SINGAPORE — Who is Huang Wei? In the exhibition-performance The End Of History, we discover (or, if you had watched the 2008 lecture performance These Children Are Dead, rediscover) an outsider. A contemporary of the so-called Nanyang Style painters, he was doing some pretty dark, photography-inspired realist paintings.

While his peers, many of whom were born outside of Singapore, were trying to make sense of their new environment, the locally-born Huang was holding up a mirror to himself and a childhood traumatised by the Second World War. “Times like these, you can’t paint whole figures,” we are told. And so, an entire room of portraits of children, eerie in the dim light, looking sad or lost, some with incomplete features, stares back at us.

Suffice it to say that The End Of History, which was conceived by artist Alan Oei and collaborators like spell#7’s Kaylene Tan, is not the vibrant, art walk experience Open House that Oei has been known for.

In fact, it’s a self-contained, intimate and private experience behind closed doors. Audiences — eight at a time — receive a key in their mail and are instructed to visit an undisclosed venue, where they enter a salon-like space with Huang’s paintings. Someone greets them, talks about the lost painter’s works and encourages everyone to “Look. Look.” And so you enter the world of Huang and his paintings—and a fascinating, surreal world where fact, fiction, the real, the two dimensional, and Huang and Oei collide.

(WARNING: SPOILER ALERT.)

It is also an environment deeply informed by Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas, that portrait-about-a-portrait masterpiece about the act of looking and with lots of little ladies and a dog.

A stop-motion video features the step by step process of creating and obliterating via layers of turpentine a portrait, while also quoting Michel Foucault’s take on Las Meninas. The lines blur as we encounter a young girl in a room. She’s in a dress, she’s drawing figures—a girl from Las Meninas and also from Huang’s paintings come alive.

Upstairs, we enter an artist’s studio room where, this time, its Huang’s history dissolving into Oei’s — there’s a an old valise with old stuff, presumably the latter’s, but also a computer and, tellingly, a painting signed by Oei.

And finally, we encounter a final room—first a huge shiny black panel reflecting us, and a series of paintings. They are Huang’s. But the children are partially or completely erased with layers of turpentine. It is a melancholic, almost depressing, sight — the sad story of Huang’s invisible career finally reaching its logical conclusion of erasure.

But wait, we notice another girl, standing beside a statue of a dog, much like the one in Las Meninas. “He liked to draw,” she begins her monologue-in-rhyme, and later stands on an improvised pedestal in front of the paintings.

Huang Wei is dead, his paintings of children have been “erased” but here before us is a child. The children are not dead — they have stepped out of the frame and are alive.

For those who encounter the Alan Oei/Huang Wei story for the first time, there’s the fun twist (well, as fun as the mood can get) but even for those in the know, The End Of History is still a conceptually interesting and layered work.

But I’ve some quibbles though — for a show that urges us to look and look, you can’t really look that long. A 30-45 minute performance, despite the “lecture” at the start, isn’t quite enough to soak in the paintings. The act of looking hard presupposes the act of lingering, which one can’t.

And also, the show’s ending baffles. We are led back downstairs, where we see a stand selling Huang Wei’s The End Of History book-cum-catalogue. There is an option to buy it.

The book itself is wonderful and something worth getting. Perhaps it is in these pages where we get to linger on Huang, his story and his paintings. But contrast this with the very fine but fleeting experience of standing in front of the real paintings and I would have preferred spending a bit more time with the latter.

Unwittingly as well, The End Of History could be read as having ended with, well, the start of the art market. A lived through, poignant experience of encountering art somehow reduced to the final product of a catalogue that could be purchased. I guess, in a way, it’s not much different from walking through a museum and ending up at a museum shop and buying a poster of a masterpiece you just saw a few minutes ago.

This (unforeseen or conscious?) “flattening” and reproducing is likewise underscored in the very last image we see. As we step outside, we see the two children again — this time in a video projection. After having seen them come alive, it was slightly disconcerting to see them once more forced back and framed within a two-dimensional medium.

Not only has the market symbolically reinforced itself in the end, but could it be that here you have a cynical nod to painting itself succumbing to new media?

Tickets to The End Of History’s Nov 15, 16 and 17 dates are sold out. But they’ve opened up Nov 23, 24 and 25. Tickets at S$25 at www.evilempire.asia.