We Hesitate to Wash Ourselves in Muddy Water is both the title of the artwork and the exhibition by Singapore-based artist Mike HJ Chang. The artwork is characterized by its bold emptiness: the artwork consists merely of six mechanical devices in the shape of cylindrical containers attached to Telok Ayer Arts Club's permanent picture hanging system consisting of rail tracks and steel cables. These mechanical devices cause the steel cables to either swing side to side, or bounce off the walls, in random sequences.

Mike's simple motivation behind the work is to highlight the support system of art. And it is apt that the exhibition comes after the hullabaloo that is Singapore Art Week—ostensibly touted as a more-than-week-long annual celebration of visual arts with the support of three state agencies and the concerted effort of galleries, institutions, art spaces, artists, curators and others. The months leading to it sends cultural workers into delirious overdrive; the season is crammed with a cornucopia of art for consumption, and exhibition openings and events to see and be seen at.

Against this fervid overproduction at an unsustainable pace, in a society that fetisheses the new, big and exciting, Mike's We Hesitate to Wash Ourselves in Muddy Water offers the audience a respite from an overload of cultural consumption in its quietness and emptiness. The simplicity of materials, shape and movement of the devices is subtle and muted, potentially hypnotic and calming.

We Hesitate to Wash Ourselves in Muddy Water follows the same mischievous strain of thought that informs Mike’s previous works that were created in relation to the space of art and art production. These site-specific works often tinkers with or disrupts the spaces and its conventions, with the offbeat humour and doleful melancholy that is wholly his.

-Project text written by Kamiliah Bahdar

Mixed media installation with aluminum, motors, timers, and wires.