Sunday afternoon on a boat

S had the great idea of renting a boat for a Sunday afternoon tour of Singapore waters.

We left from Sentosa cove, a place where I had never been and where life seems to be sooooo hard... We boarded our lovely boat for an afternoon of sun, food and rose!

This seems to be a popular way of spending Sunday afternoon as we met plenty of other people enjoying the sunshine around St John's island but it is still Singapore, so impossible to avoid the tankers view at some point...

 

An experience to repeat!

 

Affordable art fair in Singapore

I had seen signs around town before but I had never been to the affordable art fair. Affordable and art do not seem to be in the same sentence very often...

The exhibit was in the F1 building, just above the grid.

While buying our entry ticket, I noticed that pretty much everyone was leaving with a painting! Seems like a good start.

The key points of the affordable art fair are:

- Paintings can not be above $10,000, there are even specific corners in the exhibition with art below $1,000.

- Galleries and artists are coming from all over the world, of course Asia but also Europe and the States.

- I have been talking about paintings but there are also photos, sculptures and other artistic items (not sure how to describe a piece of bubble sheet where someone spent the time to insert tiny pieces of paper in each bubble that finally reads "no time"... Love the irony!)

 

Despite seeing some awesome, horrible, amusing, original, beautiful, funny and ridiculous pieces, we did go home empty handed!

(we are actually running out of space on walls so not actively looking for more...)

Here are a few pieces which caught my eye.

Note the 4 Damien Hirst's and the little scribble with a pencil on the price tag;-)

 

Chinese New Year: the year of the wooden horse

It's been a while...

Since the last post, A was born, so my time on the web has reduced significantly...

Anyway, she is asleep so I'll give you a quick update on the preparation for Chinese New Year. We are leaving the year of the water snake behind to enter the year of the wooden horse. From what I have read, it is much better!

During the recent family visit, we went for a little walk in Chinatown and here are some of the decoration.

 

 

The little black jacket

First week of maternity leave and still no baby, so I'm making the most of the free time by going to exhibitions around town. Today was "the little black jacket", a free :-) show at the art science museum at Marina Bay Sands.

I had never been to this museum, it's in the Marina Bay Sands complex, actually in the lotus flower or the baseball glove depending how you look at it...

Here's for the building, now the exhibit! It's a serie of photos by Karl Lagerfield (himself!). Models are famous people wearing the iconic Chanel jacket.

It doesn't take long to see the photos (there are only 3 rooms) but it's interesting to see these very different people with very different style, both men, women and children, all wearing the same jacket.

I even got a free poster of an apparently very famous Korean actress!

 

Gillman Barracks

We have now been stuck in Singapore for a few WE, waiting for miss G to arrive so we are trying to occupy our time...

This Sunday afternoon was an artistic one, we made a trip to Gillman barracks, an old British military camp now occupied by art galleries. It was deserted! (Not just by the army, by viewers as well!) It's a bit in the middle of nowhere, close to some office towers, may be it gets busier during the week on evenings, who knows?

The buildings have some style and it's set in a nice green environment (excellent for mosquitoes proliferation as we were to discover later on at the bar!) and we found some interesting exhibitions.

First Edward Clydesdale Thomson and his distracted gardener

 

Then the weird Pilipino artist Riel Hilario who went to the big apple and got depressed as no one was into carving...

 

And Anthropos, a mix of 11 SE Asian artists.

We were allowed to walk bare feet on the little skulls!

 

The question remains about what they are trying to achieve; gallery owners did not seem to try selling anything, to advertise an artist would require a wider audience, I'm not sure really...

We were supposed to continue the visits and see a few more galleries but it took us too long to finish our glasses ;-)

Never mind, another day may be!

 

F1 2013, happy birthday to me!

A few months ago, R offered me some F1 tickets for my birthday. They took their time to arrive, but a couple of days before the Grand Prix, here they were!

I was not disappointed as I was treated to a different stand everyday!

Friday for practice, we started with a beautiful view of the Marina, Marina Bay Sands was even showing some F1 on its wall and a checked flag under the "boat" at the top. I discovered that despite being a night Grand Prix, there is a lot happening before dark: Porsches race, GP2; plenty of time to get roasted in the stand! (It is actually rather rare to stay outside in the sun in Sg, and that was a reminder why...)

I also discovered my noise limit, Porsches I can do without earplugs, GP2 can not lah! (as Singaporeans would say)

We gave a miss to the big concert that night (some Koreans bands) but caught a little bit of a British artist at dinner time at Esplanade.

Saturday for qualifying, we were in the posh zone: zone 1 where we got a free ride of the Singapore flyer (the big wheel) just ahead of GP2 race!

Then, it was time for Porsches qualifications, a bit more practice and finally F1 qualifications.

The seats were fantastic! Just outside of the pit lane looking over turn 1,2 and 3. I believe it's where the best photos are from.

At dinner, we saw Bob Geldof performing and post race, we went back to the Padang for a really cool concert of the Killers.

Sunday was race day for all categories, Porsches, GP2 and F1, this time we are on the Padang stand (ready for Rihanna's concert!)

We got to see the tour of the pilots on vintage cars, the safety car a few times, the thing is, we were so close to the track that it wasn't really good for the photos...

But we were indeed at the best location to watch Rihanna (not) singing and moving her bump (a lot)!

All together, a fantastic birthday present!