Over the course of three months, Ang practiced replicating the signature of pop musician Justin Bieber, eventually reproducing Bieber’s autograph on a poster of the musician.Herein the musical process of ‘sampling’ is extended to the identity of the musician and the signature functions as a metonym for the celebrity persona, honed through a labour intensive process of trial and error. Justin is a unique entry into Ang’s practice, whereby the artist’s ongoing engagement with music as a point of departure for visual arts is expressed entirely through traditional visual media (works on paper, photographs). While the majority of Ang’s work engages directly with music through collaboration or the objecthood of musical instruments, Justin expands this interest to focus on the concepts of celebrity persona, fan culture, and ephemera. In Ang’s artistic practice, the time-based nature of music is often captured through an engagement with musical notation (which marks time) or video (another time-based medium). In Justin, this act of ‘marking’ time is extended, capturing a three-month process of unlearning and relearning the most personal of gestures: the signature. This process is documented in the quantity and evolution of Ang’s practice sheets, which testify to the transformation of the artist’s own handwriting to that of another. Ang Song-Ming (b. 1980, Singapore; lives and works in Berlin and Singapore) is a Singaporean artist whose work explores the social aspects of music, highlighting the relationships that people have with music on a societal and individual level. Besides making art, Ang writes about, as well as composes, music, and organizes music events.Channeling his passion for music into installations, videos, and public art projects, Song-Ming Ang explores this universal means of expression in all its variety and nuance. Within Song-Ming’s work, music functions as an entry point to other areas, such as how fan cultural and musical amateurs generate distinct forms of knowledge. Song-Ming’s work often focuses on craft a labour within the contexts of music and art-making. Many of his works are based on processes, using material ‘sampled’ from popular culture and everyday experiences. Song-Ming studied Literature at National University of Singapore and Aural & Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, London.
