Anyhow Blues Project - lee wen 李文

The “Anyhow Blues Project” characteristically manifests the various contradictions that contemporary art seem to be mired in with different positions and claims. Performance art once frowned on as the pariah hybrid iconoclasm of all art forms that threaten the pillars of conventions and traditions already dissipated in society’s plight with globalization. Our political will to uphold ideals of democratic freedom has been weakened by the triumph of capitalism, commercialism and consumerism seem to refrain in evidences of performance and conceptual art gaining acceptance and prominence and even celebrated in major museums and mega art shows.

The project also responds to Adorno’s critique that popular music and the protest songs of the ‘60s are in fact pretentious commercialism. “Anyhow Blues Project” readdresses the ‘high art/low art’ debate in the nonchalant presentations as a strung out folk singer re-learning how to play his guitar again, at times unable to keep rhythm or forgetting his lyrics.  Through the songs the nuances of social discontent are revealed against the current trends of euphoric celebration manifested in the escalating propagation and so called "globalization" of contemporary art and culture via the proliferation of international art biennales, and the expanding art market. An expression of desperate struggle for the individual's voice to assert a place in a commercially driven and essentialist engineered culture of contemporary society. 

The presentation of “Anyhow Blues Project” also questions the attempt to re-position performance art in its desired return to raw, abstract formalism. The domesticating if not disciplining of an ‘anti-discipline’ not only privileges and classifies performance art as serious high art status but may also suggests the desire to disengage herself from earlier social concerns. In contrast to international trends, the Anyhow Blues Project also expresses the concern that independent local music if not art and culture in general even gaining deserving legitimacy find themselves up against high powered commercial or exploitive fare if not self defeating prejudices of local audiences sold to the "globalized" world of contemporary art and culture, perhaps still circumscribed by a colonial, imperial mentality of western superiority if not loyalty to the exports from an ancestral motherland.

The Anyhow Blues Project was presented in
  1. 9th International Performance Art, Turbine, Giswil 2010, Switzerland
  2. Rencontre internationale d’art performance de Québec, Quebec, Canada
  3. Survey from Singapore, FADO, Toronto Free Gallery, Toronto, Canada
  4. 4 Directions from Asia, Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.
  5. Action Script: Symposium on Performance Art Practice and Documentation in Asia, Hong Kong
  6. Performance Platform Lublin 2010, Poland
  7. BONE 13 – Festival für Aktionskunst, Berne, Switzerland
  8. R.I.T.E.S. “Rooted In The Ephemeral Speak” #01/2011, The Substation, Singapore
  9. “This Is Performance Art”, Aberdeen and Glasgow, Scotland
  10. “AfterHours - Grounded Party”, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore
  11. "Can Cannot Also Can", The Substation Theatre, with Zai Kuning, Hafiz Bastard, Reef, speical guests Yuzuru Maeda,