There was a bowl Maggie Mie, a Canned Food and Porridge, a 24hr Available and a Sizzling Woks on a bright brown table with a cheerful pink chair. There sat too, a teddy bear, relatively smaller than the rest, trying to reach out to the camp painted food. It was truly a visually buoyant piece by Joanna but for the artist, it was a forlorn situation of eating alone.

The installation starts the journey of the EAT WITH FAMILY exhibition, a visual art show in conjunction with Eat With Your Family Day 2010 at the Arts House. Involving 12 artists and a collaboration with Centre For Fathering and Artloft, the exhibition features installation works, paintings, drawings, multimedia as well as performance. Each artist explored the theme of family and food in close relation to their own experiences. Thus each work became a reflective documentation of what a family constituency means to them.

Next to Joanna’s work were drawings by Moses Sia. Incorporating his usual uncanny figures formed by interestingly wavy ink lines, Moses portrayed two scenes of family dinner on two paper plates. Titled NonDisposable, he was visualizing an interesting parallel relationship between craving of speed behavior with the disposable eating utensils. The whimsical drawings then reflects a rather painful truth that hectic lifestyle disrupts family bonding.

Within the corner area too, pieces of trading card-sized art works were displayed. Created by Pauseability and titled The More We Get Together, this piece was a collaboration of nine creative individuals. Approaching the theme of family and food in mini-cards sized 2.5 by 3.5 inch, this collection of works gives viewers a huge variety of styles, approaches and appeals. It was almost like an actual reflection of a society, where there are numerous smaller families but seen as one strong component.

Next few steps forward were Yong Hwang’s triptych paintings of grains bowls.  This piece was site-specifically installed in the relation with the walls of the Arts House. Using the physical space in hanging the works, Yong Hwang’s Eat With Family becomes an experiment where viewers were expected to jot down their thoughts on the issue of family and food, but at the same time, about how much the works are successful in achieving the intended message. Being the youngest among the individual artists involved, Yong Hwang had shown an ability to adapt the art works to the actual environment of possibilities and studies.

In a completely different approach, Rin Ioka’s installation titled Akari wo Keshite was created on the basis of reminiscence and evoking childhood memory. Her playful and eccentric objects which challenges the conception between art and craft, evoke a variety of reactions and personal consciousness on the viewers. Substantiated by the unfamiliarity of the Japanese culture and soothing acoustic music of her band, KaRinBa, the experience were almost quaint and unbelievable, but at the same time, luring and leading you towards your own imagination.

On the right side of the Arts House’ entrance was the largest piece of the exhibition, an acrylic painting by Sun Wahyu. Titled We Could Grow Up Together, this piece  is a very personal representation of the artist, not as the gigantic eyed boy figure but the mountains constructed beneath him. Alongside this work, is a series of five mountain drawings. The mountains for the artist is not only a representation of personal awareness but also a rendition of his surroundings in the comparison between his past and present state of life.

Another exuberant approach to the theme was the watercolor pieces by Annie Chong. The rich coalesce of colors, and shapes tell a never-ending narrative and create possibilities for viewers to interpret the works in the wildest imagination that they could ever think of.  Her works not only allows that but re-sketch fairy tales characters and situations to her personal performance of fantasy like an apparent example in Little Red Riding Hood’s Lucky Day.

A stone’s throw away from Annie’s dreams were the recorded laughter and joys of the children at Artloft. Taking the title of the exhibition, Eat With Family is an installation consisted of photographs, video documentation of performance, paintings as well as sculptural collage. The arrangements of all of these independent sections create a mental ecstatic noise of children having fun, sharing and communicating with their families. The videos were documentation of ‘performances’ done by the children themselves in which they cooked set meals for their parents. This work then becomes a series of archived activities of the children but had been presented in a very personal and relaxed space within the possible interaction between viewers and the work as a whole.

At the end of the Print Gallery was a work by Kelvin Atmadibrata titled Baby’s Breath. Origami on canvas and tape sculpture was exhibited together with a performance exploring the idea of maturity in the context of melamine affair. The performance in which the artist mimicked the presentation of the tape sculpture; with baby’s breath on their heads, walking blindfolded, distributing the melamine-filled White Rabbit Candy to the willing audiences.

As Kelvin performed on the opening night, he passed by another huge piece of work by Betsy Toh, titled 开饭了!, A collage of paint, crochet and knittings, Betsy portrayed her family having dinner together. This was among the most thought-provoking piece of the exhibition in which the artist attempts to diminish the boundary between art and craft. Creating a painting embellished by craft works, Betsy’s way of finishing her canvases are unique and mind stretching.

A couple of steps to the right from Betsy’s work was an installation by Grace Foo, titled multichannel. The installation creates a living room space with a real TV, sofa, coffee table and floor lamps, was as well decorated with two pieces of photo collages. However, Grace’s main focus is in the audio piece which is a recording of her Chinese New Year dinner with her family. Secretly taping the nostalgic audio, Grace created an invisible space through the conversation, allowing viewers to be at two places at the same time. Exploring the habit of eating in front of TV, Grace has provided a space for provocation and confrontation in dealing which space is real but at the same time, keeping her main message strong and visible.

One of the central pieces of the exhibition, Vincent Chow’s “A house is not a home, a home is not a family” is created using 30,000 Lego pieces and over 200 bricks. The materials that shaped a house gave the gist of a giant toy but carried both maturity and childishness in it. For Vincent, a household is created with equal balance of importance from the parents and children. The raw surface of the bricks was a contrast to the colorful polished veneer of the Lego bricks. The artist had creatively merged the two conflicting visual aesthetic in creating an equilibrium in both his concept and subject.

Last but certainly not the least is the work of Catherine Cheok. Using narrative texts as a collage on her paintings, Catherine retold the story of a conflict she had with her family. “What’s aesthetically pleasing” is a triptych piece of paintings in which the artist divided the chronicle into three main stages. Installed in an unusual method, the stools provided for viewers to sit and read the story followed the height of the tension.

EAT WITH FAMILY was truly experimental and an exercise in bringing various forms of art together from artists with different backgrounds. By making use the space of Print Gallery and Foyer within the symmetrical Arts House, artists involved had played within the physicality of the venue in the relation to the family volume within their respective pieces. The exhibition was not merely a show, but our imaginative meals with families.

Kelvin Amadibrata is a multi-disciplinary young artist. He is exploring curatorial and art writing exercise in his free time, though he admits he has still got much to learn