UTOPIA REIMAGINED, 2023

COLLABORATION | COMING UP ROSES, OHMYMEITING, WEISH, AND DRU CHEN

The UTOPIA Reimagined Series champions and grows Singapore's creative culture, empowering artistes to push boundaries in their creativity and fuel the progressive growth of their musical careers. The Foundation's collaboration with popular and award-winning Singaporean artists sets out to create a platform that opens doors and connects diverse talents across genres and borders, producing music that resonates with broad audiences. Four popular and award-winning local artistes will reimagine the Singapore-inspired UTOPIA Symphony in their own styles as part of the UTOPIA Reimagined series by Foundation for The Arts and Social Enterprise. The UTOPIA Reimagined Series enters its second edition with four new artists commissioned, which includes Coming Up Roses, OHMYMEITING, weish and Dru Chen. In line with its mission to promote local creative talents, The Foundation has also commissioned Dr Yanyun Chen, recipient of the Young Artist Award in 2020, to design the cover art for all four singles.

Terrestrial
2023
Charcoal on paper
37cm x 37cm

The image of dried, cracked bits of plaster, brick, and clay came to me when I listened to These Corners by Coming Up Roses. The harsh inability to dream beyond walls, the hesitance to think a change because it “could mean a world’s been torn”, these are screams of stasis where salvation is the slow traversing across textured terrains of a foundation which remains ever present to lock us in. After all, there is no going outside, so imagination is the touching of raw wounds of walls.

Possession
2023
Charcoal on paper
37cm x 37cm

I've often wondered if our creations would miss us once they have left our hands. Nested within a glass case at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, sits a guǐ gōng qiú (鬼工球), a "devil's work ball". Described by Ming Scholar Cao Zhao, it alludes to the otherworldly magnificence of such a hand-crafted artisanal object. This free floating 15 layered concentric ivory sphere, also known as "puzzle balls", left its native shores as an art curio in the 19th Century, purchased by American traders. At its core, the last bone sphere, is a deep darkness. I wonder if it is dreaming of its maker.

Plumed Serpent
2023
Charcoal on paper
37cm x 37cm

At the other side of the world lay a plumed serpent. He is the wind, the guide, the road sweeper of rain gods. He is a foreigner, an invader, a sacrificer, and a guardian. He is K’uk’ulkan. He is the long count, the ups and downs, the cycles. He is of the sky and of the earth, for he flies and he slithers. He has seen the blood, the ghosts, and the screaming through the crevices of rock, ruin, and time. 

He spoke to the sun and burnt his tongue. Staring at the sky, he has questions. 

Komorebi Coral
2023
Charcoal on paper
37cm x 37cm

Thin slivers of sunlight between tight walls. Cutting rays and dappled shadows. Light finds its way through crevices and cracks, piercing straight through a concrete jungle. Perhaps, it isn’t just about squeezing through to reach the sun, but embedding, emerging, rooting, carrying the whole damn lot of ingrowths—plaster, brick, stone, ivory, clay, forest—along in the walk-towards. We sink our talons into the infrastructure, and dive into the dark abyss; we are a coral colony migrating through space and time, on our way home.