​An ongoing dialogue with the cosmos ​

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​Since the dawn of civilisation, human beings have upheld rationality as the supreme virtue which brings progress to societies. In the current technological era, automations and machinery have even introduced an unprecedented degree of accuracy in our daily lives. However, to young local artist Michelle Tam, the world has never been more puzzling and absurd. Her ongoing practice actively observes and confronts traces of “contemporary primitivity” visible in surrounding communities that threaten rationalism. 

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Religions and superstitions are the key ideas explored in her previous works, as she is drawn by people’s irrational tendency to depend on an unproved, transcendent entity. In her latest commissioned work for the second part of “Noble Rot”, a group exhibition presented by independent art space Para Site, she continued on her making of fictional environments, assemblages, and performances, in which she turned her speculations toward our primal desire for nature. Through unveiling our complex relations with nature in a contemporary context, she sought to reflect on the paradigms of human living. 

 

​In When Mother Nature Sings Her Lullaby, Michelle sets up a mise-en-scène of a natural sanctuary, inviting viewers to return to nature’s cradle. At first glance, the constructed landscape might evoke a sense of utopia, as the two dominant video works portray an open blue sky and a sunlit beach. However, as our gazes linger, we will be able to observe hidden contradictions, arousing senses of threat and unease. Drawing references from animated simulations, the works, intended to showcase the beauty of skies and oceans, are depicted in an uncomfortably saturated and plastic manner. While the pile of oyster shells resembles an imagery of animals gathering by a bountiful shoreline, paradoxically, it also hints at the violent aftermath of human consumption. Although the idea of reverting to the simplicity of nature might appear appealing here, it is endangered by manmade destructions that widen our departure from nature. A careful reading of the disparate components in the installation confirms experiences of contradictions and leads us to rethink our multiplex history of interacting with nature. 

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Futile rationalisation of nature

 

Through the recurring symbol of clocks superimposed on the sky, Michelle alludes to our tradition of telling time by looking above and our growing impulsion to organise nature in human terms. Before the invention of clocks, human beings were always aware of the passage of time, as they observed transitions from day to night, the cycle of the moon, and changes of seasons. With the coming of industrialisation, our desire for productivity led to the invention of clocks, where accurate scheduling of events were made possible through standard time.

 

Through overlaying images of moving skies and running clocks, the artist brings to attention two parallel yet independent systems of time—the natural unfolding of events in the cosmos and the counting of hours and minutes. Rather than ceding to the latter way of timekeeping that has been central to our present-day societies, the fictional world she melded highlights the often overlooked idea of nature’s order as the fundamental indicator of time or change. In a way, the mesmerising flow of white clouds in the central video relentlessly washes out, and eventually engulfs, the numeral display of time. In positioning humans as part of the vast totality of the cosmos, thus suggesting the inevitability of our traces being ultimately forgotten, she urges us to confront the futility of our attempt to attain full knowledge of the universe.

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Michelle also draws upon the practice of natural sciences, another rational framework  devised in attempt to gain a total grasp on the surrounding world. In her constructed landscape, she sees animals as key players encountered by human subjects, as manifested through a collection of found objects on the floor.

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Her specific choice of inanimate items challenges our typical epistemological process of defining animals as living and breathing entities. For one of the sculptures made from a tiny shirt for dogs, identifying it as a living creature seems implausible at first glance, as it is completely void of a face and limbs. It is until after close inspection that one would be able to notice the word “crocodile” subtly printed on the back of the shirt, eventually confirming the figure as a known species. 

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Through the use of playful yet uncanny objects, Michelle makes the viewers conscious of their overbearing compulsion to assign names to animals and poked fun at the arbitrariness of the process. This piece resonates and contrasts with another shirt-made figure placed on its side: a frog, readily discernible by its quintessential green skin, round eyes, and webbed feet. This adds to emphasise our scrutinisation and classification of animals based on physical features and behaviours, in coordination with the system of naming. As we gaze down at these creatures under our feet, we are compelled to question our firmly rooted ideology of humans being the dominant species in the biosphere. 

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Embracing irrationality and animality

 

Aside from looking at the presence of humans in nature evident in sciences and technologies, Michelle inversely digs into the presence of nature in humans, magnified in forms of innate instincts and subconscious responses. By staging different self-referential video pieces that explore primitive human behaviours, she places herself as a performer in the space and disrupts the initially established rationality.

 

Video installation The moon bends low kissing each rose goodnight is her investigation of the manipulation of human emotions, and her rebellion against intellectualism recalled in her other pieces in the installation. In this piece, she casts the surveilling lens of a night-vision camera onto herself and allows the audience to observe her attempts to deliberately smile during her sleep. This experiment centers on a scientific claim that she finds doubtable but compelling—it suggests that human beings can trigger genuine emotions through forced facial expressions, implying the possibility in which human subconsciousness overrides the intellect.

 

Her smile and movements in the experiment are intense, as if her happiness were dependent on confirming the hypothesis. At the same time, her wild thrashing becomes increasingly resemblant to an animal. The final results, however, are not included in the video, leaving room for us to ponder and speculate. Beyond deciding whether the claim is true or not, she guides us to reflect on our lack of understanding and control over the human mind, and challenges how we have proudly assumed it as the highest faculty of all beings. Instead of inducing happiness through conscious thoughts, she succumbs to the bodily and lets her innate responses to take reign. Under the context of a natural sanctuary, her performance further delineates invisible connections between herself and non-human species around her.

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Her dialogue with irrationality carries through the other video, Our cares and all our troubles, projected on the sidewall. The subjectivity of the artist is present but less explicit in this constituent piece. It shows a montage created from the archive of Michelle's cell phone, a daily tool to photograph subjects that have intrigued her. Like many of us, she documents what she considers peculiar, incomprehensible, and sometimes humorous around her everyday spaces.

 

Her video compilation showcases her prolonged attention to irrational and absurd behaviors of human beings. The single question “why?” pertains throughout the work. At the subway station, she captured a peculiar, almost affectionate interaction between a station worker and a passenger service robot. While we might expect the machine to perform assistive duties, it turned out to be dysfunctional, eventually trailing behind its human companion in an almost whimsical manner as they left the scene. In another clip filmed at a shopping mall, a flock of people gathered in front of a makeshift stage, trying to figure out what was happening, despite looking completely clueless. She even shot a video right outside of her flat, where her neighbor's living room windows were completely covered with paper which blocked any possible sources of light. These daily and accumulative observations of behaviours with no apparent or understandable intentions seek to illustrate the irrational side of our species. The rawness and realism of these footages echo that of The moon bends low kissing each rose goodnight, dismantling anthropocentric conventions.

 

A storyteller, a romanticist, a surrealist

 

Through When Mother Nature Sings Her Lullaby,  the artist solidifies her reflections on primitivity in contemporary times and demonstrates to us her multi-faceted dialogue with the universe. Her work is also significant in terms of how it illustrates her aspiration to be not only a thinker, but also a storyteller. By weaving together a contemporary natural sanctuary overflowing with contradictions, she invites viewers to step into a sensory and critical space where one can tread between nature and culture, rationality and irrationality, and beauty and grotesque. Behind the narrative is a tedious process of engaging with mundane daily events and objects, as she actively documents, archives, and experiments. In different ways, her materialised conversation with nature, presented at “Noble Rot”, is reminiscent of those from romanticists and surrealists. Like romanticists, she seeks to unveil the sublimity of nature and its indifference towards human efforts to control and modify. Akin to surrealists, she strives to unleash the unconscious minds, bringing speculations upon herself and the society.

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