By Woon Tai Ho

THE Singapore Youth Festival's annual Art and Crafts exhibition has found an admirable way to tie this year's event with the inaugural Youth Olympics Games - by co-organising with The National Art Gallery and putting the art in a museum environment, for the first time.

While the Youth Olympics shows how young bodies push themselves to their physical limits, the exhibition shows how far youthful minds dance along their creative boundaries.

As it turns out, the boundaries hardly exist, and it's even harder to tell that these mature works are by students aged 13 to 20.

Themed "Torch of Friendship", the 52 works are selected from hundreds of entries from 48 schools across Singapore. From the conventional ink, acrylic and oil to mixed media and installations, the works show an exceptional level of sophistication, and how in tune the schools are with the contemporary language of art.

The artists themselves are refreshingly down to earth, sharing their thoughts with you as they would their own friends.

Floating installation: "Womb" symbolises ideas and human diversity.

Twenty-year-old Uraiwan Songmunstaporn, a Thai national studying in Singapore, says that her installation Simple Wonder started with her observation that we often fail to see the simple beauty of nature.

Her huge 545 x 220cm piece literally "transforms" on a wall from simple white paper into graphic paper cut-outs, eventually coming to life as three-dimensional white flowers in bloom. As the medium is just white paper skilfully cut and supported by needles, pins and wires at the end, it has a soft fragile beauty. It won the Gold and takes centrestage in the last part of the exhibition, "Exploring the World".

The exhibition has three themes: "Exploring Identities"; "Exploring Relationships"; and "Exploring the World".

Another Gold winner, Zhao Ziqi from Temasek Junior College, also impressed with Womb, a gorgeous installation of several hanging "eyeballs". At first sight, it looks like a low hanging chandelier. On closer inspection, the balls have small green, red and blue wires in the shapes of small trees stuck into fine white sand. "These trees are made from discarded computer wires I found and they symbolise ideas. If you notice, the balls are not all hung at the same level. It is the diversity of human beings.

We are not the same but we are creative, we have ideas."

Stretched over three floors, the sprawling exhibition is a visual discovery of the challenges facing young people and how they overcome them. What inspires, unlike most other displays of youthful angst, is the sense of hope behind these young minds, using their talent to transcend their own situations and reaching out to the world at large.

This article was first published in The Business Times.