Remember This Place, For We Will Be Back Here Again Someday
Matt Enamel on Treated Wood, Acrylic, Metal, Mirrors / Enamel Coated Mild Steel
2019
Investigative, poignant and angled with a poetic scrutiny, this exhibition questions the privilege associated with the limited space we have in Singapore and its inevitable aftermath on the country’s architecture. The series draws the viewer in by coaxing alternate perspectives on viewing and questions about the psyche of space planning.
The hopeful connotation behind the title Remember This Place, For We Will Be Back Here Again Someday touches on the fraught attachment people pin to a place. With the rapid change in Singapore’s landscape, it becomes futile to claim any space as one’s own. Even so, we try to grasp at what a place once was for our emotional liberation. Revisiting a place can romanticize its notion, or be a jarring reminder of its past temporary comfort.
Each of the works have been aptly and poignantly titled to evoke a sense of yearning and loneliness in spite of their elegant, aloof nature. There are constant motifs of stairwells and suggestions of panels to maintain elusiveness. Nostalgia is a focal point of these constructed spaces, calling on different layers in his history such as the personal, the wider socio-economic environment and a certain political climate.