Looking back into a window, I arrive at a fortified coast. You drive out from this room - the water - feeling surrounded by invisible seas, we trace a garden, building a temporary surface obscuring the wind
Inspired by the loss and opacity associated with Singapore’s ever-morphing landscapes – embedded in its fatalist narratives, fortified borders and land reclamation – the work is a series of abstract constructed images that meditates upon notions of reflective nostalgia as a method for memory formation. Informed by psychogeography and the biographical
circumstance of my late grandfather – whose work surrounded constructing and surveying temporary sites – the work’s images fantastically reimagines mental landscapes that attempts to merge and reconstruct both personal experiences walking around and tracing Singapore’s fortified borders, and a long-forgotten, even outmoded past, altogether trying to self-locate within and relate to a ambiguous collective history.
cooling off day // thinking of theatre and eligibility
in the wake of yesterday’s LO-gone-empty news, I thought to share bits of a slightly relevant work I did last year. for 24 hours during cooling-off day during last year’s election, I took a series of environmental portraits of friends around the GE’s strangely drawn and codified electoral boundaries. I asked them then - precisely at those decided lines - to simply find a way to cool off. i mean, it was what it was designated for, right? it was a surreal endeavour, silly taking a sentiment so literally. but i took the bait and indulged. in such a firmly determined flash of events, I raced around the island, imagining how just following an arbitrarily simple framework would create this transient temporary theatre. firmly reality, yet feeling undoubtedly… flimsy. I thought surely, things materialised in ways more than just markings or marketing. at all of these places were supposedly lines - lines we could not see or fathom - but lines nonetheless about to create reality. so it was wise things cooled down and I let them sit, just like the spirit of what it was. it was not wise to react in the moment! to the environments… I supposed, with many laughs
many many hours and months after the heat, these images are strangely comedic. context is needed, I suppose? but in the end, what do simple words connote and create in their power? and how do they evaporate after a temporary temperature? what does the theatre of semantics make, and how are things remembered after the heat is gone? surely opposing it does not change people’s minds I thought. then in a similar way I pour another bucket of water over myself.
incredibly proud of @nataliesins - 4ply clandestine system premieres tonight at @sgiffest ! was so much fun scoring this fictional Clementi universe and can’t wait for more 😈😈😈
hhh.mp3
I lost the game many times this election already so…. couldn’t help my inner shitposter
not a PAR supporter…. but please vote wisely this may 3
Looking back into a window, I arrive at a fortified coast. You drive out from this room - the water - feeling surrounded by invisible seas, we trace a garden, building a temporary surface obscuring the wind.
Installation view, 13 inkjet prints
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so glad to be done with this particular weird winding capstone process, though it feels like the beginning of a giant starting point! Thank you to everyone who has shared conversations and their time with me to get to where this work is right now…Prof Wei Leng Tay, friends, family, fellow eyes and nostalgia lovers… little steps!
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As posited by Svetlana Boym, reflective nostalgia as a mode of recall questions “the absolute truth” – one centered in demoralizing space and playfully reconfiguring “shattered fragments of memory”. This notion anchors these photographic collages, built by juxtaposing found and archival imagery related to Singapore’s land reclamation with instinctually captured photographs around the Tuas area. The images’ documentalities across time become deemphasised, while their represented space become expanded, distorted and transformed through layers of mirrors and mylar. At the same time, these images never try to hide marks documenting their natures of deliberate construction, materiality constituted as prints or otherwise - a mirror’s edge, a C-stand, dust in the air, a box of prints holding up others. Guided by color and vectors within an installation context as bare prints and focusing on different ways of looking via gestures of compression and fragmentation, the work highlights how histories – after their being negotiated and solidified through images preserved – turn into carriers of multivalent truths, or even sites of confabulation, much like how one’s (or perhaps a nation’s) relationships to land and collective memory become fluid and subject to regimes of power and viewing.
