Flutterbye Mansion

ART SG 2023, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore.

Digital-printed 250gsm wallpaper mounted onto wall with starch-based glue, direct-to-metal sublimation print on laser-cut shaped 4mm thick aluminium Dibond.

For the very first time and specifically for Art Porters at the inaugural ART SG 2023, the ArtHitects produced their charactersitic Perspectival Scenic Panoramas (通景画) as a sumptuous printed wallpaper installed in Art Porters’ booth. Styled after the mansion, a building typology new to their practice, Flutterbye Mansion is an immersive, multi-perspectival architectural illusion that is also a continuous 3.5m high x 15m long continuous image that wrapped around the three walls of the exhibition booth to enclose the viewer. Its variously shaped portals and niches frame vistas of historically consequent or celebrated gardens, off centered on a monumental Still Life.

Combining interior and exterior views, traversed by specimens of migratory butterflies that flutter between them, symbolically connecting archipelagic and peninsular Asia with the continental entities north and south. Flutterbye Mansion’s aesthetically coded discourses evoke the complex exchanges between geography and identity as they are enacted across time and place. Its flattened, multi-perspectival vistas purposefully transform the (gallery/booth) wall into a rhetorical and pictorial device.

Flutterbye Mansion emphasises the ArtHitects desire to reintegrate art into the nuanced social and cultural spaces that the white cube and its cultural bias conventionally obliterates.

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