The artist rejects retirement cliches with new works that explore war, grief and joy
[SINGAPORE] The story one often hears of retirees is that they’ve discovered gardening, taken up golf, started to knit or joined a Pilates class. In other words, they’re staying active and keeping cheerful.
Dana Lam wants none of that. Instead, she wants her old age to be filled with the rage, passion, joy, confusion, romance, adventure, disappointment and discovery that society usually reserves for the young.
After all, this is a woman who has been a journalist, artist, playwright, performer, founding member of TheatreWorks (now T:>Works) and two-time president of women’s organisation Aware.
Dana Lam refuses to treat old age as a period of retreat. PHOTO: CRISPIAN CHAN
She was also part of the core group that fought to reclaim Aware during the historic saga of 2009 when it was stealthily taken over by conservatives seeking to quell LGBTQ perspectives and sexuality education.
So at the age of 73, Lam is opening her first-ever solo art exhibition at T:>Works’ 72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road in July.
Titled Who Knows Where The Bird Goes: Dana Lam: Six Decades of Practice, it brings together new and older works across drawing, animation, writing, performance and conversation.
The title may sound retrospective, but Lam bristles when asked if the show is a summation of her life’s work.
“No,” she replies instantly. “My life’s work is not yet done… There is so much still to try and understand what it means to be alive in a frightening and beautiful world.”
Lam being Lam, even her simple declarations carry the force of a manifesto. That spirit runs through the exhibition, which is presented as the first artist commission of The Agency Fest, a new T:>Works initiative supporting artists aged 60 and above.
Lam’s first solo exhibition spans drawing, animation, writing and performance. PHOTO: DANA LAM
Among the works is Lam’s first experiment in animation, titled Is It A Bird? Is It A Plane?, which takes its name from an iconic Superman line.
For Lam’s generation, the phrase evokes childhood wonder: looking up, spotting a plane, waving at it, believing that what appeared in the sky might be heroic. Even now, when an aeroplane passes over her home, she may call her grandchildren to come out and look.
But the old innocence has darkened. “Now, when you ask, ‘Is it a bird? Is it a plane?’, it could well be a drone. And rather than Superman who comes and sorts out your problems for you, it’s a drone that wants to attack you and your family.”
Lam’s Is it a Bird? Is it a Plane? turns childhood wonder into a meditation on threat, distance and the uneasy knowledge of violence elsewhere. PHOTO: DANA LAM
Similarly, Lam remembers being young and waving to passing boats. Today, a ship moving serenely through the Singapore Strait may not be so innocent. It may be carrying soldiers, armour or weapons to bring death and destruction somewhere else.
That unease sits at the heart of the animation. Lam is not drawing scenes of war. There are no battlefields, explosions or bodies. Instead, there is a child waving at a boat, a dog, a human figure walking.
The threat is not shown directly. It is felt in what the viewer knows but cannot see.
Inspired by the practice of artist William Kentridge, Lam uses an animation style of drawing and erasing on the same piece of paper before photographing it, allowing the residue to serve as memory of previous images. PHOTO: DANA LAM
Lam has been thinking about what it means to live in Singapore, where a personal difficulty can feel enormous, while war unfolds only a few hours away by plane.
How does one mourn a dog, illnesses in the family, sudden deaths of relatives – without reducing the suffering experienced by people elsewhere? How does one acknowledge comfort without pretending one’s own grief is unreal?
Her work hints at the absurdity of comparison, but also refuses to dismiss the domestic as trivial. It sees suffering as a spectrum. “One person’s pain is not made false by another person’s catastrophe,” she says.
There is also the bird that gives the exhibition its title. The life-sized drawing of a mynah was inspired by a friend’s Instagram post of a wet, frazzled creature which, in Lam’s words, “had seen everything”.
She recognised it immediately – the stare of something rained on and still staring back.
A wet, frazzled mynah bird is the inspiration behind the title of Lam’s show. PHOTO: CRISPIAN CHAN
Yet. for all its melancholy, Lam’s work is not despairing.
“I am also about celebrating being alive,” she says. “The joy of being alive, and the joy of making and creating, and the joy of being able to see and hear and feel and receive.”
At 73, Lam is not asking to be admired for her age, or praised for still keeping busy. She is asking for something more serious through her art – to be met in the present tense.
Who Knows Where The Bird Goes: Dana Lam: Six Decades of Practice runs at T:>Works, 72-13 Mohammed Sultan Road from Jul 22 to Aug 8.
T:>Works is also organising The Agency fundraising concert featuring Jacintha Abisheganaden and Frances Lee singing the songs of Dick Lee. Visit tworksasia.org for information.
