The Central Market Annexe’s latest exhibition, “Out Of Line”, is (as the name suggests) an anthology of 15 sketch-and-line (in Pang Khee Teik’s case, blackboard-and-chalk; or, with graffiti designer They, spraypaint-on-plywood) artists displaying quirk. Some of the works come from dark places, as with Chang Yoong Chia’s self-portraits or Avroco’s huddled masses, but in general they are fun, fashionable pieces; many are cutesy-ly mellow vignettes or minutely detailed surrealities — reflecting the kind of knowing lightness that is such a part of our era’s fatigue with dour issues dealt in dour ways. You could ponder about meanings and subtexts (are Mun Kao’s skyscraper-toothed Godzillas about the inherent monstrosity of human habitation?) here, as in any other show — but looking at it as a collection of cool drawings is pretty satisfying in itself. (An added bonus, on display since the weekend, is the finalists of the exhibition’s attendant ballpoint pen art competition. The winner: a One Academy lecturer’s weird-cool rendition of a dog.)

That said, I’m going to waffle anyway:

Oddly enough for Daniel Chong, a consummate doodler (I believe I have an original Daniel hiding between the pages of a comic trade paperback, somewhere on my shelf), none of his stuff in “Out Of Line” are actually drawings. (They are not on sale, either.) Most are in several binders, print-outs concerning the artist’s obsession with the employment of Cartesian-coordinate-system quadrant matrices to visually describe (and make sense of) the world: Ken Wilber’s expressions of the integral movement, game theory charts, mystical mandalas, the chambers of the heart. (He also exhibits a canvas frame’s cross-beams and one of Central Market’s actual windows as examples.)

Alongside such an exhaustive survey, Daniel’s other piece is relatively simple, but it is a fitting counterpart to his riffs on expressive patterns. “Sungai Wang Forces” consists of a traffic cone, upended and suspended from a ceiling girder, serving as a funnel for rice. Viewers are invited to fill it up and push it into motion. The cone swings, Foucault-pendulum-like, spilling grains of rice in shifting ovals.

It’s an elegant response to the push-pull of consumption that governs our lives, these days. The rising price of rice (by extrapolation, the global food crisis and general resource scarcity) is coupled with a symbol of perpetual roadwork (extravagant mega-projects or ill-conceived schemes that return little actual value); gravity seems to stand in for the irresistibility of market forces. The crucial point is the interactions of these elements and their evident imperfections: the pendulum’s patterns are less-than-mathematically precise because the traffic cone is an imperfect weight, and the rice an imperfect medium.

The result? A haphazard, more-often-than-not unbalanced whorl of wasted food. Its lesson? The free market tenet of self-regulation, free of human agency, is completely effective only in flawless conditions. To allow it its foibles is to allow people to go hungry.


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The above article first appeared on the Kakiseni blog last week. To post a comment, please go here.