A couple of days in Singapore on the way home, to see nephew Scott, Val and the little ones. Pearl, age nearly one, has made her first step to stardom by appearing in a magazine, charmingly ‘works the room’ when we go for coffee. Life is good, nine floors up the thirty something floor Regency tower. Down below a swimming pool, gym, sauna, massage complex with a set of underwater exercise machines, bike, rowing and treadmill. Just around the corner, a café with a real barista who does proper one and a half late.

Long term pottery friend Soo Kim is still managing the family pottery business. He explained that the best way is to eat is in Eating places rather than restaurants. These are often out-doors with no frills and sometimes no menus. From time to time Soo Kim brings groups of students and collectors to Australia to visit potters and galleries, so Sweetiepie sat patiently through the technical chat over dinner.

The Singapore Art Gallery is in an old colonial building with a ‘Raffles’ kind of vibe. A fascinating installation in the gallery proper was a random stack of cardboard toy cartons. These had been painted white. In the darkened room, the original coloured art work was projected onto the stack from an overhead projector. The artwork exactly fitted all of the odd angles and sizes of the relevant boxes. But is it art? Unquestionably yes, for the challenge of guessing the technicalities.

our humble effort

As we had young Ethan in tow, the emphasis was on the children’s activity section.  The children’s activity area is entered by corridors that lined with blue plastic ‘Thomas the tank engine” train tracks. Over the walls and ceiling, sometimes the floor too. The current activity is the assembly of fruit from cardboard cut-out components. On completion of the exercise, the cardboard fruit is exchanged for real fruit. Apples for apples, bananas for bananas etc including some unrecognizable varieties of tropical fruits.

the fruit shop

All of the cardboard fruit goes on display in a sort of cardboard fruit shop. Managing the bending and glueing was challenging for little fingers, so mostly it was the grown-ups who were getting sticky fingers.

A previous activity was producing and painting free form papier maché models. These were currently displayed on white painted branches of trees along with coloured textas, inviting the trees and models to be embellished. The invitation did not actually extend to the white gallery walls, but some children are by nature more creative than others. Another kids activity was dressing blank figures on the walls with life size (for them) clothes, faces, shoes and hats. Cross dressing apparently acceptable in Singapore.