The Petri Dish Series, 2008, Mixed media installation
Evident from the LASALLE College of the Arts building, transparency has increasingly become a characteristic of contemporary architecture. As an extremely private person, I need a lot of personal space. Exposed or open working areas prove to be daunting to me. Hence, it became the motivating force to find out the issues pertaining to the gaze facilitated by architectural transparency.
The term transparency is positive, affirmative. Clearly defined in the dictionary as ''clear,'' ''without guile or concealment.'', there seems no doubt about being transparent. The modernists have regarded it as an ethical triumph, a utopian universal virtue, embodying values such as truth, honesty and accountability. Even up till today, this symbolism is still reiterated in Reichstag, Berlin’s transparent cupola in 1999.
However, I would like to put across that transparency in contemporary architecture is no longer one that symbolizes the truth and honesty but takes on a more complex, diverse meaning of public and private, voyeurism, surveillance and scrutiny.
Foucault draws a parallel of such scrutiny to that of a physician’s gaze in his book Birth of the Clinic, which I made reference to in many series of my artwork. The people of modernity thought that with this powerful gaze the physician could penetrate illusion and see through to the underlying reality, that the physician had the power to see the hidden truth.
Through this series of work, I hope to stimulate ideas and thoughts with reference to the issue of transparent architecture.