Field Notes, Fluidities, and Fictional Archives: Transmedial Photography and Singapore's Altered Coastlines

Singapore seems made to be photographed: its meticulously planned city center, its manicured bay-side gardens, and orderly public housing blocks have in recent years circulated as utopian images of a postcolonial success story. Much has also been made of its apparent biophilic qualities, a city in a garden, as official tourism campaigns put it. As H. Koon Wee posits, “Singapore managed to reproduce the comfort and aesthetics of nature alongside the construction of necessary infrastructure of modernization—housing, highways, office towers, and industries” (67). This visual quality of steel, asphalt, and glass softened by tropical greenery has garnered many international plaudits and heightened visibility as the setting for films like Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and the most recent season of HBO’s dystopian television series Westworld (2020).The most iconic photographs of the city in recent years feature concrete pylons with photovoltaic panels entwined with epiphytes and other trailing plants, or forestscapes enclosed in climate controlled glass domes often with enormous water features built to mimic waterfalls.

Yet, what is seldom acknowledged is the feats of extreme terraforming and engineering on which the island city is predicated. Its futuristic skyline, “eco-developments,” coastal public housing, busy ports, and even its award-winning airport are all built on land that was reclaimed from the sea using underpaid migrant labor and sand taken from neighboring countries. Singapore’s rapacious and neocolonial demand for sand meant decades of denuding islands, coastlines, and river estuaries in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Cambodia. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, these countries all banned the exportation of sand to Singapore, even as a quiet black market arose for the resource.³ Even before this postcolonial development, Singapore has had a long history of terraformed coastlines: its interior hills were quickly leveled by the colonial authorities in the 19th century to enlarge its land mass, and its ever-accelerating postcolonial land reclamation projects in the past half-century have irrevocably altered its coastlines. Since independence, the city-state has increased in size by almost a quarter, from 224 square miles to 277.⁴ By 2030, the government plans to increase the island’s land mass further to 300 square miles.⁵ These massive infrastructural developments have been marked by their rapid pace and restrictions on public access to the changing sites. Singapore’s series of Master Plan maps (1958, 1980, 2003, 2008, 2014) may provide an aura of transparency regarding the zoning of each parcel of land, however, on the ground, along the coast, these spaces became increasingly off-limits to the general populace.

Whether newly reclaimed land was transformed into airplane runways, sites for chemical and energy industries, or a deeply corporate skyline, these changes often happened out of sight. The consequent lack of an everyday visual archive of these alterations has had long-lasting legacies on the postcolonial nation-state’s consciousness of its own boundaries and limits. How might one see and comprehend the littoral zones of the ever-expanding island state?⁶ What is left behind? The dispossessions and degradations of the Singapore coastline are, for the most part, hidden and invisible. Without access to these spaces, notions of documentary photography as a stable referent are tenuous and contested. This article takes up these questions, by engaging in the form of a collaborative interview so as to shed collective new light on these occluded contexts. The interview features three major Singapore-based photographers and visual artists whose work has been exhibited in Singapore, other parts of Asia, and Europe. Juria Toramae, ila, and Robert Zhao Renhui all employ transmedial photography practices that play with the borders of fiction and reality, and, significantly attempt to shape new visual vocabularies to grapple with the often-unseen processes and effects of terraforming. By transmedial photography, I refer to the digital and material manipulation of documentary photography and, further, to the emplacement of photography as an integral part of other media. Photography in this sense interfaces with and alters another artistic medium, whether an art or video installation, a prose memoir, an onsite interpretative dance performance, or a longer, conceptual art piece. Singapore’s coastal borders are supple, elusive subjects—as the iterative island rapidly makes each new map outdated. The transmedial tactics that Toramae, ila, and Zhao use seek to grapple with these shifting sands and waters.

Placing Toramae, ila, and Zhao in dialogue for the first time also enables the overlapping realities of Singapore’s contested coastlines to intersect in their conversation about their craft. Toramae is a is a visual artist and photographer based in Singapore whose photographs, paintings and installation art examine the role of memory in the littoral zone. Her most recent work, which we discuss in this interview, depicts the persistence of nonhuman life amidst massive ecological upheaval in the intertidal zones of Singapore’s offshore islands. ila is a visual and performance artist who works with found objects, moving images, and live performance. Her images, which arise in the context of memoir, ethnography, and dance recall the archipelagic relations and intimacies that predate the colonization and degradation of Singapore and neighboring islands. Zhao is a visual artist who often adopts a multi-disciplinary approach by presenting images together with documents and objects. His work includes textual and media analysis, video, and photography projects. He shares images from The Land Archive, a fictional archive that collects fantastical images depicting the swift and surreal changes that have taken place on the island’s coasts. His composite images deliberately deceive the viewer while evoking the disorientation that accelerated development entails.

The artists’ field notes and imaginary archives, their attention to the suppressed fluid histories of these spaces, infuse their photographic work with losses that are intangible and perhaps still unknown. Further, photography’s limits reveal the contours of state power in these landscapes—a power that is constantly remaking the island and shaping artistic practices. Due to the heavily regulated and inaccessible littoral spaces of Singapore, each of these photographers has found it necessary to augment and supplement their photographic practice with post-production additions and alterations, or by framing their photographs in physical installations. In effect, their photography practice attempts to unsettle the spectacle of Singapore as tourist destination and homogenous nation-state, an exceptional post-colony that has expanded its territories with seemingly little or no ecological or emotional consequences.

In the following virtual discussion, which was recorded in August 2020, we discuss how Singaporean artists use other aesthetic sensibilities to create photographic representations of Singapore that refuse to succumb to the power of its carefully manicured spectacle. What might photography do in a site that is both made for photography and yet is also unphotographable? What hidden kinships might it reveal between the nonhuman and human, between what is within Singapore’s borders and without? What structures of feeling are revealed in photographic prints that flaunt their own decay and ephemerality? Each artist was asked to share images from their work that related to Singapore’s coastline. They speak about the genesis and technique of their photography, and its affective and material traces. Our conversation offers multiple, generative readings of each piece and its relation to an imposed, developmental landscape.

This dialogue has been edited for length and clarity in a manner that attempts to preserves the cadences of Singaporean speech.

On the medium of photography in Singapore

Joanne Leow (JL): All of you work in multiple media, including performance, installation, video, and writing. What do you want out of photography as a medium? How do you go about incorporating it in your work?

ila: I think for me I see photography as a documentation. When I go out and I do my site recce I’ll bring my camera out and use my film camera, I just think about what I can capture and how much I can keep within it. Evidence of documentation that I was there. I’ve always shot Singapore’s urbanscapes and I’ve always like to go back to the same places again and again and places do change in our very strange way.

Robert: For me, the way I approached the photography is I usually have the idea or the image I think that I want to create. And then I go about kind of shooting that image. So, I don’t go out with a camera waiting for things to happen. Usually when I have the camera, I will already know this is the story I want to talk about or this is the image that I feel would illustrate what I am thinking about. So, most of the time I am looking for images that complement the story or what it looks like. So that is my approach to the medium.

Juria: Like Robert, I usually have a mental image that I will go out for to make. In my practice there are two separate things that I enjoy doing: documenting the environment as much as I can because I know it will change, and the making of the mental images in my head. And then I go about thinking if the image will become a moving one or sculptural.

JL: How would you explain how you subvert what we assume of photography? Whether we see it as kind of like a true-to-life document, a particular archive of something. Or whether you combined it with other media in ways that changes its meaning or its purpose?

Robert: All of us do not approach photography in a documentary way, we are always trying to capture something that doesn’t have an image for it. There are no images for the things we want to talk about. That’s why I think our approach is this way. We create the images. So, in a way, although photography has a very strange standing where it is a portion of the truth or it repeats reality, I think all three of us are working in an art context, so I think photography lends a view, a dimension for us to imagine. It talks about things that are not so tangible and there isn’t really an image that can talk about it.

Juria: I think the intention is not to subvert but to portray the affect of the mental images and capture that in a material form. At this point for me photography as a visual medium works best. For example, for the Field Notes installation, I wanted it to be like a portal where the video and images crack open another dimension while you are also surrounded by mounds of sand and framed images of marine animals and industrial infrastructure. It’s sad and frustrating.

ila: I think for me, the story always has to be there. So, for me it is always narrative-based when I make my work and photography is just a layer. Because I’ve been documenting using the camera, I have unintentionally used it as a medium or the mode of production as well in the presentation. I guess for me what I always want to subvert is this notion of seeing something. Because with something visual, yet this is so explicit, you see something immediately. So, through the medium, I’ve tried to play with this notion of visibility. Things are not so clear, things that are hidden, that are not explicitly there. At least with film [format] you can do that a lot through experimentation.

JL: What material, political, or economic barriers are there to your artmaking in Singapore?

Juria: For me the barrier lies in being a foreign artist even though I have lived here for a decade.

ila: For me, like Robert say, we don’t know the processes of land reclamation. Because there is no visual accompaniment to these processes, I feel I am liberated to depict it the way I want it to. I am not bogged [by] historical leftovers and residues. Because of that, it creates enough gaps for me to enter the way I want to. In a way, that benefits me and my practice and approach. It doesn’t burden me with questions of accuracy or authenticity because there’s no research or documentation that has happened. Playing with this idea of speculation and fiction, especially as a way to kind of come to terms with certain notions of displacement and erasure. In all our works, I feel it is very good there isn’t very much history that is documented in the first place.

Robert: It is the lack of information that can help us imagine and create from there. It is the lack of narratives, it is not about documenting the phenomenon, because that would make it about red tape. Maybe the stories and the images that we can procure from the actual site may not be as effective as we imagined or we try to create another experience of it. This is how we operate. Sometimes, I feel like if I can go to assess all these dunes and maybe then there isn’t much to talk about at all. I don’t know. You know, I won’t feel any impulse to want to create images to talk about it. I think it’s because I think there’s a lack of access, especially here. Then it spurs imagination for our work.

“I have been recording Singapore’s marine life through surveys of intertidal zones between the mainland’s sandy and rocky beaches and offshore mudflats, sandbars and, coral reefs since 2013. In Field Notes from the South Seas, paintings, photography, and a video installation are presented in which photographic fragments of islanders and marine life coalesce into compositions that surface subterranean historical, cultural, and personal narratives of displacement and conservation. By meditating on the human and environmental legacies of modernity and urbanisation, this work explores our inherent dependence and devastating disconnection from the sea.”⁷ (Toramae 2019)

Juria Toramae’s artistic practice often begins with direct encounters with the remaining nonhuman life in Singapore’s littoral zones. Her earlier work examines the role of collective memory and loss on Singapore’s coastlines and its surrounding seas. As she begins to talk about her installation piece, Field Notes from the South Seas, which was mounted during a residency at Singapore’s premier alternative art venue, The Substation, we come to understand how her eye for detail and her ecological focus on these spaces entail a different way of seeing. Her decision to frame her images with a physical installation of sand in a darkened room plays with the artificial creation of this intertidal zone. Her moving portraits of marine life glow luminously in these spaces, forcing the visitor into an intimate meeting with the surviving flora and fauna in the waters just off Singapore’s offshore oil refineries and chemical industries.

Juria: This is a still image from the video. Whenever I go on intertidal survey trips, I often take lots of short videos of responsive marine flora and fauna. During my residency at The Substation, I wanted to use these videos to create a portal that would give you a glimpse of how I stumble upon them and how they respond to me as well as how I feel toward them. And I ended up using footage of Cerianthids because they are very responsive yet they are very stuck and can’t run away from you like an octopus. Their animated tentacles are visually intriguing and sometimes can give a painful sting. And I wanted to show them even more as they are not seafood, not something we recognize as food—we don’t eat them. I wanted people to wonder if Cerianthids were flowers or animals. The video includes footages of mangroves, tides moving in and out with silt, on loop, projected on the floor so you cannot run away from it. You have to go through it and look at it with all the sensation and intimidation, something you have to deal with.

JL: It is almost like a moving photograph because you keep the frame quite static. And I’ve always found something very intimate about the framing that you’re doing. It’s like you’re right up close to it.

ila: Juria, what was your first encounter with this creature? Because I’m very curious how, you know, during your trips to do these areas, what animals or what species are [you] actually coming in contact with, as you mentioned, encountering? I’m really interested in the encountering.

Juria: The encounters when I first started were really random. You need [to] learn about the space that you’re visiting, whether it is a sandbar or a reef and you need to get used to spotting. In the first few trips, you may not spot anything at all because your eyes are not used to recognizing these creatures because they are not in your field. These are easier to spot obviously, some of them are pale or super colorful, orange, or purple and they look like flowers. But when it comes to squids or nudibranchs, sometimes you think they are specks of trash. So, when I said that, it’s not easy to spot, obviously, because, you know, they are so teeny and small. And only when you realize that they are actually something I feel like for me, my visions starts spotting them everywhere. It means when I go in, I only see crabs and I mentally have to think, wait there are other things. What does this area have? I try to remember. If I see sponges here, then there is the possibility of seeing a particular nudibranch [and] a particular seahorse here, for example. And sometimes you might not see, you know, it depends on the tide, the time, the sun, the temperature. sometimes it’s not a very visually productive day and that’s OK.

JL: You are thinking of the ways your practice leads to different ways of seeing and knowing, in a very place-oriented way.

Juria: This is a ferocious reef crab. I find them very, very beautiful, and elegant. They’re always in crevices, staying still, and maybe watching you with their red eyes.

For this installation, I framed portraits of marine flora and fauna in mounds of sand. When people interact with them, sometimes they bury them, sometimes they are gone. And I felt that that was very necessary because in a way that’s what reclamation does to the marine ecosystems. You could save the hard corals and transplant them elsewhere before reclamation but not others like soft corals, sea grass or squids; you can’t move those around. So, this was basically me trying to materialize the way I feel about it; that’s why they’re in plastic frames in sand, unfixed, where they could fall and move around. And I had images of the refineries as well. There are other worlds in Singapore that you may not see. A lot of these places are temporary islands and they are only visible during low tides. Some used to be islands in the 1600s then disappeared. And now that the sea level rise is a threat to Singapore as an island nation, it becomes justifiable to further reclaim land and build sea walls.

JL: We never think of Singapore as an archipelago. And because of that, we never think about Singapore in the region, which is a problem; we see ourselves as this exceptional cut-off island.

Robert: I think because we don’t think of ourselves as an island because we are so urban and Sentosa is more of an island than Singapore is an island because I think because there are so many beaches there. So, I think one of the problems is that we have concretized our shores. So, works like Juria’s that look at these transient islands, her work has a very important presence that brings out the nonhuman species that depend on these spaces. First of all, it is hardly documented and talked about. On the one hand we are worried about the reclamation destroying things, but here you can see what is being destroyed.

ila: For me what is striking is that at one glance, I had to double take because it felt like it was an actual crab in the sand. Like at first the image did not look like an image in a frame. The presentation felt like you were returning an artifact of something that is created, its placed in artificial presentation but it also is returning it to its natural habitat, so there is moment of dissonance when you doubt it might be a crab.

Robert: And I think what is different is that a lot of marine photography or underwater photography tends to aestheticize a lot of the beautiful creatures; I think it lends itself to the conservation message, as we’ve all seen nature photography. But sometimes the beauty of it doesn’t bring about the actual context on how our shores are operating, you know? So sometimes I think like with works like this that help us to be nearer to actually the situation of reclamation and biodiversity. The message becomes much clearer.

And these are issues that with a lot of marine photography we might miss if we look back fifty years or eighty years. It’s just not that visible. And a lot of things that I think we are concerned with now, they are not documented and we don’t have images of it to talk about it and then just kind of missed. Because we developed so fast, we don’t have a visual memory of it. So, works like these actually visually they tell us what the artists are concerned with. So, I think it fills a gap in the memories of what is actually happening so fast. I think reclamation is very hard to assess. No, you can’t really see it. So, there are no images, almost no casual images circulating that there is no access. So, it’s really hard to create images to talk about that.

“The air was salt and brine and it billowed; bulged in and out; but the sea was nowhere in sight, no matter how far into the distance one tried to look. How did the sea, in all its vastness disappear completely? I stood amidst the metal beams, gazing around the barren land, looking up at the towering cranes catching the glint of the shifting midday sun. The winds were relentless; like restless spirits that danced on lands but were hungry for their sea. They forgot that waves could not form on land but they could not stop themselves from trying.”⁸

The visual and performance artist ila melds her photography practice with narrative and performance. In the two photographs that she shares with us, she is conscious of the serendipity of the medium—each of the images has been inadvertently altered due to exposure to the elements or by benign neglect. The color spectrum of “Tanjong Uma” is overly red, something that ila refuses to correct. Her image of a distant Singapore skyline from Batam, Indonesia, renders its progress unreal in the hazy horizon. Her defamiliarization of this much vaunted view is almost an afterthought as our gaze falls to the children in the foreground, playing on the seashore. This image was taken as part of her research for her photo-essay, “A Fluid, Borderless Past,” which considers Singapore’s archipelagic relationships with its surrounding islands. In the photo-essay, ila recounts the story of encountering a group of fisherfolk in Batam who remind her of the long familial and linguistic ties between themselves and the Malay community in Singapore. In the image “Sons and Daughters of the Hungry Ghosts” which was part of a group exhibition in Singapore at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, ila deliberately soaked film in seawater to evoke the degraded state of the Singapore coastline. This produces a haunted view, as a spectral Kobelco sand dredger is just visible in the photograph, suggesting the traces of violent upheaval in coastal ecologies.

ila: I’m sharing this image because this is the first time I met Pak Ramlan in Batam. I always have my camera with me and coincidentally I had an expired film already rolled in. After we went talking at his house about the situation of the fishermen in Batam, he decided to bring me to the beach which is just behind the kampung itself. I just saw the boys playing kites. Then he said, Ila, take a look at a distance, what can you see? Wait, that’s Singapore. And it looks so dystopic from where we were. It looks so strange. It got sandwiched with this image of these boys playing kites and then Marina Bay Sands.⁹ And I was just, like, I was thinking how much of these changes were actually being witnessed by the islands all around. And how disconnected these changes were.¹⁰ And the work looks at SIJORI Treaty, which was in the [19]70s where it was all Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore wanted: trade relations, opening up trade waters, making it like everyone’s helping each other out. But what happened was that Singapore benefited from this and Batam became like the hinterland in a way. It became the exploited partner of this treaty. And what happened to the fishermen was their channel of water, which was shared with Singapore, was opened up to big ships. And these big ships pollute the water and what happened to them was their fishing area started to be devastated by this pollution. But because they couldn’t prove that these things were happening. Pak Ramlan was giving this account of how big ships would throw and then weigh down whatever waste that they might have carried down and slowly move away. So, by the time whatever waste comes up this ship was already gone. There is also this problem that happens in Singapore waters and not Indonesian waters so there is this border politics ongoing.

This was my first encounter with Pak Ramlan, and I really love this image because it brings me back to the first time I met him and I met him accidentally. Yeah. To me it’s very special and because of these images. And this became the anchorage for my next body of work.

JL: It is so beautiful. In terms of the coloring is it because it was an expired film?

ila: Yes, it is a slide film so you cross-process it. So, what happens is that the reds get brighter, it brings out the reds. So, I can’t get this shot again if I tried the slide film, because it is like a lucky draw.

Juria: Can you tell us a bit more about the shore itself? Because I feel like this could have also been an older island in the southern islands of Singapore but it’s a different country that developed much slower than Singapore and still stuck in time. So, you can see village boys still playing like kites, this and no sea wall. This is precious in that sense. Just like what Robert said it, we don’t have enough images. If you look into the national archives, most photos of the islands are records of ministerial visits. Meanwhile, portraits of islanders or island landscapes in the archives are usually donated by an individual photographer.

JL: So, the gaze is different. The gaze of photography is different.

ila: I think going back to the freezing in time [that Juria refers to], right, what I found particularly interesting during this trip was when I first met him, I was talking to him in Bahasa, with an accent. And he was like, you know we speak the same kind of Malay right, you know we speak the same kind of Malay right, we know we used to be one? Because he got annoyed that I was speaking to him like that. He asked me whether I was Indonesian and I said no I’m Singaporean. I speak your kind of Malay; we speak the same Malay. It is so separated that we have assumptions on what Batam is. I didn’t connect Batam to Singapore, I connected it to Indonesia. But Batam is closer to Singapore and we shared the same geography, landscape and history. So, I had an awareness after this trip that I wanted to mediate, what does it mean to return to a time when we are all together and not separated by nationhood? What does that look like? And how does it feel? So, it goes back to how I used this research to think about identity that has been removed from our consciousness because of geographical changes, notions of sovereignty and all that.

JL: That’s so interesting, though, because the traces of it are there, the linguistic traces, the aurality of it. That must have been such a great moment when he said, “I speak the same Malay as you.” It’s still there no matter how much you try to erase it, it’s a bodily trace because it is how you pronounce words. This shot reminds me of the work Robert does with the smaller figures and the landscape photography. The hazy image of Singapore looks like it is fake, just this faraway city.

ila: It’s like a cut-out, a very artificial background.

JL: That’s how it has been designed, how it is supposed be this iconic skyline. It also like an illusion, a mirage, like a city of sand that could just disappear. That’s also what’s going on there in the serendipitous shot.

Juria: I think it goes back to what we think a photograph of landscape should be, the mainstream aesthetics from magazines or online. They have to be clear and vibrant. So, when you have snapshots, we don’t think it looks real.

ila: This is from the Arus Balik – From below the wind to above the wind and back again exhibition and it’s a commissioned series of work. This is when I started experimenting with photography as a form. This was about pollution in the water, but I didn’t want to talk about it so directly. So, I used it as a form material to think about what disintegrates because of certain elements in the water. What I did was soak the film into seawater, dry it and went shooting. I did the first one and it didn’t dry properly, and you get this harsh result. This was the first attempt. The later attempts when I dried it properly, the images were clearer. So, I presented different parts of the experiment, and for this photograph you can see a crane on the right side. This crane was on the water itself. I was trying to capture the sea, but the crane was more present. It was telling of the construction and change that happens on the sea all the time. Punggol, Sentosa, it could be reclamation or other things we are not made privy to what is going on. And that is a lot of the geographical changes that is happening. So that was what I was trying to convey in this image that there are a lot of things happening that we are not aware of and we are not in control. It just takes a bit more time to look at something and think about it deeper. And it is important to do that. You may not have more control but at least you have more awareness.

JL: This image makes me think about how to see differently. How when we look at the spectacular skyline that Singapore has constructed, we need to think about the ecological impact that has on local coastlines. But also, regionally, where we are obtaining sand and raw materials from other spaces? If you could see the kind of damage that is being done, then what would we do differently? And this powerful image reminds me of this because it is so hard to see the crane, the medium is so degraded, and it reminds me of this lack of visibility of Singapore’s environmental impact on the region.

ila: The notion of memory also plays a big part in this body of work. The disintegration of memory, how the salt water disintegrated the film, the memory is not pure, it is not kept unchanged, it declines in its way, it makes up for the absences that happens when you don’t have the full knowledge of certain things. And that was what I was trying to talk about indirectly.

Juria: What I love about the result of the process is the way the colors are kind of fluid and moving from one spectrum to another; it is fleeting and sensorial, overwhelmingly colorful, which can be seen as the amount of information that we have to deal with: reclamations here, degradations here. You’re like, wait a minute, what am I supposed to focus on or do? You know, it becomes very overwhelming.

Robert: Every image that tends to look back at Singapore, it always makes me stop, to take a look at it again. It is very reflective, the position of outside looking in. In the second work there is a doubling of documentation. One is trying to document the act of it and itself, the medium is also witnessing whatever it is trying to document. It is like a paradox: it shows you that photography cannot capture whatever it is trying to capture. There is a very nice doubling, where it is trying to show but it is showing you that it is impossible to see.

JL: It is also showing you the passage of time, where you’ve sped up the decay of the photograph itself.

Robert: But at the same time, you cannot see the image of what it is trying to what it is trying to do so, you know, but at the same [time], like you’re already looking at a process. There is this showing of the limits of photography which is stirring for me.

“In the 1960s, Singapore gorged the soil from its tiny hills and ridges and used it to reclaim land. The island is virtually flat today, forcing the government to buy sand from Malaysia and Indonesia to continue its reclamation efforts. In the early stages of a land reclamation project, when the imported sand was sitting idle for some time, huge desert-like landscapes began to dominate the eastern and western coasts of Singapore, mainly Tuas, Punggol, Marine Parade and Changi. When these deserts started appearing in the 1960s, they took the place of the beaches that the locals used to frequent. To make do with what they have, Singaporeans would flock into these reclaimed spaces on the weekends to walk towards the new shoreline, in hope of reaching the beach that they once knew.”¹¹ (Zhao 2014)

Robert Zhao Renhui shares images that come from his longer collection, The Land Archive 1925-2025, a fictionalized, digitally manipulated set of images that invent an archive of Singapore’s ecological changes. Zhao explains that he forms composite photographs to arrive to a closer approximation of the feelings of disorientation, loss, and estrangement that have accompanied Singapore’s rapid alteration of its physical landscapes and coastlines. His preoccupation with the immense quantities of sand that have been stockpiled across the island and then used to enlarge its land mass is particularly evident. As is his fixation with the new land that stayed in transition for years as the authorities waited for it to stabilize for new construction. Zhao’s work examines the politics of visuality and invisibility in Singapore’s accelerated nation-building project. His trickster images force us to stop and contemplate the scale and the amnesia inherent in this process.

JL: So, this photograph that we are looking at is like most of your other photography: fictional...this landscape doesn’t really exist?

Robert: No, it doesn’t. I got acquainted with reclaimed land when I was very young, when I was twelve. I would go to Tuas with my father to fish. My father would drive in, but he would drop me off and I would cycle, and this is the part where it's the Asia Pacific Brewery now. And then it was still all sand when I was twelve. That was more than twenty years ago. People would go fish and fly remote controlled airplanes there. And so that was there. And I would always wonder why I have to cycle so long to reach the shore because it's so big and it is so sandy. And then later on he would go to Tanah Merah which is Changi Naval Base now. And then when I got acquainted with ecologist when I was sixteen, about twenty years ago. We would take the bus to Tanah Merah and walk in and I think it was an hour plus and a lot of sand and I was always fascinated with the landscape. Then about ten years ago access started to be very limited, they started to fence it up and then you can no longer go in. Back then the first images I created, my friends in polytechnic were very captivated by it when I took them there because you can walk to the sea and see this new land touching the sea. Back then it was very romantic and nice and then I realized that there aren’t any memories of this land because we had no access to it. People don’t go there. This has been happening for so long since colonial times we have been reclaiming. We don’t have a memory. Sometimes we read about hills being destroyed. We don’t have photographic records. We don’t have a connection to this process although it has been happening for so long.

This image was taken in Totori in Japan when I was visiting it. And when I was there I had exactly the same feeling that I had when I was in Tuas. Actually, one of the images from this series is from Tuas that I took when I was twelve. For me this was kind of plugging in images that could have been. How it was like when I was [young, when the] coast was disappearing. I just changed the title of the photograph.

Back then I wasn’t thinking too much of the environmental consequences, I was thinking of the lack of connection we had with the process.

Robert: There used to be a sand dune here right out of my window. I couldn’t find an image or record of it even on Google maps. Then it just disappeared in 2012. And then now, if you want to talk about it, most people are like, really? There was something like that. So is, I mean, that's the extent of how fast our landscapes change. I didn't know I was going to stay here when I took that photograph.

Juria: Well, it's like it never existed. Oh, it drives me crazy when the landscape here goes poof and gone!

Robert: For this, I exaggerated the size, I doubled the height of the sand dune. Already it was huge, it stands out in the whole neighborhood. We don’t know what is it and we don’t know how to talk about it.

ila: And you don’t know where it goes to in the end, like where did it disappear to?

Juria: Where did it come from and how does it stay in shape?

JL: Because you've doubled in height, there's a kind of a weird sharpness and flatness of it that makes it seem particularly surreal. That contrast in the black and white medium as well.

Robert: We can’t go there, so the work is imagining our access to the site and those photographs were taken from natural dunes where people could go and have an encounter.

In the final part of our interview, the artists signaled their desire to revisit what we meant by the idea of “trans” especially given our hour-long conversation that enabled each of them to be drawn into a conversation about their diverse artistic practices. In a context where change is rapid to the point of dislocation and deterritorialization, it seemed as if the artists’ struggles had to do with expressing an inchoate loss that they could not quite see.

Juria: I was thinking about the term “trans” itself and how we actually work with it in terms of all our practices...“Trans” means across or double bonds if you look at chemistry. I feel like our practices try to create bridges or bonds between the way things feel that we try to visualize with what is going on. I was wondering if that is something that we could talk about?

JL: Are you thinking of transmedial lines between fiction and photography, performance and photography, video and photography? I understand a kind of transmedia practice, which I think all of you engage in, is crossing seemingly bounded disciplines like photography, film, literature, installation, performance.

I feel like your works are very informed by the spaces you are in. There's a sense there's some kind of urgency to your work, which is perhaps to do with the pace of change and how time in Singapore seems very compressed, particularly our lifetimes as well.

Juria: I totally agree with what you are saying.

JL: And so, in some ways, that kind of almost pushes you to like, how many different ways can I manipulate this? To convey the affect.

ila: This notion of transitioning is there through the works, places, spaces that we are working in. There are constant transitions that may not be able to be captured completely. When I think of “trans” I think of these places constantly transitioning, constantly changing. At least for me that is how I can feel I can relate to all of it.

JL: And you are mediating your experience with the land through art, that transition between experience and art...

Juria: Memory and embodiment, too.

ila (b. 1984) is a visual and performance artist who works with found objects, moving images, and live performance. She seeks to create alternative nodes of experience and entry points into the peripheries of the unspoken, the tacit, and the silenced. With light as her medium of choice, ila weaves imagined narratives into existing realities. Using her body as a space of tension, negotiation, and confrontation, ila creates work that generates discussion about gender, history and identity in relation to pressing contemporary issues.

Notes