5th Passage: In Search of Lost Time

Gajah Gallery, Singapore 23 September – 24 October

A common mantra for survivors of trauma is ‘I am not what happened to me’. Could a vilified art group attempt a similar recovery? This seems to be the case for this exhibition, which wants to tell a story of 5th Passage that doesn’t revolve around its central controversy. Founded in 1991 by three young artists, Suzann Victor, Han

Ling and Susie Lingham, 5th Passage occupied the fifth floor passageway in Parkway Parade Shopping Centre and was one of the first multidisciplinary art spaces in Singapore. Running for five years, it organised a wide range of activities, including exhibitions, readings and talks, but it came to be defined by one infamous performance: Josef Ng’s Brother Cane.

In 1993, together with another art collective, The Artists Village, 5th Passage organised the Artists’ General Assembly, a weeklong arts festival in which Brother Cane was presented.

The performance protested an antigay sting by the police, in which ten men were arrested and caned. One of the actions by Ng was to turn his back to the audience, pull down his pants and snip off some pubic hair. A reporter was present at the event, and a salacious picture of Ng’s half-covered buttocks ended up on a newspaper frontpage the next day. The fallout was quick: the artist was fined for performing an obscene act in public, 5th Passage was evicted from its premises and barred from all government grants, and the National Arts Council started a no-funding rule for performance art that lasted ten years. 5th Passage never quite recovered from the ordeal and subsequent stigma, though it clung on for a while staging shows in other venues. A sitespecific exhibition held in a hospital in 1996 became its last show.

Over time, Brother Cane came to be known as a seminal work in local art history and 5th Passage became a footnote in that mythical narrative. As a pioneering artist-run space in Singapore, its prominence has also been eclipsed by other groups, such as The Artists Village and Plastique Kinetic Worms, which were also active during the 1980s and 1990s. This despite the established names of its cofounders: Victor went on to represent Singapore at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and Lingham became the director of Singapore Art Museum (2013–16).

In Search of Lost Time aims to rehabilitate 5th Passage’s good name, but instead of a conventional art-historical showcase of works produced during the collective’s heyday, curator John Tung got ten artists involved with the group to produce new works reflecting on their memories of 5th Passage and the nature of time and memory. This approach has the benefit of showing how former members have processed the experience. Photographer-filmmaker John Clang, who had his first solo at 5th Passage at the age of twenty, has a wistful take in The Waning Crescent Moon (all works 2021 unless otherwise stated). He returned to the site where the arts group once was – now an empty black wall with a fire hydrant – took a picture and blew it up. This huge digital print forms the backdrop against which grainy stills from a video call with his ailing elderly mother are superimposed. The message is clear: things pass, people age. But it’s not all water under the bridge for all the artists. Kai Lam’s installation, We Are All That’s Left, contains, among other things, the title spelled out using party balloons on the wall. Meanwhile, Lingham chose to revisit an old performance, Renunciation (1994), in which she hammered nails into a wicker chair, in reference to a practice of hammering nails into sacred trees to transfer woe or disease. For the show, she made undoundone #1 – #4, which includes three charcoal drawings of that chair. The first drawing is a detailed, almost-photographic rendering; the second is more faded; and the last one is bleached white, with only the nails remaining.

In general, the exhibition feels more like an exploration of the members’ internal states than a critical examination of 5th Passage’s relevance. This is partly due to the decision to include remakes of old works done during 5th Passage’s days rather than the originals.

As a result, the exhibition feels oddly distanced from the past it aims to investigate. We don’t get a sense of what was powerful or immediate about the original in its context, only an emotionally metabolised version that has had its edges smoothed out by time and distance.

For example, in 1994 Victor created a trilogy of installations that used props to stand in for the absent human body due to the prohibitions against performance art. Exhibited at another mall, Pacific Plaza, one of the works was Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame (1994), in which a lightbulb dangles from a long wire centimetres off the ground, where there is a mirror. The wire is connected to a baby rocker, which makes the lightbulb bounce gently up and down, and chink repeatedly against the mirror. The work’s title comes from a Shakespearean sonnet on postcoital self-loathing, and a similar sense of dejectedness is present in Victor’s work, which simulates feeble self-pleasuring rocking movements while alluding to narcissism (the mirror) and the glare of public exposure (the lightbulb).

For this exhibition, Victor has arranged 20 lightbulbs in a circle (Shadow Work). Instead of a mirror at the foot of each bulb, there is an engraved lens bearing a scene from photographs of diverse activities held at 5th Passage’s space. While the work celebrates the overlooked multifaceted identity of the group, it also comes across as oddly conciliatory and anodyne, just one more adaptation of Expense, a work Victor has remade over the years in different scales and configurations.

The only ‘old’ work in the show is Ray Langenbach’s video singapore sub liminal (1994– 2015), featuring interviews with 5th Passage members about their dreams shortly after the court trials, new works made during this period and actual footage of Brother Cane. Having the shaky quality of a home video, the film captures the woozy irreality of a group of friends trapped in a waking nightmare; people who are, as the opening crawl text says, ‘scripted into the government’s nightmare of “new art forms” that “pose dangers to public order, security and decency”’. The video is shown at the back of the exhibition, probably to downplay the Brother Cane reference. Nonetheless, the film highlights an important fact: on a fundamental level, Brother Cane and 5th Passage were in the same boat. They were the victims of a punitive state. In the background of the crawl text, we hear a voice saying, “They were guilty and given ten strokes”, interspersed with thin, whistling sounds followed by sharp pops. Near the end of the video, you see what’s happening: Ng during his performance, hopping around devilishly with a cane, whipping the ground. Adeline Chia