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WHEN BLOOD TURNED GREEN (A journey into underwater art) by Tan Haur

Article: Singapore Art Gallery Guide Book, NOV 2005, Vol. 1, No 10, P.8 & 9.

The times when an accident acts as a catalyst leading onto a string of discoveries, a breakthrough, best illustrated by the story of the apple falling upon Newton, is a common enough phenomenon. I was the happy benefactor of one such accident. On one of my early diving trips near Phi Phi Island off the coast of Thailand, I cut my palm upon a coral. It was the pain that made me realized that I had sustained a cut, and when I looked at my palm to assess the damage, I was mesmerized to see green blood oozing out from the wound. All divers know that red light does not travel far into water and the greater the depth the more it has been absorbed. Yet the shock that came along with this perception of green blood overwhelmed me. It rocked me, and the pain notwithstanding, I was transcended into a new level of awareness. Suddenly the beauty, color and the magnificence of the submarine environment took on a fresh dimension, it screamed out to me. There and then I was moved to record, translate and share the glories of the underwater world. But how does one do this?

Back home, I pondered and assessed the medium of approach. As curator of the epSITE (digital art gallery) in Singapore I am very much into IT. This is the trend, and we are but riding the first crest of the IT wave. Over the past years I have been studying and researching the way IT will impact the art world, how artists will react with digital media and the new art movement this medium will bring about. In particular I have been pursuing the interrelationship between art, IT, body, mind and soul, the five elements. What is the relationship of these elements in the production of contemporary artistic expression? What conflicts would arise between the human mind and the microprocessor of the modern machine? Can the artists utilize computer to decode and translate sketches into pixel-databases, analyze them and reproduce them making them the Art of the new Millennium? What about a change of the environment? Facing a constrained environment say the confines of a satellite, the moon or 30 meters underwater, would these be the new inspirations for artists? I was determined to try. But how does one draw underwater? What is the media? One morning I woke up with an idea – a white board and pencil. That should permit me to sketch. But what type of pencil should I use? While musing on this, suddenly these words came to my mind “To be or not to be”. I decided to dive with 2B pencils, which turned out to be the correct choice.

Of course the next step was to enlist the support of my fellow-divers. For safety reasons one does not dive alone. Divers employ a buddy system to look after one another. So forewarned, my fellow-divers would swim around me while I sketched. Sketching underwater must be a rare happening; on quite a few occasions fish swam between my white board and me. The sketching act aroused their curiosity and made them swim in close to observe my drawing equipment. Within the hour we are back onto the boat and upon reaching shore, I scan the sketches.

Once back home I proceed to work on my scans with the impressions of the dive fresh in mind. This is most exciting and challenging; the translation, the coloring, painting and interpretation into digital database. Using painting software, I render my scans of submerged landscapes into strong and captivating images. Of course work on a computer must, for health reasons, never be prolonged. I stop and take a break whenever necessary. And IT means that when the pictures are finished all it needs is the click of a mouse to share my images on the Internet. Sketching underwater is a relatively new art form; it requires steady diving skill to support art creation in a challenging environment. Inspirations from the unpredictable nature force and frequent meditation by the sea have certainly influenced my philosophy in art.