Margins: drawing pictures of home

SingKarPor (2015 – 2020)

AikBeng Chia

SingKarPor, is what Singapore sounds like when spoken in Hokkien dialect. Using a mobile phone and camera Chia captures earthy and candid portraits of Singaporeans, foregrounding visual puns and ludicrous moments of everyday life.

Home Visits (2009 – 2010)

Alecia Neo

Home Visits is a documentation of Queenstown neighbourhood’s residents and their homes. Neo asked to be invited into residents’ homes to capture these intimate portraits that give insights into the psyche and lives of this small, inter-connected community of Singaporeans.

Hanging Heavy On My Eyes (2016)

Ang Song Nian

Throughout 2016 Ang Song Nian documented the daily Pollutant Standard Index in central Singapore, to observe the recurring haze caused by forest fires burning in Indonesia. Ang’s position is that our attempts to manipulate land and environment are a consequence of short-sighted agendas.

Ma Jie (2016)

Charmaine Poh

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.

Explore the Exhibition

Chow and Lin

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.

SS24 The Last Train (2011)

Darren Soh

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 (2013)

Hu Qiren

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 (2014)

John Clang

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.

Suddenly the Grass Became Greener (2015)

Kevin WY Lee

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 (2015)

Marvin Tang

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.

Singapore (2007 – 2020)

Nguan

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.

The Long Road Home: Journey of Migrant Indonesian Women (2003 – 2009)

Sim Chi Yin

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 (2020)

Wilfred Lim

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.

Ways to Tie Trees (2015 – 2017)

Woong Soak Teng

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 (2014)

Zakaria Zainal

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.

Gardening the City

The “Garden City” vision was introduced by the late former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in 1967, as part of a strategic plan to transform Singapore into a tree-lined city of green spaces and parks. The 1975 Parks and Trees Act enhanced this vision with plans for trees and greenery becoming mandatory for build projects by government agencies and private developers.

From Another Shore

Singapore is a nation of permanent immigrants and temporary foreign workers who all play crucial roles in the growing economy. The subjects explored across these photographs tell stories of the hardworking heroes who have played, and continue to play, an important part in the country’s evolving social, political and economic story.

Documenting Reality

In Singapore’s race for progress, the struggles faced by individuals, both observed and mediated, help us make sense of the present. These photographs are reveries, suffused with personal anecdotes, satire, humour, and a sense of time passing.

Our Island City-state

Singapore is a relatively young nation, existing in a state of in-betweenness, steeped in its own history. It is also future-focused, ambitious and resourceful. The country’s rapid urbanisation, for some, fuels a particular kind of nostalgia and these photographs encourage us to pause and contemplate our home’s changing shape and nature. What will home look like 20 years from now? How will our heartlands, tourist centres and transport systems evolve? Will our national character change too?