Anthology Blues

56 Hour Durational Performances (Part 1)

Kai Lam

2007

Kai (Lam Hoi Lit) is a Singapore based artist that does works like drawing, painting, sculpture, mixed media installation and performance art. He is the president of Artist Village and co-founded Pink Ark (a sound collective) with Zulkifli Mahmod. He is also known as Singlish Punk.

I find Kai’s work interesting as there are many elements/symbols in his work that evoke certain response from the audience. Kai’s work have certain influence that is very much ‘Singaporean’. I feel that his passion to do art at a full-time basis is motivating as it is something that is not very common (although it is growing now). I feel that there are a lot of things that I can learn from the way he does his work (the gestures that he uses in his performances). Also, I normally take a very long time in analyzing an artist’s work and this project will allow me to analyze an artist work step-by-step. When we translate our own meaning from looking at the art piece, are we actually coming up with new meanings of the work ourselves? Is this act a contradiction, because we are trying to understand the work but are actually coming up with our own meanings?

The aspects of his work that I am going to analyze are the repeated elements/symbols in his work. Examples would be the mini merlion statue, the slogan-“More Good Years” and 5 stars and a crescent. When I look at his recent work, Anthology Blues, it gives a ‘ritualistic’ kind of feeling as there are repeated gestures and symbols. What is the message that he is trying to bring across? What did he do to bring the message across? These are some questions that I hope I would be able to answer or at least have an understanding of by the end of this project.