AROMASCAPE OF SINGAPORE

– olfactory representation of the city –

workshop & installation (2011)
DATE: January 5th (premier) -16th, 2011
WORKSHOP: 29 – 30 Dec 2010, 11am – 2pm at Singapore Art Museum
VENUE: Glass Porch, Level 2, Singapore Art Museum
PRODUCTION: Fringe Festival, Singapore

Aromascape of Singapore consists of two parts: a workshop and an exhibition.

In May 2009 and March 2010, Ueda conducted a 3-day workshop for Aromascape of Rotterdam at Willem de Kooning Art Academy, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.  The workshop format will be adopted for the Singapore version of the project.

What do you smell if you walk around the city of Singapore?  Savoury fragrance from food stands and restaurants, green and fresh scent in a market, salty sea bleezes, or stinking garbage?  Singapore has an international reputation to be the clearnest city in the world.  In this project, participants are going to explore Singapore on the level of smell.

What is it that we are smelling, what does it make you imagine, what does it make you feel? This workshop will deal with these questions through a combination of lectures, hands-on workshops with fieldwork.  The result of the workshop will be used for the exhibition.

Some of the smells are extracted and exhibited. Just like a perfume shop, the visitors are free to touch them, open the bottles and smell them.  They are not perfumes for wearing, but for evoking your emotion and imagination.

[Relationship to Art and Education]

For Aromascape of Singapore, the relationship of the work to the theme can be seen as follows:  the purpose of working with art academy sudents is to raise the awareness for their sense of smell.  As these students will be in their late teens or early 20s, they have the maximum physical capability of smelling, because as you get old you can smell less.  They still have the clear memories from their youth that are attached very much to smell.  It’s the perfect mement for them to learn about smell and totally different dimensions will open up in front of them.

WORKSHOP

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More documentations regarding the workshop

http://scent-lab.blogspot.com/search/label/%5BAROMASCAPE%20OF%20SINGAPORE%5D

EXHIBITION

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NO. 1: IXORA FLOWERS (AMARYLLIS SEAH HSUEH TING)

NO. 2: SUGARCANE (BRENDAN POH KAI JIE)

NO. 3: CHEESEBURGER (NG YI HUI MARY ANN)

NO. 4: NEWSPAPER (KANAKO FURUKAWA)

NO. 5: CEMENT (ORANJE)

NO. 6: RICE (AMARYLLIS SEAH HSUEH TING)

NO. 7: INDIAN INCENSE (SHERYL LAW)

NO. 8: BAK KUT TEH (HO BAOXIN)

NO. 9: BARBECUE (MACK ZHI FANG WENDY)

NO.10: CHAR KWAY TEOW (DEVA RAJ)

NO.11: COFFEE (YU DANYA)

NO.12: TAIWAN SAUSAGE (CHUA TIAN LI)

NO.13: GARAM CIGARETTES (HEMA LATA D/O VEERAMOHAN)

EXHIBITION DETAILS

THAT MICROPLASTICS SMELL DELICIOUS!

– The Smell is the Message –

installation (2023)

DATE: Sep 22, 2023
CONTEXT: Tokyo Biennale 2023
CURATOR/PRODUCER: Masaki Fujihata + Super Sorted Trash Cans Project 2023
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Concept:

Recent science has shown that marine organisms mistake microplastics for food not because of their appearance, but because of their smell. Plastic is a material that easily absorbs odors. It also absorbs Dimethyl Sulfide (DMS), an odor produced by plankton. Marine organisms have poor vision and a keen sense of smell, so there is no doubt for them that plastic is a “pseudo-bait”.

In this work, the blue balls represent the ocean and the white balls represent plastics. By designing the smell of microplastics (DMS) in such a way that humans can easily smell them, this work questions environmental issues through smell.

Technique:

The boiling point of DMS is 38 degrees Celsius, which means it is moderately retained in seawater, which averages 21 degrees Celsius, but quickly volatilized under the temperature and humidity of the exhibition space. Therefore, I have applied a technique to adjust the solvent so that about 20 drops per day are dropped to release odor stability.

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OLFACTORY MEMORY GAME

installation / educational workshop (2010)

 

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DATE: March 15th, 2015 (premier) – April 26th, 2015
VENUE: RAM Gallery, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Please make pairs with scents.

Just like Kodo, a Japanese olfactory game, woody scents are being used here.

  • Cedarwood
  • Sandalwood
  • Styrax
  • Labdanum 

This piece is an adaptation of one that I developed in the past with students in the OLFACTORY GAMES class.