Signature Art Prize 08 – Vote now!

Ed’s note: The Results are out! Find out who are the winners of the Signature Art Prize 2008! HERE.

The Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize is a premier juried prize established by the Asia Pacific Breweries (APB) Foundation and the Singapore Art Museum (SAM).

Aimed at recognising the single most outstanding contemporary artwork produced in the preceding three years in , the competition is open to all forms of visual art. In its inaugural year of 2008, the APB Foundation Signature Art Prize will focus on 33 nominees from 12 countries: Cambodia, China, India, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.

You can vote for your favourite artwork! Read on…

Vote for your favourite artwork!

The People’s Choice Award allows the public to choose their favourite artist. Voters will be entered in a lucky draw, so you stand to win a Canon digital camera if you do! Vote here from now till 7pm on Oct 12.

Nominated artists from Singapore include:

– S.Chandrasekaran

Lindy Poh who nominated Chandrasekaran’s work “Bleeding Angel” mentions in her statement that “Chandrasekaran’s practice in the area of performance art constitutes one of the most aggressive, punishing and gruelling body performances in Singapore’s contemporary art history.

Bleeding Angel belongs to a series of performances, documented in photo stills and video-film, in which Chandra uses ‘material’ produced by Australian scientist and inventor Gary Cass. The performance involves the artist’s immersion of one-half his body in a specially constructed metal vessel containing wine and bacteria (Acetobacter).  The notion of bleeding here, with the suggestion of self-inflicted violence/pain upon a sensate, suffering body – is also tied to ideas of the suffering spirit in many cultures, which attain a kind of spiritual transcendence through such suffering.”
– Milenko Prvacki

Also nominated by Lindy Poh, Milenko is “arguably one of the most influential contemporary painters in the Expressionistic tradition in the last decade of Singapore painting development. Prvacki’s works stands apart from the formalistic and sometimes decorative tendencies in local painting. The integration of image and texts as well as ‘quotations’ from various sources have led to critics describing Prvacki as a ‘post-modern painter’.

Prvacki’s handling for Building allows an unusual degree of subtlety, detail, layering and deepening that is critical for monumental works to outlast the initial, momentary reaction to sheer physical scale. Building is one of a cluster of works, conceived for the Sydney Biennale 2006. The idea of ‘building’ anchors a metaphor that the artist has grappled with. Many involve the ideas of passages, trials, journeys, of relocation and interim spaces.”
– Yeo Chee Kiong

Lindy writes, “Yeo Chee Kiong’s A Day without a Tree, in a rare instance in public sculpture, captures a distinctive sense of fun and humour, without sacrificing finish and detailing. A Day without a Tree engages a range of visual devices and languages including those of the graphic art and pop-art fields (for instances in his use of signages) as well as the strategies of optical illusions in which the quality of ‘liquidity’ and fluidity is achieved through a ‘hard’ material.

The work is also indicative of the artist’s expanding consciousness of environmental issues – an awareness that has surfaced in his more recent pieces. A site-specific installation, Yeo’s piece, responds to the site of the National Museum – a heritage building institution over 120 years old.