Five Trees Make a Forest has recently opened at the NUS Museum and brings to the public artistic approaches in the portrayal of tropical landscapes. The exhibition combines Donna Ong’s collection of antique lithographs with NUS Museum’s selected nineteenth-century watercolors made by Charles Dyce, as well as Ong’s installation that gives the name to the show. As in many contemporary art exhibitions, the theme and research behind the show is much more complex and dense than the exhibition itself displays. In questioning the way artists have been representing landscapes since the nineteenth century, Five Trees Make a Forest invites us to reflect upon artistic choices and its role as truthful documentation through history. Donna Ong’s installation that gives name to the exhibition. Photo Credit: Christine Veras Ong’s installation is a modern interpretation of the nineteenth-century dichotomy between reality and representation that the entire exhibition reflects upon. In her installation, she follows instructions on a children’s book on how to create a forest. Using paper cutouts she builds a scale model of a forest, following the book’s premise that using a few different types of trees/plants, you would be able to ‘make’ a forest. According to Ong, ‘the instructions are so easy and [...]
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