Southeast Asian Arts Masterclass

For this masterclass, there was an artist who came to talk to us from Vietnam called UuDam who shared with us about his projects— his sculptures and installations were all very fascinating but i particularly loved his Eco-di project for how he approached it. 

 

For that project, he said he felt the beach he was commissioned to make an installation for perfectly fine as it was without any outside elements disturbing it. Hence he decided to come up with the idea of sandals with an imprint of text on the footprint so that it would leave the imprint of the words on the sand at the beach. Thus leaving a mark in the beach in a way that does not harm or introduce anything foreign to it per se. I found the innovativeness of this concept very fascinating as most would not consider such and just make a sculpture or installation instead anyway.

 

As someone who likes to frequent museums and dabbles in painting myself too I always love listening to the rationale and conceptualisation of other people’s projects, and hearing how it developed from the ground up was very interesting. Often I don’t get to hear that from a fine arts perspective as much and am only able to read the description pasted on the museum wall, as opposed to how it is more common to be able to find the entire project brief and conceptualisation for design projects on platforms like Behance for example. 

 

He then introduced us to the project he was working on and that was going to be relevant to our activity in just a few minutes — weapons based around the shape of countries. The concept stems from his experience being born in wartime and he wanted to explore the concept of how one’s patriotism can become a weapon. We then all were tasked to make a weapon design based off the shape of our respective countries and I made brass knuckles based off the shape of Singapore, but it was too big to actually grip onto properly hahaha. It was my first time handling clay in a very long time so it was quite interesting.