Shanshui on the Hour: The Lobby Screen of Singapore's ArtScience Museum

As noon approaches, in the lobby of the lotus-shaped building at Marina Bay in Singapore, the LED that had been showing wayfinding information switches all at once to something else. On the hour — at zero minutes past, exactly. What rises there, for a few minutes only, is a single moving shanshui: grey mountains and a river with a dense mass of high-rise towers packed in between. The audience is still on the approach, before the ticket desk. In a bright lobby where the light of the city still falls through the windows, before they sink into the dark of the galleries, people stop and look up at the screen.

This is the slot the ArtScience Museum runs on the large screen in its lobby, called ArtScience Interlude. Neither advertising nor wayfinding, it is a programme of time-based media art screened at the top of every hour. The phenomenon this journal usually pursues out in the street — a momentary interval opening within a run of advertising, and a single work kindled inside it — is happening here on the museum's own side, and on the wayfinding screen at its entrance at that.

A Vessel in the Shape of an Open Hand

The ArtScience Museum opened on 17 February 2011. Claiming to be the first museum in the world to carry "ArtScience" — art and science — in its name, it is Singapore's largest private museum, operated by the integrated resort Marina Bay Sands. The architect was Moshe Safdie, who described the form himself as an open hand welcoming Singapore and the world. Ten finger-like structures extend from a circular base, and the whole can equally be read as a lotus flower opened on the water.

The building is designed as an apparatus for drawing light and water inside. The tip of each of the ten fingers is a skylight, narrowing the outside light and letting it fall into the galleries; the twenty-one galleries are filled with daylight in this way. The roof, dished like a plate, collects rainwater and sends it down like a waterfall through a central oculus — a circular opening — into the atrium below. Clad in FRP (fibre-reinforced plastic), the body is carried on a steel diagrid and ten columns and appears to float above a reflecting pool. The roughly 6,000 square metres (50,000 square feet) of gallery space belong to an outer shell complete in itself as architecture and, at the same time, to a vessel that was waiting from the outset to have its interior filled with image and light.

A Universe Below, a Ma in the Lobby

That vessel holds two screens of entirely different character.

One of them is underground. Future World: Where Art Meets Science, the permanent exhibition launched in 2016, occupies about a quarter of the museum and is made up of some fifteen installations by the Japanese art collective teamLab. Its centrepiece, Crystal Universe, hangs — by teamLab's account — around 170,000 LED points in the space, so that countless points of light resolve into a three-dimensional image in the manner of a pointillist painting. Visitors choose a star on their smartphone and cast it in, and where a person stands changes how that universe looks.

This is a design that erases the frame of the screen and sinks the audience inside an environment. You pay for a ticket, enter the dark, and are wrapped in the work with your whole body. It is precisely the box-office model of immersion teamLab has proved across more than a dozen sites worldwide, and this journal has argued its logic in a separate piece (Screens That Erase the Screen: teamLab and the Box-Office Model of Immersive Art). It is a screen on the side of the closed vessel — one that folds the city away and completes a single self-contained universe.

The other screen is in the lobby, above ground. ArtScience Interlude behaves in exactly the opposite way to the immersion below. It does not enclose. It does not swallow its audience. A single screen set in the bright entrance runs a few minutes of programming only on the hour, from 11am onwards each day, and stands back the rest of the time. The museum describes the programme like this.

At the strike of every hour, a digital artwork plays on the LED screen – a welcome pause for contemplation, reflection and a profound awareness for moments both fleeting and lasting.

— ArtScience Museum, Marina Bay Sandssource

It is worth noting the choice of the words "a welcome pause". If what happens below is an immersion that fills space, what happens in the lobby above is the cutting of a hole in time. Within the continuous everyday operation of wayfinding display, a gap of a few minutes opens at the top of every hour.

A Tenkei Within the Shanshui

What appears in that gap is what makes this slot a special one for this journal.

A Quiet City, which plays in the lobby at 1pm and 5pm each day, is a work by Yang Yongliang (楊泳梁), born in Shanghai in 1980. After training in traditional Chinese ink painting and calligraphy, he has spent his career rebuilding shanshui for the present through photography and digital compositing. Peaks that at a distance look like a Song-dynasty landscape resolve, up close, into an accumulation of countless towers and cranes and transmission pylons — the megacity woven into the mountain, the din of the city into the quiet of the river. In Glows in the Arctic (2022, two-channel 4K video, about ten minutes), the night views of cities such as New York, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Paris, London and Tokyo run on in sequence, as though flying above the aurora and the mountain ranges of the Arctic.

Here it is necessary to return to the word that once gave this journal its own name, TENKEI. Tenkei (点景) means the figures, boats and pavilions painted small into a shanshui. A vast landscape of mountain and water is, on its own, no more than silent nature. Only the small human shadow kindled within it gives the scene a scale, a time and a story. What brings a landscape to life is not the protagonist of the landscape but the small presence set into one corner of it — that is the implication carried by this old word.

Yang Yongliang's shanshui substitutes the city itself for that tenkei. On his screen, the megacity — which ought to be an accumulation of human activity — takes its seat again in the position of the point in a landscape. And that footage rises like a tenkei, on the hour, on a screen placed at what is precisely a crossroads of the contemporary city: the lobby of a museum in Singapore. The conventions of an old form of painting come back to the urban screen, nested twice over.

Interlude does not deal with him alone. The Singaporean artist Niceaunties adapts for the present Zhang Zeduan's (張択端) celebrated handscroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival (清明上河図) — a painting that gathers the crowds of the Northern Song capital into a single scroll, itself an accumulation of tenkei. A serial animation by six artists on the subject of rubbish and waste has also been screened in this slot. What they share is a behaviour in which the screen does not swallow the audience but flows past in front of it. Shanshui and handscroll — the "travelling viewpoint" and the "human activity that appears as points" that East Asian painting spent centuries cultivating are called back into a few minutes on a wayfinding screen.

The Top of the Hour as an Act of Editing

The lobby screen is, by rights, a supporting apparatus within this building. The leads are the immersion below, the daylight let down by the ten fingers, and Safdie's structure itself. A wayfinding screen is ordinarily nothing more than a surface at the lowest tier of operation, running opening hours and routes and notices in a flat, dutiful stream.

What the ArtScience Museum does is to insert into that lowest operational surface a clockwork ma — an interval pinned to the top of the hour. Advertising and wayfinding both stop, and for a few minutes a single work is kindled. Most visitors have not come for it: queuing for tickets, checking bags, confirming the route, they find, mid-errand, that the screen overhead has changed. In structure this closely resembles the way a person in the street looks up at a momentary work in the gap between advertising spots. The difference is that here the interval is not accidental but edited to a rhythm — the top of every hour.

This journal has set as its axis the question of making the city itself a museum. What teamLab chose below ground was the solution of cutting the city off and turning the inside of the vessel into a universe. What the Interlude in the lobby shows is another solution — that even inside a museum, it is possible to open, in an urban apparatus such as a wayfinding screen, the same ma that the street holds, and to kindle a tenkei within it. The vessel in the shape of a lotus is a place of gathering (KAI, 会), where people converge, pass one another and come to a stop; and at its entrance, on the hour, a small shanshui reflects the city back at itself.

On the open palm of the hand, each time the clock comes round, one more landscape rises and withdraws.

Sources

1. fig.001Crystal Universe — FUTURE WORLD: WHERE ART MEETS SCIENCE (teamLab official channel)
2. fig.002Yang Yongliang — Before the Rain (2010), excerpt (The Tang Teaching Museum, Vimeo)
3. [3]ArtScience Museum — Official Site (Marina Bay Sands)
4. [4]ArtScience Interlude — ArtScience Museum
5. [5]Yang Yongliang 杨泳梁 — ArtScience Interlude
6. [6]Glows in the Arctic — Yang Yongliang (official site)
7. [7]Future World: Where Art Meets Science — ArtScience Museum
8. [8]Crystal Universe — teamLab (ArtScience Museum)
9. [9]Marina Bay Sands — ArtScience Museum (Safdie Architects)
10. [10]ArtScience Museum — Wikipedia

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Marina Bay Sands (operator of the ArtScience Museum)

LOCATION

Singapore

MODEL

Museum commission — A ticketed museum, but the lobby programme this piece centres on — ArtScience Interlude — is a free, in-house-curated slot of time-based works; the basement’s permanent Future World is co-produced with teamLab (since 2016)

CADENCE

Time-based works play on the lobby LED each hour on the hour from 11am daily; the museum runs year-round since 2011

SPEC

Moshe Safdie design; 21 daylit galleries within ten finger-like structures evoking a lotus / welcoming hand; c. 6,000 m² (50,000 sq ft) of gallery space, FRP cladding, a steel diagrid on ten columns. Future World’s Crystal Universe uses c. 170,000 LED points (teamLab)

SINCE

2011-02

STATUS

Active

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