#rpinterviews

Hi Hélène, we're excited for opening night! How are you finding the festival (Voilah!) so far?

 Hi! This is the third time in a row I have participated in the Voilah! French Festival. I have to say that I’m very excited and very impressed by the 2017 edition. The selection of events is very wide, offering the public a French flavour in regards to cinema, arts, sciences, food and more… but what I enjoy the most in this festival is the interaction between Singaporeans and the French, and a good blend of cultures and enriching exchanges in all fields.

 Could you tell us a bit about your work?

 Through a constant back and forth between painting and sculpture, my art practice is always related to memory and body in one sense or another. Working mainly in black and white, I question the passage of time and the traces it leaves on our bodies. I like to interrogate the hidden parts of ourselves, as well as the way we attempt reconciliation of our collective and family histories with our individual memory.

 Could you tell us more about this particular exhibition? What moved you to choose these particular forms of media?

 Beyond the Surface explores the link between our body and the memories it contains. Through Chinese ink paintings, sculptures, videos, an installation and conceptual pieces of art, I talk about the secret and unconscious parts of ourselves, trying to define what escapes from us and what is perceptible by others even if it remains hidden from them and sometimes, even from us.

 In this exhibition, I tried to portray our inner geography, the landscapes we walk along when we sink in our inner world. Shaped by the passage of time and events in our lives, these Internal Landscapes reflect the transient nature of our lives and question the intimacies of our time, the place of silence and introspection in a world submerged by a constant flow of images, sounds and digital data.

 To answer the second part of your question, I would say that each medium I used allows me to explore different aspects of my subject: when the paintings play with textures, veils, blurry and misty versus jagged and very distinct shapes, allowing me to develop the idea of the body as a landscape, the sculptures are made of different layers and contain in their inner cores some secret messages I have collected during my first exhibition in Singapore in 2014. The videos allowed me to talk about movement and the transitional aspect of our lives. To realize them, I had the chance to work with Syv Bruzeau, a Butoh dancer, performance artist, and with the Mechano-Biology Institute of Singapore / CNRS in the person of Virgile Viasnoff who provided me some incredible images of human cells. As for the installation, playing with reflections and silence, they push the viewer to engage further and to reconsider his own inwardness.

 What was your experience like working with ink wash on paper?

 My relationship with Chinese ink is a long love story! I started to work with ink soon after my Art graduation in 1998. I was living in Paris at that time and didn’t know many things about Asian cultures. But coming from a mural paintings background, I found a lot of similarities between fresco (a technique from the Italian Renaissance) and Chinese ink such as its interaction with water, the short time frame you have to work with both of these techniques. And the fact that, in both cases, the first stroke must be the good one: indeed, in fresco like with ink on paper, you can’t erase or correct anything you have done.

 That’s what I really like: this immediacy, this state of urgency that concentrate your action in one single gesture making each new artwork a new risk to take.

 And of course, working with ink became even more meaningful for me since I settled in Singapore in 2010! There is now an obvious resonance between my art practice and the place I live!

 Is there anything you would want to say to viewers who are coming to see your work?

Exclusive Interview + Concert Review.

One of the pioneers of American punkrock, New Found Glory is back in town, 7 years after they first performed atthe now obsolete Singfest. Going through another wave of mainstream revival, New Found Glory opened up to us about their lives and their opinion of this ever-changing industry of pop punk just before their concert.

Pop punk has never really died, as we have seen from the various bands gracing our airwaves and the constant popularity of Warped tours. New Found Glory has definitely experienced the ups and down of being in a band and touring the world for 18 years, and their larger than life personalities both on stage and off stage defines them as a band and artist in itself.

Change can be for the better. 

Chad Gilbert: Founding members leaving is always up to the band. I feel like Blink182 is in a tough spot because a lot go people love Tom and he’s not in the band anymore. But to be honest if Mark and Travis get another lead and they make an album that is fucking awesome, then people will love it. I don’t know whether you've seen Blink live, but Tom sometimes sound like shit live! At the end of the day music speaks for itself. If you can step up to the plate and write good songs then it doesn't necessarily have to be the same as it used to be, but that doesn't mean it still can’t be good.

Hopes and dreams boiled down to touring – and tour they did

Ian Grushka: I’d always follow bands on tour and I’d be like, “How do you do it?”, and they said “You just gotta tour, if you don’t tour, you’re not gonna make it.” I remember it being hard because all these guys were still in school so I was just working a shitty job and I knew that I had to get them to tour. I kept saying “We gotta tour, we gotta tour!” but they were busy in school and we’d play shows on the weekends. When we finally signed to a record label, I was like “We gotta have this fake meeting where you tell everyone in the band that we have to start touring non-stop because they’re not gonna listen to me but they’ll listen to you.” Chad dropped out of school (C: Whoops! And I still don’t have my high school diploma…) and it’s my fault.

Chad’s sacrifice wasn't for the worse. They have definitely made their own name defining themselves as their own sub-genre.

Chad: We've never tried to fit what was popular in the mainstream. When we came out, we just created the music that we played. We never wanted to sound like any other bands. Some of us liked west coast punk rock, I liked New York hardcore and some of us liked emo. So we all had our different influences but when we started writing music, it came out like New Found Glory. We sounded nothing like blink-182, we sounded nothing like Green Day. We were our own style and we got popular. But then when music started changing and things kinda got poppier or things got a little bit more gothic, a lot of bands changed with the genre but we created our genre, so we never changed because we started our style of music. So I think that’s a definitely trait that makes us punk rock – that trends have come and gone but New Found Glory is always New Found Glory, because we aren't an impersonation of anything else. We are our own brand, we our own sub-genre. I think that’s a very important thing that keeps us still a band.

Punk rock is not dead yet, and will only grow bigger because people can relate it to on a more personal level.

Jordan Pundik: I think [punk rock] is bigger than its been in a long time, maybe not on radio or MTV so much anymore, but nonetheless its big.

Chad: People need punk rock. What happens is that you get into music, right? Say you’re ten years old and you hear Katy Perry, One Direction or whatever I t is. You turn fourteen and you’re in school but now you’re starting to deal with real relationships and people. Then you listen to your [Katy Perry/1D album] and you’re like, “Okay… I’m starting not to relate to it as much anymore. Then you hear a punk band and your’re like, “This is just as catchy as a One Direction song but it’s actually making me feel not alone.” When you hear punk rock music, it helps you cope with your life because you’re able to have a favourite band that is willing to expose your true feelings. Pop music doesn’t necessarily do that it’s, “Let’s write a catchy song about having fun at a club and everyone will relate to it.” [I: Or let someone else write a song for us, with their feelings.] With punk rock music, people get to a point where they’re like, “Alright I can now smell bullshit and I need to hear a song that will help me deal with going to high school, going to college or entering a serious relationship. You wanna be able to hear a song and have someone express what they did in their relationship and I think that’s why there’ll always be punk rock because you rarely get that from pop songs.

Tattoos make for great stories or fashion statements.

Jordan: I wouldn’t say it’s regret, I just think it’s [more of a] “Why did I do that?” and it makes a good story.

Chad: It’s all [about] where you are in life. Tattoos now are like a fashion sort of a thing but when we grew up it was more of a social statement? There were the jocks, the preps and the punks and in the suburbs you didn’t want to fit in – you were an outcast that if you didn’t fit in school, so you got tattoos. But now jocks have sleeves! Everyone has tattoos. Before, that meant that you were a little weird and that’s why we had tattoos. When I lived in LA and everyone has tattoos, I hate my tattoos; I’m like “Man, I hate my tattoos. I look like everyone else! I look like all these people screaming for attention.” But when I‘m in Tennessee where no one has tattoos and I walk around and everyone judges me, that makes me happy because then it’s a statement: You can be different and still be smart. In certain parts of the country if you have tattoos you looked at as a criminal but in LA you look like everyone else. 

It’s the same thing as straight-edge – I can be punk rock and not do drugs. I can have tattoos and not be a criminal. It’s more about the social statement behind people not being close-mind and open-minded to everyone.

Its definitely eye-opening to tour so far from where they started to so many different places, and every member has found their pet peeves.

Chad: I really hate getting off the planes. Different countries have different plane etiquette. I am quite used to people being polite, and exiting row by row, but here in Singapore, people just push through. 

Jordan: What really annoys me is waiting in line, especially when the airport is really hot. Like the airport in Bangkok. 

Ian: I get hungry all the time, so I always bring snacks in my pocket. I bring these snack bars, and I always make sure to bring enough of them whenever I tour. I packed like 48 bars for this tour alone.

When the bands are on stage sincerely, for the right reasons, there’ll be good vibes.

Chad: Asian crowds are just crazy, and we definitely appreciate it. Asian shows have more energy, maybe because we don’t tour here often. NFG shows are pretty much the same level of energy everywhere. You can even watch our shows online.

We perform in Boston three or four times a year, so travelling out here to different places are really interesting.

We do play in countries that don’t speak English very well, but when we play, they sing all the lyrics to our songs. We have had Japanese fans tell us that they learnt English from listening to our records.

Expect lots of energy and mosh pitting [tonight] at the show.

And deliver they did. Lucky to have managed to clinch a spot right at the front of the mosh pit, the energy and vibes overpowered me as they powered through song after song. They literally blew crowd away with songs from all their studio albums (they have 8!?) and a few of their new songs from their latest album.

Jumping like jackrabbits all over the stage, Jordan, Chad, Ian hyped the crowd up with their rocking riffs and powerful lyrics.  With popular hits like Resurrection and Selfless, the crowd was taken back to their teenage days, running around in the circle pits and crowd-surfing for the lucky ones in the crowd.

Made up of current teenagers and new reluctant adults, the crowds welcomed New Found Glory to the stage in all their tattoo-ed, pogo-ing antics on stage. Chasing the thrill of performing their art on stage, NFG did not let their fans down with a strong 21 song setlist. Entertaining the crowd with both their music and their personalities, they got a laugh as they put Cyrus’ (their drummer) absence down due to lack of contraception.

The punk-rock concert atmosphere was contagious, be it moshing or dancing to the beat, and everyone could not get enough of New Found Glory. When frontman Jordan Pundik came down to the barrier near the fans, hands from enthusiastic fans stretched out to get the chance to touch this guy of the band. One guy who was crowd-surfing got thrown over the barrier into Jordan, and he must have been having the time of his life as Jordan helped him back into the crowd. Another enthusiastic fan that managed to get onto the stage ran around and danced with the members of the band before being chased offstage. 

Finishing off with My Friends Over You, the song about choosing his band over a girl that Chad considers their national anthem, the band left the stage to the sorrow of the crowd. After coming back with an encore of three songs to appease the crowd-goers, lucky audience members managed to leave the venue with the setlist that Chad threw into the crowd or guitar picks that Ian or Chad played it.

It was a night to remember, both as part of the crowd or on stage, and it was evident that as long as they kept making music, pop punk will always be alive through their fathers.

(For more photos from the concert, you can check out our Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/RadioPulze )

Editor: Michelle