Strain and spectacle: Brian Gothong Tan

In the music video “Imelda Goes to Singapore,” artist Brian Gothong Tan recasts the eponymous heroine as a domestic worker in the affluent city-state. She lip syncs her signature song Dahil Sa Iyo and dances the tinikling in shorts and a white terno blouse with puffed-up plastic bags on either sleeve. The infamous kundiman turns painfully hilarious.

Tan’s video of the despot’s spouse cum “performance artist” has been up on YouTube for almost 10 years (it was first shown as part of an installation called “We Live in Dangerous World” in Singapore Biennale 2006) and yet still — cleverly and entertainingly — wounds.

An Imelda parody that alludes to the perils of overseas Pinay workers, the video creates a tense ripple across time from the influx of agricultural labor export to Hawaii at the turn of the 20th century, to the more organized recruitment of the OCW in the 1960s, and the current mass retrenchment in Saudi Arabia leaving 9,000 OFWs stranded, jobless and unpaid.

Brian, who was born in Cebu and moved to Singapore as a child, acknowledges this history but also allows us to snicker at the former First Lady’s hallucination within a hallucination; a skewed ruse that reverses the roles of exploiter and exploited. These sharply-constructed inversions are recognizable across Brian’s work. Spiked with humor and, indeed, entertainment, his practice blends spectacle with allegory through film, animation, theater and multimedia design.

Collective and personal histories reinforce one another through familiar tropes but with a tenderness and shrewdness of temperament. As the artist says, “I prefer to seduce them with humor… aggression fails for me.”

Brian’s work for the forthcoming Singapore International Festival of Arts, “Tropical Traumas: A Series of Cinematographic Choreographies,” combines theater and cinema inside designer Rod Arad’s 720° (it was first conceived as “Curtain Call” in 2011), a massive installation work to be installed in Gardens by the Bay. Shaped like a coliseum composed of thousands of eight-meter silicon rods to create a 360-degree stage, Arad’s work envelops audiences en masse.

“Tropical Traumas” as a “hybrid” piece recounts the chronicles of Sir Stamford Raffles’ wife Sophia Hull (“an amazing woman… full of love,” Brian says), who gave up everything in England to join her husband in Singapore. The artist describes the work as an amalgamation of history (i.e., the founding of modern Singapore by Raffles), his own personal insights and a “collaboration with the actors… mixing it with their (the actors’) life stories… actors playing actors.”

The following discussion took place after Singapore’s National Day Parade where Brian held the position of film and visual effects director. He is well-acquainted with spectacle, having taken on the same position in previous years, as well as the multimedia design for last year’s SEA Games.

THE PHILIPPINE STAR: As an artist who works with the “skin of the building,” could you share how architecture and scale figure into your practice?

BRIAN GOTHONG TAN: Transforming architectural space through projections has always fascinated me as an artist. By immersing my viewers in these images, which function as an extension to reality, or adding another layer onto reality, I’m able to transport them to alternative worlds. I can also create new meaning to spaces that we take for granted.

What are your thoughts on collaboration in film, theater and huge gatherings of people such as the SEA Games?

Collaborating with cultural giants like Eric Khoo and Keng Sen is always a pleasure and a gift that I treasure. In the past, artists used to mentor under masters to learn their craft, which is sorely lacking in most art practices these days. I get to learn so much from their experience and also just learn how they see the world.

Working on huge spectacles like Sea Games and National Day Parade is a totally different animal. These events are usually quite political and used as a form of propaganda to promote national interests. Not to say that they have zero artistic merits, but what I can say as an artist is very much limited. But, of course, it requires a lot of craft when I do these shows, and I do try my best to inject something truly meaningful, but usually through symbolic metaphors or aesthetics.

How do these seemingly “non-art world,” hugely anticipated endeavors relate to your work in art?

Brian Gothong Tan’s work for the forthcoming Singapore International Festival of Arts, “Tropical Traumas: A Series of Cinematographic Choreographies,” combines theater and cinema inside designer Rod Arad’s 720°.

It’s quite ironic that in my earlier art practice, my art was quite subversive politically, but in these projects I become an instrument to the national agenda. But doing these really help me understand that the world isn’t as binary as I thought it was. I meet people of different levels of awareness, and humbly, I’ve learned I’m not really above the system or anything. If anything, I’ve come to understand that the system both nurtures and kills you at the same time. I’ve always seen doing these mega shows as experiences I can learn from, and some of the things I’ve learned are quite intangible, like the power to move people through art and change their minds is quite apparent, and I’ve put that into my own private practice.

For “Tropical Traumas,” you mentioned that this is largely a collaboration with your actors who are migrants themselves. Could you share more about the process of working with them? How does self-reflexivity play into your work?

Working with these actors has been really rewarding and fun. I’m just so lucky that my actors are such generous and giving performers. For me, casting is the most important part of theater, because ultimately, it is the actors who convey meaning to the audience, not only through words and actions, but through their body and presence as well. Self-reflexivity is very important in my work, especially theater, because I really feel that it is quite old-fashioned to convey a drama where actors are pretending without awareness that they are acting as characters. Of course, this is also an aesthetic choice, one can play a realistic play that is also self-reflexive, but I think a lot of people are still hung up about text and realism. It’s really boring for me to watch a traditional straight play these days without falling to sleep, because one can easily watch films and the experience is much more convincing.

What drew you into this idea of exploring explorers, naturalism and the tropics?

I was naturally drawn to explorers, people who are mobile, and I think we are all explorers to some extent. Nature and the tropics is a subject that I only started getting into as an adult, because I’ve always taken that for granted when I was a child, especially when I was growing up in Cebu CIty, where I was very close to nature, climbing trees, experiencing typhoons, etc. In Singapore, children don’t really climb trees, they have metal and concrete playgrounds, and the only nature they experience is the zoo and Gardens by the Bay. So this respect for nature is totally missing in the psyche for most Singaporeans, I believe.

What do you hope to add to this image of Raffles in Singapore?

Actually, his reputation is quite spotty. It’s quite fashionable to see him as a white colonizer who tricked the local rulers to hand the island over to the British. But of course, we always prefer the British to the Dutch. But what I hope to add is that, after reading so much of his letters and writing, it’s amazing how similar present-day mindsets are very much intact after more than a century.

What do you think of the Gardens as environment for this particular work?

It was Keng Sen’s idea I think, and I think it’s brilliant. Gardens by the Bay is like our second botanical gardens, the first was started by Stamford Raffles, so I think it’s perfect. Of course, Gardens by the Bay is the hi-tech, slightly artificial sister, but I thought that was quite interesting because it perfectly describes Singapore now. You know, with its “City in a Garden” slogan.

How has migration informed your approach towards “Tropical Traumas”?

I’ve always kind of viewed my childhood in the Philippines as a kind of tropical paradise, where people were kinder and less concerned about material success. Of course, when I grew up, I realized that reality is much more complex, but I’ve kind of understood that it doesn’t really matter where you come from, but where you are headed and intending to go.

I use the word (trauma) very symbolically, the trauma or traumas that I refer to in the title means many things in the work: colonization, migration, death, love.

How do you think “theater” is translated within the “frame” of film?

I think that what theater can convey very easily is human relationships and human behavior really viscerally. Film can be a bit more obscure, kind of like dreams, where you don’t really know what the characters are thinking and what they can morph into. So I try to bring this sensibility into my film works. I’m definitely not the first director to do this, there are many great directors like Ingmar Bergman or Almodovar who are theater directors-turned-film-directors.

Would it be possible for you to elaborate on what you said about “seducing (audiences) with humor”?

I think at the end of the day, art has a very specific function, even though it is a human activity that is considered to have no “useful” function. Whether it is to reflect life or express the human soul, I think it just needs to connect to another human being. So it isn’t really humor as an effect that I’m really interested in, but the need to connect to my viewers that is very important to me. The word “entertainment” has very bad connotations in the art world, which sees it as shallow, but if you look at the origins of that word, it actually means “to hold,” and I’ve always viewed this as a gentle act, not to hold someone aggressively down, but to hold, kindly, someone’s hand and to put an idea into it.