun begins to harm. Parallel to this message, they are also symbols of overbearing urban experiences – egoistic and tyrannical conscription of urban life, which erases unscripted urban possibilities with total and militaristic efficiency. What we need is exactly opposite to these. We need works that subvert predictability, certainty and familiarity. With For Mr. & Mrs. Children, the twin brothers reinscribe the innocence of play, liberating its paradoxical and poetic elements.

Clara Chow

Twin brothers Chun Kaifeng and Chun Kaiqun are not above revealing to you, amid sniggers and chortles like naughty children, that they filch scraps of grass from construction sites at 3am – all in the name of art.

“It’s more authentic that way,” says Kaiqun, whose 2007 art installation in CityLink underground mall was a realistic, painted papier mache recreation of a concrete storm drain with the pilfered turf, aptly titled Long Kang.

For the exhibition For Mr. & Mrs. Children, their first combined solo exhibitions (an oxymoron, if there ever was one so happy), Kaifeng and Kaiqun are displaying their art-as-child’s-play aesthetic once again.

A bigger, better version of Long Kang is on show – except, now, it is an indoor racing circuit for leaf-boats, complete with advertising billboards and sponsorship stickers, ala the upcoming, inaugural F1 races here.

As Kaiqun explained, while work on the DIY obstacle course was still ongoing: “We were doing things like racing paper boats down real drains when we were young. There’s this desire in us to bring it to a professional level.”

Other childhood pursuits are similarly appropriated, turned on their heads, or pushed to the most ridiculous limits. Another of Kaiqun’s works here, Forgotten Eyes, employs the nostalgic, superhero-esque Viewmaster 3D image viewer to show visitors images of neglected and marginalised places in Singapore. By focusing on these desolate, quietly poignant scenes, the artist seems to have imbued his audience with new eyes. The viewer, in one sense of the word, is transformed by the viewer.

The terrorist-in-toyland theme gets a good working-out in Kaifeng’s contributions to this exhibition.

Having already garnered good reviews and critics’ attentions with his eerily eloquent models of places under surveillance (either literally, like prisons or top-secret camps; or metaphorically, in the case of Van Gogh’s room, the site of much cultural imagining), Kaifeng has produced some miniature amusement park and leisure facilities this time around.

The Ferris wheel in The Ride Of A Lifetime! looks innocuous at first, reminding the viewer of the ubiquitous giant wheels that grace – or blight, depending on how you see it – the skyline of major cities today. But, it reveals itself after further scrutiny to be ominous, with its caged cabins and internment camp-like loudspeaker system. The insinuation that an ultimate tourist magnet can lead to a dour situation is certainly not accidental: Why do government’s plans for urban development and architectural statements reduce the world to such cookie-cutter similarity? Why do we need such giant props to prove that we can have fun?

The Parklife model is even more perverse. Urban landscapes that are designed to improve the quality of life for inhabitants turn out, ironically, to be not very friendly at all. Playground equipment are unwieldy, stupidly designed, and even plain dangerous. Rows of chairs call into stark relief the very loneliness that these so-called social spaces are supposed to dispel.

Elsewhere in the exhibition space are Untoys built by Kaifeng that are not particularly suited for play. Built from everyday materials, in the spirit of Ikea-hacking or Japanese anime’s archaic technology, they look more like dangerous weapons with their prongs and blades.

And Kaiqun’s gleefully morbid drawing series, Unfinished Adventures, is linked to the rest of the artworks on display by its depiction of a grotesque, carnivalesque theme park, with dead bodies for prizes, or its rendering of an eco-system powered by a Super Nintendo game console. They involve nightmarish roller coasters, broken tracks, and scary radioactive girls.

For reasons unknown and probably unfair, I can’t help but compare the Chun twins to the Chapman Brothers – controversial British contemporary artists Jake and Dino Chapman. The similarities are only skin deep: Both sets are brothers who collaborate to make art. Both sets have a taste for black comedy. And both sets understand the importance of publicity (and being geekily cute) when it comes to furthering their works.

The twins are aware that their near-identical appearance and biological back-story makes for an obvious media story: They are the youngest in a family of taxi-driver Dad, factory worker-turned-housewife Mum, and three older sisters, all of whom are teachers; the gifted family used to attend local children’s art competitions and sweep the prizes; the art trophies they won filled an entire shelf, and eventually were just thrown willy-nilly in a cupboard; and the twins themselves were both recipients of the Georgette Chen Arts Scholarship in 2005.

Nor are they precious about being lumped together artistically and professionally. “There isn’t any artistic rivalry between us, but people keep thinking there is. We kept being compared to each other so much – it was like a Venus and Serena Williams thing – so we decided that we might as well work together.”

But, whereas the Chapmans set out to shock with their in-your-face works involving sex, death and gore in some form, the Chuns trade on a kind of snarky, juvenile humour that aims to discomfit, displace, unsettle and plain niggle.

As Kaifeng puts it: “We don’t like to go out and shock people. That’s very easy to do, visually. Just put blood and guts everywhere. We’d rather disturb, which is more complex and lingers. Something is there, but you can’t really see it. And if you can, it rewards you.”

The starting point for their works is the flotsam of life. Kaiqun explains: “We are always interested in the mundane, stupid things. Like that flying plastic bag in the film American Beauty.”

At the heart of it all, both artists have much to say about the country they have grown up in. Lampooning amusement parks, for them, is an oblique way of questioning why Singapore’s tourism image is driven by economic initiatives that can do with more imagination; why childhood past-times have evolved to a sterile, character-less ghost of yesteryear’s dirt-under-fingernails’ games; or why people are paying money to entertain themselves literally to a spiritual death.

As Kaifeng observes, while discussing his Ferris wheel and Parklife models: “Leisure is supposed to be non-productive. But by buying into things like cineplexes and tourist traps, we are still stuck in that consumptive cycle.

He adds: “It’s as though people, faced with free time, don’t know how to truly enjoy themselves anymore.”
Kaifeng and Kaiqun have created works that are the visual art equivalent of local coffeeshop roundtable discussions or taxi-driver rants. As the former puts it: “People have to realise that there are alternatives to how we can live our lives.”

The brothers cite The Situationists, political-cum-artistic agitators with roots in Marxism, and German artist Carsten Holler, famed for building gigantic slides and his explorations into human physiological reactions, as influences. Tellingly, Kaifeng’s website is called Next Stop Laputa, which he explains as an allusion to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and the never-ending search for utopia. But Laputa, which means “the whore” in Spanish, has also been read as Swift’s mockery of the so-called Age Of Reason (Martin Luther had famously said: “That great whore, Reason”). Do we thus need to think less and just experience more?

Whatever the answer, fun is definitely a main element in this exhibition – streaked with cruelty, danger and violence. Like magpies poised on the edges of innocuous playgrounds, the artists have swooped in to snap up bright shiny parts that have caught their attention. And like magpies lining their nests with their finds, Kaifeng and Kaiqun have finessed their collection into objects capable of pricking officious officials, bumbling bureaucrats and clueless citizens.