I first became interested in Magic Lantern slides in learning through @gabbymoser’s scholarship about how they were a colonial pedagogical tool — specifically, they were used in a series of eight lectures cast as geography lessons to teach pupils around the British empire about its colonies. I became interested in what was inscribed in those…
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An installation of photographic prints and a newly-created VR piece, ‘The Garden Of No Return”, from my “Shifting Sands” project is on view at the Gropius Bau Berlin till August 2023. Indigo Waves and Other Stories Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora 6 April to 13 August 2023 Taking the stories and histories…
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Shifting Sands (Singapore, Malaysia, China, 2017 – on-going) The world is running out of sand. It seems counter-intuitive but sand, besides air and water, is our most used commodity. The insatiable demand for this non-renewable resource has led to environmental impact where it’s mined and to mafias driving the lucrative business. The global depletion of…
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Fallout (China-North Korea border, United States, 2017) In this exhibition commission for the Nobel Peace Prize 2017 — won by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) — I created a series of diptychs pairing nuclear-related landscapes from the North Korea-China border and the United States. My intention was to get the viewer to…
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I’ll be exhibiting part of the family history/ colonial history project I’ve been working on — “One Day We’ll Understand” — at the Esplanade Singapore’s Jendela Gallery during Singapore Art Week, in a three-artist show titled “Relics”, engaging with colonial legacies and hidden histories. Curated by Sam I-shan. The other artists are Sarker Protick from Bangladesh and…
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In September (2017), I was commissioned to create this year’s Nobel Peace Prize exhibition. As soon as this year’s Peace laureate — the global civil society group, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) — was announced on October 6, I have been working to produce this show that opened in Oslo after the Peace…
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I would conquer the Cedar Forest. I will set my hand to it and chop it down. — Epic of Gilgamesh
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Mounds of sand sit beneath a row of pile drivers on Dadeng island where the Chinese city of Xiamen is building a new airport on reclaimed land.
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Every morning, a metamorphosis takes place below the ground of China’s capital. In a world without sun or fresh air, people roll out of bed in windowless rooms, empty bedpans into communal toilets, pay 50 cents for a five-minute shower, ascend concrete stairways to the outside world and transform themselves from residents of the city’s…
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Their sweaty, sinewy bodies writhed in ecstasy. Fists clenched, they punched the air and screamed with abandon. These young men and women were letting it all out at a concert by Myanmar’s hottest rock band, Iron Cross, in the heart of the old capital of Yangon.
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Deep in the landlocked rural heartland of China, some 6 million Chinese workers lie ill with “Black Lung” disease or pneumoconiosis, the country’s most prevalent occupational sickness.
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In Los Angeles and Beijing alike, millions of workers who have left their homes and often their families in search of prosperity find themselves at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
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Thousands of Indonesians armed with plastic scoops, pick axes and jerry cans work to find tin each day on Bangka Island – just off the eastern coast of Sumatra — extracting the tin that becomes the solder that binds components in the world’s tablet computers, smartphones, and other electronics.
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