Seelan Palay
“The New World Awaits, Those With Stendhal Syndrome (An Artist’s Statement)”

Seelan Palay, 'The New World Awaits, Those With Stendhal Syndrome (An Artist's Statement)' 2019, acrylic, saliva, eraser, text labels, found mirror and frame. Image courtesy of artist.
Seelan Palay, 'The New World Awaits, Those With Stendhal Syndrome (An Artist's Statement)' 2019, acrylic, saliva, eraser, text labels, found mirror and frame. Image courtesy of artist.
Seelan Palay, 'The New World Awaits, Those With Stendhal Syndrome (An Artist's Statement)' 2019, acrylic, saliva, eraser, text labels, found mirror and frame. Image courtesy of artist.

summing up the future
and enlightening the Contemporary behaviour art
and autonomous regions,
and the construction
Art theatre flux stages viewing method
especially affected
times are
the way past the period
from here,
contribute development
doctrine to internalisation

In this work, the wooden structure holding the poem is a found object containing a broken mirror. The mirror is a reference to a performance that Seelan was arrested and detained for in 2017, and he thinks of this object as a "post-performance installation". The text itself was extracted from another performance and reassembled. The eraser with the words "Social Realism" on it is from the gift shop in the National Gallery Singapore.

You can read more about the original performance and its significance to Seelan's practice in an interview with the artist for the LA Review of Books, titled 'Art and Dissent in Singapore: An Interview with Seelan Palay'.

Seelan Palay (b. 1984) is a visual artist from Singapore whose practice focuses on the concerns and complex conditions found in our present-day, globalized society. Having studied Fine Art at Lasalle College of the Arts, he works with mixed media, installation, performance, film and sound. In 2018, he founded the independentart space, Coda Culture.