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

More documentations regarding the workshop

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

EXHIBITION

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

WALK’N SNIFF

one-hour olfactory walking workshop(2009)

goals

re-finding of the area from smell perspective
becoming more aware of the sense of smell
getting to know the connections between the nature and our modern lives. example: the oak moss found on the tree bark is extracted and used a lot in perfumes, etc.

date: 23 & 24, Aug 2009

Kooipark, Leiden, The Netherlands

View in Google Map:

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/albumMap?uname=110341721675628623374&aid=5345626595436543681#map

Pine tree – the most common tree in Dutch nature. Rub the leaves – you’ll smell a refreshing fragrant as lemon, orange, and mint.

Let’s smell the childen of pine tree too! Is it similar to the leaves or not?

With the rose as example, I’ve explained the various ways of retrieving essential oils from natural materials.

‘Kampafoelie’ in Dutch. Smells like lily, jasmine, and rose.

This pretty yellow flower should smell good – but it actually does not smell at all! Instead the leaves well. Smell of black pepper, grape, orange. Gourmand smell.

“This smells like orange!”

‘Klimop’ in Dutch. This grows everywhere in this country. The flower smells like Japanese ‘fuki’ – fatty, stinky smell. Reminds me of one autumn evening of Holland.

Vlinderstrook – flowers that Dutch people love. Compare the white one and purple one. The white one smell a touch of vanilla, like a virgin. The purple one smells more sexy.

Rozenbottel leaves smell like apple.

This one looks like mint, but its smell is nothing comparable to mint!
“Wow, what a strange smell!”
“This smell reminds me of something…”
“Yes… like an animal shop”
“Right, like a bird cage”

Thinking alone about the scent often doesn’t lead to anywhere, but thinking together like a game leads to the idea of similar smell that we know. Very interesting!

I’m thankful to Marjan van Gerwen / Wijken voor Kunst / De Laekenhal, who gave me this opportunity. Thank you very much!

SMELL BAR #1

– a bar for sniffing –

site specific research / installation (2010)

Electric-Eclectics Festival, Meaford, Canada on 01-03.08.2008.

[content]

Maki Ueda will research and find interesting local scents, and extract them on-site. The goal is to find the local and original scents; the scent of daily life, food, drinks, materials, persons, and environment. Because of the evaporating character of the smell molecules, scents cannot be

preserved very long, and therefore it’s preferable to work local. Maki Ueda has been making a series of the perfume works under the name “Aromatic Journey” (http://www.ueda.nl/aromatic_journey1). These works focus on the local, extraordinary scents. The local culture is being explored and experienced by means of scent. The results are not a perfume to wear, but to smell and trigger one’s imagination.

[extraction during the festival]

Maki Ueda will extract the scents of the chosen subject in a mini-laboratory installed in a caravan. The visitors can visit the caravan and observe the extraction process, and off course they can smell the scents-in-progress.

The premier of SMELL BAR was presented at the Electric Eclectic Festival 08, Meaford, Canada in August 2008.

SMELL BAR is a bar for sniffing. The bottles on the bar counter are at your disposal. You can sniff them from the bottles or with the perfume strips. It is an installation with which you can smell and experience the local smells.

The each smell is extracted manually from materials found in the environment. Thus they together form the environmental smell as collective.

In the fieldwork the environment is being explored and experienced by means of smell. Then the smells are extracted freshly on-site. It’s because that the preservation of natural smell is almost impossible because of the character of the smell molecules: they are easy to viporate and decay. This work is not site-specific, but the extracts have to be made on-time on-site. The results are not a perfume to wear, but to smell and trigger one’s emotion and imagination.
These smells below were found and extracted for the Meaford version.