Flesh And Bones as art and science

ArtScience Museum show, featuring over 160 artefacts and artworks, traces the study of the human body through the centuries

- Clement Yong

The human body - its sinews, depictions and enhancements is the subject for dissection and wondrous study at a new Art-Science Museum exhibition that opens on March 21.

Curated as a circular experience, Flesh And Bones: The Art Of Anatomy begins and ends with Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota’s enveloping canopy of red yarn, a mesh of blood vessels equal parts soothing and threatening.

The Network Within tenderly draws from Shiota’s own battle with illness, but these are as well the red threads of fate - blood binding not just family, but also anyone who steps through this portal.

The landmark exhibition marshals a remarkable 160 artefacts and artworks, all ambitious in their framing and reframing of how the body has been documented and imagined over centuries.

Rare life-size prints of human musculature from the 18th century and preserved organ specimens come into lively dialogue with contemporary artists’ reckonings with scars and cyborgs.

The magic number is 30. More than 30 highly detailed historical prints and medical books - the ostensible stars of the presentation - have been loaned from art centre Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the United States.

Over 30 contemporary artworks have also been curated for the show to match, from Singaporean Woong Soak Teng's photographs of people with scoliosis to a video of Stelarc with his algorithm-linked exoskeleton. The Australian performance artist famously attached an ear to his left forearm.

Human body specimens from Nanyang Technological University's (NTU) Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine and Germany's Institute for Plastination lend a more explicitly medical context. And so do the teaching aids from the Singapore College of Traditional Chinese Medicine that are generously given an entire room.