Margins: drawing pictures of home

Ma Jies were a wave of female migrants, largely from China’s Guangdong province, who worked as domestic servants in Singaporean households from the 1930s to the 1960s. Poh documented several Ma Jies living out their twilight years in rental apartments in Singapore’s Chinatown.

The Poverty Line examines the daily food choices of people living on the poverty line. The artists travelled 200,000 kilometres and visited 36 countries and territories spanning 6 continents to conduct this research. The country case studies use local poverty definitions to calculate an average meal per person per day.

Senandung Sutera 24 (SS24) was the last passenger train service to depart Tanjong Pagar train station, Singapore for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Soh spent several months capturing the train’s nightly route in a series of apparition-like images – a tribute to the rail line’s long history and the connection it made between the two countries.

People Mountain People Sea is a direct translation of the Chinese idiom, 人山人海 that describes a huge crowd of people. The main character in this body of work, Old Master Q, a serialised comic book character is juxtaposed against Singapore tourist attractions, resulting in disparate scenes of awkward harmony.

The Land of My Heart casts the woman in sarong kebaya attire – as the protagonist in a portrait of Singapore’s past, present and future. The images contemplate different notions of a ‘Singaporean identity’ in the context of the country’s rapid development.

In 1967, then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew declared his vision to turn Singapore into a Garden City. He established a successful large-scale tree planting program. Suddenly the Grass Became Greener documents this tribute to Lee’s legacy.

Stateland documents small private garden plots and plantations that have been secretly created in Singapore’s state-owned forests. This instance of ‘guerrilla gardening’ questions strict policing of land use and speaks to a collective longing to escape from the concrete jungle back into the garden.

Peering behind the polished and extravagant facade of Singapore, Nguan reveals overlooked corners of the city and uncanny moments in the lives of ordinary Singaporeans. Singapore is a study of the nation’s grittier face and the alienation sometimes felt by city dwellers.

Troubled by the high percentage of Indonesian domestic workers who fell from high-rise buildings in Singapore in the mid 1990s, Sim travelled to their home villages to investigate the migration process capturing their trails and travails, heartaches, and their bittersweet successes.

State of Solitary is a series of photographs created during the Singapore circuit breaker period using food scraps, familiar domestic objects and wild flowers found by Lim during the sanctioned one-hour outdoor exercise period.

Woong’s portraits of uprooted and relocated trees in Singapore reveal the tightly controlled acts of urban planning that go into making the man-made garden city.

Our Gurkhas is an anthology of portraits of retired Singapore Gurkhas.  Each person photographed was asked to reflect on their lives in Singapore from the 1950s to the present day.