Singapore - Art Museum and Botanic Gardens

After a morning spent purchasing the last two long hauls of our trip (China-Cairo on May 13, Istanbul-Portland on July 8), we went to the Singapore Art Museum.

The first exhibit was about realism, which is a modern Western import in Asian art, and how it was used in many cases to portray social messages and show social injustice.

Most of the rest of the museum was modern art, much of it not very good (well, that's what I think of most modern art actually). However, there was one rather large exhibit that we did like, showcasing the art of FX Harsono, a particularly influential modern artist from Indonesia. We weren't allowed to take photos in the museum, but in particular we liked the table set with butterflies. Here it is pictured in Nafas Art Magazine: Bon Appetit, 2008, FX Harsono.

Housed in another building was a set of galleries containing large alternate medium modern art. It included such things as a collection of broken glass washed up by the tide, a structure of rice bowls that was supposed to somehow be about eating and death, and a tiger-rocking chair-red ribbon piece opposing the traditional use of ground up tiger penis to renew potency in old people. Perhaps I'd like these things better if I didn't lack the cultural background to understand them without long-winded explanations. I did like the one that had a bunch of female body parts spelled out in words on the floor with pubic hair, and the one with the old-looking bust of a deity placed atop a cardboard cutout of a provocative young woman in (not very much) Western dress.

After the museum, which didn't take nearly as long as we expected, we found dinner and then took a bus up to the Botanic Gardens, which are open until midnight. They were well lit and still reasonably full of joggers taking advantage of the comparative cool of the evening at 8-9pm when we were there. It was really quite nice for a quiet romantic stroll.

From Singapore

From Singapore

From Singapore

Oh, yeah, and we had "carrot cake" for lunch, which is rather a different dish over here than it is back home.

From Singapore