AS PART of its opening festival in 2002, Esplanade—Theatres on the Bay commissioned one of the country’s leading contemporary theatre companies, Singapore Repertory Theatre (SRT), to create a new musical “Forbidden City: Portrait of an Empress”. They joined forces again a year later and in 2006, when I watched this musical for the first time, it was met with critical and popular success.

Last month, the musical returned to Esplanade Theatre once more and, like a fine restage that never gets old as time passes, “Forbidden City” again delivered entertainment as well as its simple yet significant messages.

Composer Dick Lee’s and lyricist Stephen Clark’s book for this musical is smart to begin with. Instead of coming up with a story about this famous Chinese empress and sticking to it, they used a storytelling structure, and a musical number like “Which story do I tell?” to remind the audience that, like history itself, there’s not a single definite edition.

For example, when American artist Kate Carl was commissioned to paint a portrait of Empress Dowager Cixi, she asked her to tell the story of her life. That meant the Empress’s story was being told through the perspective of the painter, and the audience was able to see from the painting that the artist didn’t really capture everything she was told. This probably explains the fact that most of the male characters looked flat, as opposed to their female counterparts.

The musical was not short of eye-pleasing scenes. /Photo: SRT and EsplanadeTheatres on the Bay

Three actresses from three generations portrayed the title role at different ages and it was their immaculate performances that must be credited for much of the show’s success.

In her first major stage role, Cheryl Tan didn’t deliver a star-turning performance; she suddenly became a superstar and she was captivating and vigorous as the young Yehenara who’d do everything to become a concubine and give birth to the Emperor’s first son. It’s noteworthy that in the previous productions international star Kit Chan played Yehenara.

This time, in the second act when Chan took over a more mature part, she added sophistication and further depth to the role amidst the tumultuous time in China. Veteran actress Sheila Francisco appeared throughout both acts as she’s the Empress the painter met and she really looked and sounded like one who had been through a lot and yet couldn’t reveal most of it.

Cheryl Tan delivered a superstar turn as young Yehenara. /Photo: SRT and EsplanadeTheatres on the Bay

Credit here is also due to the casting by director Steven Dexter who, recognising that which most musical theatre lovers need drama and some comic relief, brought a good balance to the spectacle,

More than a decade on from the first experience, I can still recall my appreciation for Dublin-based Francis O’Connor’s set design and the joy in seeing a neutral set piece that not only worked for many different locales but also helped in speeding the scene changes.

And on that note, “Forbidden City: Portrait of an Empress” is an example of how local, regional and international creative forces are being combined by SRT. If the musical is to be restaged anytime in the future, I will definitely watch it again.

BUSY MONTH AHEAD

Esplanade’s annual “Moonfest: A Mid-Autumn Celebration” is from Friday to October 4, with Peking opera, traditional Chinese puppetry and music performances and many free and ticketed shows.

As part of its da:ns series, Stuttgart Ballet performs “Romeo and Juliet” from October 12 to 14.

Dada Masilo’s “Swan Lake” and Benjamin Millepied’s LA Dance Project among the highlights of the annual da:ns festival, which runs from October 20-29.

Find out more at http://www.Esplanade.com.

SRT’s new musical “Chicken Little” opens October 25 at KC Arts Centre in Robertson Quay.

Tickets for all are available at http://www.Sistic.com.sg.

CAI GUO-QIANG, the Chinese artist known for harnessing fireworks and gunpowder to craft delicate, ephemeral works, brought childhood dreams to life Thursday in a colourful public installation that is one of his largest in the United States.

To celebrate the centennial of Philadelphia’s grand boulevard, 900 illuminated paper lanterns in an array of bright colours will bob up and down Benjamin Franklin Parkway at night for four weeks on a fleet of 27 pedicabs.

Pedicabs decorated with lanterns roll down Ben Franklin Parkway in the grand opening of Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s latest work “Fireflies” in Philadelphia. /AFP

The lanterns were crafted by hand in Cai’s hometown of Quanzhou into whimsical shapes including space aliens, rocket ships, pandas, emojis, orbs and stars.

“I am shedding the conventions of large-scale celebrations to inject childlike playfulness and laughter into the centennial’s festivities,” Cai said ahead of the project.

Following a choreographed performance on Thursday, the free “Fireflies” rides will take place for four hours between Thursday and Sunday until October 8.

The three-wheeled pedicabs themselves were specially customised to serve both as rickshaws and kinetic sculptures.

The pedicabs carry up to two passengers each on the boulevard lined with flags from all over the world that stretches from Robert Indiana’s “Love” sculpture to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s walks among his latest work “Fireflies” in Philadelphia./AFP

Cai, who once sent a 500-metre ladder of fire up into the sky and conceived the fireworks display of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, has a busy year ahead.

Last month he unveiled a large-scale work in Japan’s old imperial capital of Kyoto featuring a traditional wooden ship set atop an array of boulders and carrying five full-sized pine trees instead of passengers.

He opened a show of new work this week at Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, and Madrid’s Prado Museum will present specially commissioned gunpowder paintings for what will be only its second solo exhibition by a living artist since the museum opened in 1819.

THE “secret” art collection amassed by Claude Monet, the father of Impressionism, went on display for the first time in Paris on Thursday, 90 years after the great painter’s death.

French art historians spent four years tracking down the startling collection of work by contemporaries including Renoir, Cezanne, Pissarro and Delacroix that Monet secretly bought.

“I am selfish. My collection is for myself only… and for a few friends,” the master once told journalists who called on him at his country home at Giverny in Normandy, whose remarkable gardens draw half a million visitors a year.

“We knew really very little about the collection,” says Marianne Mathieu, one of the curators of the show at the Marmottan Monet Museum, which has brought together the bulk of the collection.

“Monet didn’t speak about his private life and kept his art collection just as private,” she adds.

He kept the paintings upstairs in his private apartments at Giverny far from prying eyes, Mathieu says, and he didn’t keep records of what he bought.

While the great and good came to visit him as he painted his famous water lilies, only a privileged few were allowed a peek at the canvasses he kept for himself.

An inventory was taken by experts when Monet died in 1926 but it was destroyed during World War II.

So Mathieu and her colleague Dominique Lobstein had to hunt down the 120 works, which included several by Manet and Boudin and more than 20 albums of prints by the Japanese artist Hokusai.

Visitors look at Monet’s “Les Villas a Bordighera” (“Villas at Bordighera”), left, and Berthe Morisot’s “Fillette au panier” (“Girl with Basket”), right. /EPA-EFE

Monet began building his collection when he was still on the breadline with gifts from other painter friends like Renoir and Manet.

Even then his mania for privacy was evident. He was reluctant to sit for Manet with his wife and model Camille, and in the unfinished “The Painter Monet in His Studio” that Manet later gave him, his face is only sketched.

His beloved Camille died of TB in 1879 with her husband immortalising her on her deathbed. Poignantly, Monet kept a Renoir picture of her with their son to his own dying day.

Mathieu said the artist was a “determined and secretive” collector who was not averse to digging in his heels, particularly when he traded works with his contemporaries.

When he lent Pissarro 15,000 francs to buy a house he demanded his acclaimed 1891 painting “Peasant Women Planting Stakes” in return.

But Pissarro’s wife Julie – to whom the painter had already gifted it – would not let it go. A stand-off ensued that Monet eventually won.

But the struggle was all the more surprising given that the painting was more in the Neo-Impressionist style of Seurat and Signac, whom Monet had pointedly refused to exhibit alongside, Mathieu says.

“This shows there was a dichotomy between what he said publicly and what he collected,” she says.

In fact, Monet kept four watercolours by Signac until his death.

Clearly, however, he was not overly fond of Degas, acquiring only one small pastel by the aristocratic artist who had cold shouldered him from his own enormous collection.

As soon as he had the cash, Monet began collecting work by his “masters” – Delacroix, Boudin and Corot – although he did not acknowledge their influence on his work until late in his life.

But from the 1890s onwards as he became rich and famous, Monet concentrated his efforts buying on Renoir and Cezanne, Mathieu added.

And tellingly, for the privacy of own rooms at Giverny, he bought a series of nudes from Renoir, a subject he never dared tackle himself.

He also splashed out on Orientalist works, paying 10,000 francs – a small fortune in 1881 – for Renoir’s “The Mosque (Arab Festival)”.

Most of the works in the show, which runs until January, come from the Marmottan Monet Museum’s own vaults, which hold more Monets than any other gallery in the world.

But the curators also managed to persuade the Sao Paulo Museum of Art to lend them the first of the 12 Cezannes Monet acquired, including the rarely seen “The Negro Scipio”, whose title grates on modern ears.

J Plus invites art enthusiasts to step into the world of fantasy and illusion in an exciting new collaboration with Van Rensburg.

Ushering in a new season of chic, stylish art to go with the passing of summer, the exhibition offers a selection of Van Rensburg’s most captivating art.

“Since 2014 we have been actively working with both local artists such as Zoie Lam – known for her food-inspired literal creations – and celebrated photographer Pazu Chan,” says hotel general manager Vivian Chau

“We have also had works from international artists and galleries from around the world, such as FinDAC and Cat Street Gallery.”

“Menagerie” captures the hotel’s dynamic and captivating essence with emblematic and thought-inspiring pieces.

Guests are invited to explore beyond the constraints of their daily lives and embark on a mystical adventure. The exhibition not only explores the physical manifestation of a menagerie, but also the “menagerie of the mind”, where fragments of ideas, dreams and imagination reside.

It is in these depths that the five artists featured in this exhibition find inspiration for their work.

Madrid-based photographer Miguel Vallinas is showing highlights from three of his acclaimed series, presenting the stunning visual of humanised animals, as an adage of the exploration between human nature and the animal kingdom.

These include a charmingly dressed cassowary featured in “Second Skins”, which explores the tendency of humans to perceive others based on their appearance in relation to whom they really are and who they would like to be.

“Retrato Numero 16” features a beautiful bouquet of hydrangeas in an equally stylish dress, set against a stark black background, which begs the question of whether appearance changes the perception and essence of our being.

Vallinas’ “Ceci N’est Pas” collection takes on a more playful challenge of personifying ordinary objects. The photographer began his “Second Skins” series with the intention of ‘investigating the animal in us all.

A well-dressed teapot, a dapper globe, and animals dressed in contemporary outfits posing as humans aptly named “Not a Tea Pot” and “Not a Globe” dismissing their true “self” in lieu of a more sophisticated version of themselves they would like to project.

Colin Douglas Gray and Adam Frezza embark on an equally imaginative interpretation of the exhibition theme in “Alexa” from their “Animal Friends” series.

A compilation of personified animals collectively form an objectified menagerie, with each animal playing a crucial part in constructing a gleeful Christmas tree on a plain, white background.

The New York-based artists utilise collages of handcut paper culled from a vast collection of both popular and esoteric published source-material. Each piece is simultaneously humorous, playful, curious and beautiful.

Janet Parker Smith challenges the animal-centric pieces of her peers with delicately conveyed motifs of nature’s evolution to survive.

Highlights include her digital prints “Read into It What You Will”, featuring altered book sculptures transformed from their former incantation. The pages are folded, torn, and removed, becoming a metaphor for the destruction of the environment.

Adding doll parts and pictures from children’s stories suggests innocence, trust, freedom and hope.

Meanwhile, “Sitting Pretty” features a woman of beauty’s head superimposed into ordinary things, questioning both the identity and the objectification of a woman.

Tami Bahat, aspiring artist from Los Angeles, has a deep love for imperfect beauty and a strong belief that art is in everyone.

“The Intellectual” and “The Reader” pieces feature a woman trying to hide behind a book and the other turning her head in shock to discover a snake on her shoulders while reading. Inspired by her love for the Old Masters of art, Bahat strives to push the boundaries of her own imagination, as well as the viewer’s through striking perspectives and master manipulation of lighting.

Shifting from a physical menagerie to a more metaphorical definition of a menagerie of the mind, Veronica Green, a young artist from New Zealand, recognised as a revolutionary in the world of abstract figurative art, contemplates the world view through the lens of a child, who is ever so curious of the unknowns in this world.

“Earl Grey” depicts an innocent child looking about her surroundings in wonder, while “The Embrace” shows a young boy pulling a Dalmatian in for a hug.

Earl Grey’s “Opportunities” has a feeling of despair that contradicts its title that gives hope. The piece depicts a man drowning in his own indecision. However, Vanessa believes not in failure, but in continued discovery of things previously unseen that is fresh and tinged with silver linings.

The work of the artist from New South Wales is highly influenced by plucking blooms of the Southern Highlands where she lives, determining the composition and mood of her paintings.

For more information, call (852) 3196 9000 or visit http://www.JPlusHongKong.com.

“The Artist’s Voice”, which runs from November 17 to March 17, is being curated by internationally acclaimed art historian Lorand Hegyi and will feature works by 34 contemporary artists from various countries and across different generations.

Participating artists include Marina Abramovic, Bill Viola, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Wang Luyan, Jan Fabre, Hermann Nitsch, Dennis Oppenheim, Jannis Kounellis, Anne and Patrick Poirier, Liu Xiaodong, Paolo Grassino, Maurizio Nannucci, Miguel Angel Rios, Sandra Vasquez de la Horra and Gloria Friedmann.

Some of the works showcased in the exhibition are also part of The Parkview Museum’s permanent collection of works by artists from both Europe and Asia and reflects founder George Wong’s belief in the emotional, imaginary, and evocative power of art and in the power of radical fantasy, which creates poetic metaphors of existence.

The Parkview Museum Singapore is in Parkview Square, 600 North Bridge Road Level 3 Singapore. For more information, visit http://www.ParkViewMuseum.com

The shows, which are part of the “Condition Report” project, showcases the work of emerging young curators from Japan and Southeast Asia, through “Play in the Flow” running until October 8 in the Sriprakard Hotel in Chiang Mai and “Vernacular is The New Gold” at Brown Sugar in Bangkok from October 14 to November 5.

Fumiko Nakamura curates “Play in the Flow”, which highlights the instability of human behaviour and the fluidity of social situations in the context of the history of Chiang Mai and Japan, while Vittavin Leelavanachai holds the reins for “Vernacular is The New Gold”, which explores the vernacular cultures in different perspectives through the art of Atelier 2+, Pichan Sujaritsatit and Saran Yen Panya.

The first phase of the project was held earlier this year and included the exhibitions put together by 21 curators working in groups of four from Indonesia, Cambodia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.

This second phase is 14 local exhibitions curated by 14 individual curators on individual themes, which will show in Jakarta, Surabaya, Yogyakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Manila, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Hanoi, Phnom Penh, Vientiane and Yangon.

Find out more by calling (02) 260 8560-4.

 Pomme Chan or Thatchamapan Chanchamratsang, a Thai illustrator who has made a name for herself on the world stage, said she was inspired by the shape of an O, which is used as a symbol for CentralWorld. It represents “Global” and is used as the main feature in 12 artworks, each of which features a character from today’s world. The 12 characters include Glamorous, Sweet Sixteen, Street, and Traveller.

Popular illustrator Suntur or Yozanun Wutigonsombutkul says: “I believe everyone has a different personal passion and they have their own little worlds. Some people love fashion, some people like art and this is what I am trying to show through these illustrations.”

Suntur is known for simple lines in bright colours that tell the story of individuals, their preferences, optimistic views and good moods. He wittily brings stories from everyday life to the fore in a way that is easy to understand.

Pakorn Partanapat, chief operating officer of Central Pattana, opened the exhibition in the company of the artists and celebrities Virithipa Phakdeeprasong, Arak Amornsupasiri, Chitsing Somboon, Kongpat Sakdapitak, and Jirat Pornpanitpan

Mamafaka was the pen name of graphic designer- street artist Pharuephan “Tum” Mukdasanit, who created “Mr Hellyeah!” – of one of the most recognisable characters in Thai pop art.

The hairy, one-eyed monster with a moustache was everywhere to be seen in the big cities.

Tum drowned in a surfing accident off Phuket in 2013, just 35 years old.

The exhibition will feature both art and music.

Six artworks from the Mamafaka Gallery in Khon Kaen will form a tribute to the late artist who was an inspiration to many others. You can see the Mr Hellyeah! Craftsman limited edition Vespa scooter with matching bug antennae. There are also the Mr HellYeah! photo frame, baseball bats, the Preduce x MMFK Mr Hellyeah! deck series, and Mamafaka bags made in collaboration with Urface.

Postcards, posters and the Literoom X Mamafaka “Hell Yeah Sailor Rabbit” prints will be on sale, every one of them numbered and signed by Tum.

A souvenir specifically produced for the exhibition is a Mamafaka bag, with proceeds from sales going to the Mamafaka Gallery for the preservation of his artworks.

Indie bands will provide the music for the event. You can see Safe Planet, Telex Telexs and De Flamingo on September 30 and Penny Time, Chanudom and Bomb at Track on October 1 at the Atrium next to the Walk of Fame.

Find out more at http://www.ShowDC.co.th and its Facebook page.

Continuing through November 2, the exhibition will allow s to explore the original Hokusai Manga and see how these connect with contemporary Japanese illustrations created by seven manga artists.

With the similarities and differences between modern Japanese manga and Hokusai’s manga, the exhibition approaches the Hokusai Manga from the perspective of contemporary Japanese comics, focusing on genre, pictorial storytelling and participatory culture rather than the integration of word and image of the role of popular characters.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849) is one of the most innovative painter-illustrators gained his reputation not only in Japan but also in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. Broadening the scope of ukiyo-e (literary translated as “pictures of the floating world”), he depicted courtesans and stage actors, published landscapes series, illustrated entertaining narratives, and even held painting performances.

He is best known from “The Great Wave” (Kanagawa Oki Namiura), which was released as the 21st print of his series, “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji”.

Another great achievement is his collection of illustrations called Hokusai Manga, which are regarded as the forerunners of Japanese cartoons.

After Chiang Rai, the exhibition moves to Hat Yai where it will be on show from November 14 to December 5. Admission is free.

Find out more at http://www.Facebook.com/jfbangkok.