| V I S U A L | A U D I O | T I M E | N A R R AT I V E |
| Fire | flicker | 0 : 00 | Life force |
S C R E E N I I I
| V I S U A L | A U D I O | T I M E | N A R R A T I V E |
| Stark woods | wind | 0 : 00 | Other world |
H I S T O R Y
The making of "Where do you go when you close your eyes ?" was conceived by the artist in the autumn of 1991 in Dublin, the Republic of Ireland. The Irish landscape was featured as "stark woods", and half of the video footage was shot in Dublin. The artist returned to Singapore to film the cemetery, one of the largest land burial areas secluded in Singapore. The artist travelled by car into the heart of the cemetery late at night, and navigated across the terrain, capturing images of tombstones and graves. However, the initial footage was believed to have been accidentally erased, and the artist went for a second trip to the cemetery on another night to recapture the footage.
On yet another late night, the artist decided to film some of the objects at the periphery of the cemetery. Since the weather was humid, the artist stripped down to his waist, went barefooted, and laid on the ground in order to capture worm's eye perspective of wall engravings under a bridge adjacent to the cemetery. At this moment, a car stopped, and three policemen alighted, brandishing revolvers, apparently scared. They thought a spirit had manifested, or a man who had been possessed by a spirit, was in seizures, writhing on the ground. The paints on the artist's skin that had not been washed off by earlier baths, and the long hair of the artist, made him appear as if he were a creature of the night. The artist explained his way out of the delicate situation and no shots were fired.
"Where do you go when you close your eyes ?" was titled in 1991. The artist believed that ideas arrive as waves of contemporary culture, and were not inherently created by the artist, who served as an alarm and a beacon. That the software giant Microsoft used "Where do you want to go today ?" as its tagline in 1992 came as no surprise.
The inquiry of where the mind and soul travelled to, when the person was not conscious, had been the subject of speculation by philosophers for many years. It was at this time that the artist paid his fair share of dues, by resting catatonic in bed for almost three days wondering on metaphysics, the origin of the universe, religion, and his role in life.
"Where do you go when you close your eyes ?" was a sequence of dream-like images that provoked more questions then provided answers. The artist was less analytical when he worked, and more agile in his handling of the camera, and fluid in his choice of images and objects to be filmed. There was no formal script scrupulously followed. Instead, the artist was seized by the freedom of his spirit, and deeply intuitive when he worked. Since the video was short but intense, the artist devoted significant time to editing and presentation.
Where did the soul go to when the body was asleep ? Was this a time in which the soul, mind, spirit, or consciousness, submerged to a different reality, where the physics of time and space were pliable ? Did the spirit engage with departed spirits ? Did the spirit run down channels in search of insights ? Did the spirit indulge in fantasies of the flesh ?
Unfortunately, there has been no written review of the installation, but one of the curators of the National Museum Art Gallery, Salleh Japer, experienced the installation. Salleh Japar was interested in the artist's work because he had turned on the artist's preceding video installation "The sin of apathy" daily when the latter work was shown at the Museum.
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