Windowshop is a cabinet of curiosities quite like no other. Thousands of objects hand-picked from local junk stores, homes, and shops form a peculiar collection of tailor-made and titled keepsakes, with each title setting the stage for the objects at hand. From merry-go-rounds to marble cases, the works constitute a visual litany of funny, irreverent and at times, painfully honest observations about people and objects in relationship to time, place, memory, truth and love.

By symbolically translating the collector’s control of the world through miniature reproductions, Windowshop takes a look at the psychological, cultural and aesthetic value of “things,” and the visual language that the latter forms.

Like the cabinets of curiosities from Renaissance Europe, Windowshop serves as a personal memory theatre in the context of Singapore’s own Golden Age. Yet unlike the cabinet of curiosities of yore which tended toward a pompous collection of art and antiquities, Windowshop seeks to curate and celebrate the infinitely everyday and beautifully ordinary of our times.

Counterpart to the works in the gallery is PERFECT DAY, an eye-popping light signage installation of the Chinese idiom 风和日丽. Perched on top of the loof rooftop bar at Odeon towers, the sign draws theatrical design cues from KTV signs and sits in bold juxtaposition to the elegant backdrop of Raffles Hotel as it shines in electric defiance against the stormiest monsoon months of the year. As such, PERFECT DAY is both a wry parody of the manufactured wonderlands that KTVs present, and a rebellious beacon of optimism hoisted into the sky.

-Chan Hampe Raffles Hotel Arcade

Image: © Dawn Ng