Art Meets Inflatables

ArtScience Museum has been known to host a lot of future world exhibitions. And this time, they have collected several artworks made by renown artists that including Ant Farm, Artúr van Balen,  Dawn Ng, Franco Mazzucchelli, Jean-Paul Jungmann, José de Miguel Prada Pool, Luigi Rados, Luke Jerram, Momoyo Torimitsu, The Yes Men, Thomas Baldwin,  UFO and many more.

Floating Utopias– The Transformative Power of Inflatable Art, is a playful and poetic exhibition that also explores the social history of inflatable objects, and how it has been used as art, architecture or social activism over the decades.

Floating Utopias shows how inflatable objects have opened up new windows to technological advances, from the invention of the hot air balloon, it has allowed humanity to be able to leave the confinements of ground for the first time and experience a new point of view of the Earth. Inflatables invite people to be playful and yet to claim their space as well; their light, mobile, and soft quality entice people to be mesmerized and dazzled by them.

The exhibition was on the 3rd floor of the ArtScience Museum, and my classmates and I got the chance to visit there on the 30th of July. Even though the exhibition is smaller compared to the other exhibition there like the Future World or the Wonderland, I really think that this exhibition should not be compared by the other two as this one is very different. Instead of being as interactive as the other two, Floating Utopias let the viewers learn and understand what each artwork means from their point of view.

The exhibition starts with this Mirror Barricade installation, where there are balloon boxes stacked to each other, forming a big wall that separates the first room to the second.

Following that, we'll see another room with two giant pink inflatable doll bunnies, sitting hunched over a low ceiling. This artwork is called Somehow I Don't Feel Comfortable, by a Japanese artist called Momoyo Torimitsu. For her, bunnies are stereotypically considered as cute, sweet and innocent and should be protected from harm. However, putting them in a very suppressed situation distorts and deviate them from their cuteness, creating something altogether more unpleasant. This installation also became one of my personal favorites because it acts as a social critique of the cramping nature of modern living situations in many large cities in Asia. 

Speaking of bunnies, another bunny installation available there is called WALTER, by Singaporean artist Dawn Ng. WALTER is supposed to be seen as a curious rabbit, appearing at random places like near apartment blocks, playgrounds, MRT stations, drawing attention to some Singapore's familiar, yet overlooked places.

Next, we move on to another room called Bubble Architectures. Displaying different types of inventions and urban development ideas and implementations for human's life. In the 1950s, the government began to advance on housing developments, transforming the 'slums and suburban' housing estates to build housing blocks using steel and concrete. These types of 'brutalist' architecture were often criticized for its harsh appearance and for leading to poor quality building, hence prompting young architects and urban planners to explore alternate possibilities of temporary and mobile architectures.

SurvivaBall, The Yes Men, is to be worn during emergencies (like earthquakes) so that people can safely hit hard surfaces (or jumping off a building safely) and they won't get physical injuries.

Solar sustainability is part of Floating Utopias's exhibition, as it represents the work of artists who use inflatable media to support a more sustainable relationship between humans and the environment. By using inflatable objects such as solar-powered floating sculptures, artists open up our imagination, hinting a new era of planetary consciousness, where the thermodynamic balance of the Earth is restored.

Since the invention of the first hot air balloon in the 18th century foretoken a new age of scientific exploration, ballooning also accelerated the desire to explore the sky beyond the Earth's atmosphere. This urges people to leave the planet's surface which inspires technological breakthroughs in high-altitude ballooning in the 1930s and conclusively led to a space race in the 1960s.

And the last room that ends the exhibition is a giant floating moon called Museum of the Moon by Luke Jerram. For centuries, the celestial silver glow from the Moon has captivated people all over the world. Despite the diverse culture, scientific and relationships that different societies we have in the Earth, the Moon connects us all. The sculpture of the Moon is created using ultra-high-resolution images captured by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera. Spanning seven meters in diameter, and has a scale of 1:600,000, meaning each centimeter of it represents six kilometers of the actual Moon. As part of the artwork, the museum allows visitors to sit and contemplate the lunar surface exquisite details by providing a deck chair around the Moon, accompanied by an evocative surround-sound composition by BAFTA award-winning composer Dan Jones.

There are some other artworks that I didn't take a picture of such as the Film in loop, 29 mins 28 secs by Graham Stevens, Aeroscene Explorer by Tomás Saraceno, Mush Balloon used during Expo Osaka, Japan, and many more.

Definitely worth the visit to check out more unmentioned artworks.