Arts...Travels...Writing

Illumination in its varying degrees have always fascinated me, and natural lights are an even bigger source of wonder. I’ve been wanting to see the Northern Lights, which I missed because I turned off the lights too early on my last night in Reykyavik! (Apparently the ever-elusive Aurora Borealis chose to appear when I was already fast asleep! It's almost like winning lotto and losing it all on the same day). In visual arts, a subject is able to evoke the intended mood only under the right amount of light. And light is most crucial in photography; balance is most difficult to achieve in natural light, and most especially challenging at night.  Some two weeks back, I went to a couple of locations in Singapore for a photography session on night shots. It was a humid day when we set up our tripods near the Merlion, across Marina Bay Sands. I shouldn't be talking about humidity as it won't show in photographs anyways. On the other hand, too much humidity is never conduci...

My daughter and I checked out the Art Stage at the Marina Bay Sands Expo today. It was a huge fair with around 150 galleries from around the globe participating. As such, we could not really explore all the galleries (a bit overwhelming for one afternoon), so what we did was take a quick tour, and lingered only on those that caught our interest more. There was a bunch of European galleries that represented the established (Chagall, Miro, Picasso, etc), but even without my prompting, little girl preferred to stick around longer in the contemporary art exhibits and the visual/digital/3D installations --- in between her main preoccupation that afternoon, i.e., collecting business/calling cards from the galleries.  Below are some of the stand outs: Mark Justiniani's Echopraxia: Reflective media, light fixtures, and objects encased in black iron structure My daughter describes the above as magic because it is endless, and seems to go on and on! Such is the magic of Just...

“In the absolute stillness of the depths of the ocean, where there is perpetual night, the Titanic must remain…” a Singapore newspaper in reaction to Titanic sinking in 1912. Titanic "boarding pass" In 1912, nobody believed that Titanic could be discovered, having sunk to the lowest and darkest depth of the ocean a century ago. But 75 years after its sinking, a group of explorers were able to locate Titanic again. Indeed, at this depth, it was perpetual night, without any light streaming through - based on the film clips taken by a robot camera. And the force from water pressure was such that anything was expected to crush into pieces. Then, it was impossible to believe that man could rediscover and retrieve some of the remains of Titanic. But a testament to man’s greatness is the fact that some of these remains were even brought back from the depth of the ocean to right above it - and now on display thousands of miles away at Singapore's ArtScience Museum in Mar...