4×4 – Episodes of Singapore Art is an attempt to re-interpret four works of art by four Singaporean artists. The project grew out of a desire to address two cultural deficits in Singapore: An audience for the visual arts and a collective historical memory. 4×4 took place across three different platforms: A forum discussion, a foldable postcard cube for distribution, and a television series which aired on Singapore’s Arts Central channel. The television series, in particular, encompasses video art, mass-media intervention, cultural sleuthing, polemics, and pedagogy. Set as dialectic arguments between a man and a woman, the episodes attempt to popularise techniques of visual analysis and interpretation from the history of art. A collaborative effort between the worlds of visual art and television production, 4×4 was conceived to tie in with the Singapore Art Show 2005, also marking the earliest instances of the Arts Central television channel being used as a platform to present video art.

(Image courtesy of the artist and Kiang Malingue.)