This post’s title is taken from Mirror Of Otherness, the name of a not-so-recent exhibition in Shenyang by Singaporean and Chinese artists who went to the towns and cities found at the borders of China/Russia/Korea last year.

The video works from that trip now comprise Parallax Between Borders: Singapore China, one of three interesting exhibition happening at Lasalle right now.

It’s a thematically tight show where pretty much all the works tread that proverbial thin line that divides. Among others, you’ve got Lim Shengen’s three-channel video Mooning North Korea, which sees him surveying, spy-like, the hermit country from the Chinese border. Teow Yue Han finds parallels between Singapore’s discontinued KTM railway and a bridge in Dandong that previously linked Nokor and China before it was bombed by Americans. A more conceptual approach is Sai Hua Kuan’s video installation. Last year, he gathered water the river dividing China and Nokor, using it as a conduit to light a bulb—in Parallax, he replicates it using water closer to home.

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In Parallax, otherness is negotiated, even embraced — the complete opposite of the show next door, Inside The Subject.

You can find arts contributor Bruce Quek’s enthusiastic review of sound installation by Bani Haykal (in collaboration with Angie Seah and Mohamad Riduan) in TODAY’s arts review section, but I really must chip in to say it’s a damn gripping work. The jarring sounds of someone cursing, an empty bedframe and a chair hanging from the ceiling, and the near-rambling confession of murder written on a door combine to create an atmosphere of terror — made even more disturbing by installation’s narrative premise. The act of brutal violence against neighbour was sparked by the inability to tolerate difference.

In these two shows are two different outcomes when A and B are brought side by side. That I saw it this very day of a rally sparked by debates on Singapore’s growing and divided population of locals and foreigners is, of course, purely coincidental. But it’s a “hmmm” moment, nevertheless.

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Moving on to more mirrors of otherness (since I’m at it and I love threading things together), upstairs had the fourth Art Incubator showcase, where Ang Sookoon’s photographs also play on this with her photographs of students wearing grotesque make-up of skulls (or a less messy Joker). I’m reminded a bit of Genevieve Chua’s old photograph series of young girls — although here, the alienation and distancing is less dreamlike and more stark and, er, in-your-face.

Otherness, too, is present in Mintio’s installation of mobiles comprising overlapping photographs of city nightscapes. Like Lim Shengen’s “peep-holes” into North Korea you look up at these circular things and into places that are familiar, but only barely.

Bani appears again as the third artist here, with deconstructed musical instruments (a bicycle, a guitar, tubes, typewriter) and, more importantly a musical score unlike any I’ve seen. Otherness, here, isn’t just the unusual instruments but the very system of notation used to create music/sound/noise. A new, and for me, at least, indecipherable language.

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And finally, to complete today’s mini-marathon of shows, was Philipp Aldrup’s Tidal Pools at Objectifs. Where we find… Bani Haykal himself!

Yes, for all this talk of “otherness” resonating across the shows, it’s actually him that links everything together. He was there with fellow members of The Observatory, who had a brief performance inspired by Aldrup’s photographs of Singapore’s liminal spaces (under bridges, in abandoned buildings and cemeteries) that collectively evoke some post-apocalyptic aftermath.

I’m tempted to compare it to Heman Chong’s Calendars exhibition of empty urban spaces. There, emptiness is complete — humanity seemingly disappearing without a trace whatsoever. Here, you find hints in gloves or a cassette tape scattered on the ground with a reddish tinge echoing some Martian landscape. Here is Singapore as desolate landscape, literally amplified by the band’s industrial/primal moodscapes — and it comes full circle when Obs’ Vivian Wang randomly throws stones used as instruments into the seated audience.

At that moment, Aldrup’s images enter into our reality, these little mirrors into an alternate world cracking wide open.

(Parallax runs until Feb 27, Into The Subject runs until Feb 24 and The Art Incubator 4 runs until March 3 — all at Lasalle College Of The Arts. Tidal Pools runs until March 9 at Objectifs. Minus The Observatory gig. You just have to imagine this bit.)