Having already missed out on half of the shows at the ongoing M1 Singapore Fringe Festival (er, long story), I thought it best to rush down yesterday to catch some of the exhibitions before checking out Orpheus Marathon. And dare I say this year’s visual arts offerings are way tamer than last year’s? To be fair, I haven’t seen the ones at the National Museum and Ion Orchard (I’m sure Achinto Bhadra’s photographs are pretty in-your-face judging from the press pics) but most of the ones I saw at SAM and at the Esplanade aren't exactly fringe-y, if you know what I mean. It could very well be the theme, but then again who’s to say “education” can’t whip up a storm as much as “politics” did last year? *** The idea of essence seems to be the unifying thread in the works at SAM. Maki Ueda’s Aromascape of Singapore delves into it quite literally, with its 13 small bottles of specific smells that theoretically offers us an olfactory landscape of the country. Lim Shengen’s Void: Utopia in a sense does the same for the very idea of the image – the very physicality of light particles by using smoke to “flesh out” a projected image. Over at SAM 8Q, the video installation Until The Sun Rises by Emmanuel Guillard constructs by way of a series of photographs of liminal spaces a place of sorts that’s both anonymous and familiar at the same time (hmm, and do I remember correctly that it talks about a specific place that you’d rather not mention in the handouts, Fringe peeps? Wink wink!). Some however, succeed more than others.