Artwork
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Gift Series: Subaqueanus
The work was made for the exhibition, Das Mechanische Corps, an exhibition inspired by the illustrations and stories of the science fiction writer, Jules Vernes. Two ornamental boxes hide fantastical miniature worlds within its wooden interiors. Each world is made out of images cut from scientific illustrations of coral and...
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The Forest Speaks Back
This is a story about the tropical forest. It is a story of the men and women who ventured from colder climates to explore, conquer and exploit the abundant resources found in these fertile new lands. It tells of how they grew to love, and hate, this place, and how...
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Letters From the Forest
This is a story about the tropical forest. It is a story of the men and women who ventured from colder climates to explore, conquer and exploit the abundant resources found in these fertile new lands. It tells of how they grew to love, and hate, this place, and how...
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Gift Series: Pluvia Silva
The work is a series of ornamental boxes of various sizes and shapes. Open the boxes, and nestled within their wooden cavities lie wondrous miniature worlds – landscapes of palm trees and dark figures, overgrown gardens with “exotic” animals peeking through fronds, trees with strange birds perched amongst riotous coloured...
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Gift Series: Hortus Conclusus
This series of works tries to imagine and recreate the gifts colonial traders and explorers sent home to their family and friends. These 18th and 19th century men and women saw things in their travels that they must have found hard to communicate to their colleagues, friends and family living...
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The Promise (i-x)
This series of portraits was made as a companion piece to the dioramas in “And We Were Like Those Who Dreamed (Cocoon)”. Images of the Virgin Mary and Madonna are cut out from familiar Art History reproductions and float above a framed flowered wallpapered background. By doing so, the women...
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And We Were Like Those Who Dream
This is a series of seven cabinets that explore the theme of hope and what it means to wait through utilizing the associations and symbolism found within the Annunciation paintings as well as the landscape of the archetypal garden. In between delicately cut-out illustrations of plants and flowers, sit and...
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And We Dreamt We Were Birds
This is a site-specific work made in response to the location, a former army barracks that housed Singapore’s army recruits. Army beds swing gently in the air, some rising higher than others. Viewers are allowed to sit or lie down on the beds, the gentle swaying motion experienced, alluding to...
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Cocoon: Garden of Waiting Virgins
Against the backdrop of an archetypal garden, the theme of hope is narrated and illuminated through the hauntingly familiar figure of the Virgin Mary, who in her many representations throughout the history of art, represents women from every age and circumstance who wait patiently, joyfully or despairingly for a promise...
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Exercises in Landscape
This series of “exercises” investigate and illuminate the strategies of landscape. It is an attempt to explore and understand the patterns and devices that make landscapes allegorical and powerful. The work uses ballpoint pen to draw on matt film and displayed within a block of clear acrylic. Each drawing is...
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In Xanadu Did Kubla Khan
Inspired by Marco Polo’s account of Kublai Khan’s summer residence, the work uses heavily decorated ceramic teacups and vessels to create a luxuriant garden filled with a menagerie of tiny ceramic animals. Peranakan and antique Chinese porcelain is used to reference not just the nostalgia inspired by fading cultures, but...
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Etymologies (II)
Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s recommendation to see and create pictures in stains and clouds, the two films is made using found photographs underground caves which are then layered and merged into each other so slowly and imperceptibly one can hardly see the changes. Each crevice, nook and overhang becomes...
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Witness
The word “transaction” is defined as “an act, process or instance of transacting” as well as “a communicative action or activity involving two parties of things that reciprocally affect or influence each other”. It is this definition that forms the starting point of exploration in Donna Ong’s installation piece, Witness....
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Sound
Each work begins from a dream – a simple desire, a wish. Based on ficticious characters, everyday objects are removed from their normal contexts and functions in an atttempt to physically realise a unfulfilled childhood fantasy or dream. The desk being a common place from which dreams are first imagined...
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Crystal City
A glass city stretches horizontally into the distance. Clear turrets and towers of glass reach vertically upwards – amber light refracting through their faceted surfaces creating amorphous patterns that shift and change as the lights dim and brighten. The illusion of an extraordinary glass city is created with through the...
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The Memory of a Place (Dissolution)
The work explores the landscape genre as well as the concept of perspective through Eastern and Western painting. Atmospheric Chinese landscapes are given actual physical depth through the physical separation of its pictorial elements, and reformatted into a three-dimensional, western one-point perspective. This move from two-dimensional to three-dimensional goes beyond...
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In the Deep, Not all Who Wander are Lost
Leornardo da Vinci once recommended looking at stains on the walls as a device for arousing the mind and stimulating the imagination. In each stain, lies the seeds for every possible space and form - landscapes emerge and fade away; mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, impossible wide valleys… Here, ten...
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Crystal City
A glass city stretches horizontally into the distance. Clear turrets and towers of glass reach vertically upwards – amber light refracting through their faceted surfaces creating amorphous patterns that shift and change as the lights dim and brighten. The illusion of an extraordinary glass city is created with through the...
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Lost and Found
The work developed in response to its location, a former brothel. situated among a row of other similar establishments in Japan’s Kognaecho area. The police had forcefully evicted its former inhabitants, leaving many of their personal items, domestic objects and furniture behind. These items as well as the marks left...
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Landscape Portraits (In a Beautiful Place Closeby)
Using small humble everyday objects such as nails and thimbles, a vast coral landscape is built up. This is then filmed and projected – the miniature scale erased as the set is transferred from physical landscape to film. Ultimately, this series of works speak of the childhood desire to imitate,...
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Landscape Portraits (In a Beautiful City Closeby)
A glass city stretches horizontally into the distance. Clear turrets and towers of glass reach vertically upwards – amber light refracting through their faceted surfaces creating amorphous patterns that shift and change as the lights dim and brighten. The illusion of an extraordinary glass city is created with through the...
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Landscape Portraits (I-IV)
Landscape Portraits (Rooms I-IV) is a four-room installation constructed in a dilapidated wooden building on Lamma Island, Hong Kong. Each room is a snap shot of the island both in terms of the island in its history as well as focusing on a specific material particular to the island. Together,...
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Dissolution
“Asleep, a Room Awakens” explores the phenomenon of feeling familiar in a strange room, or vice-versa, the sensation of feeling alien in a known environment. Does every room recall or describe another? Are rooms dreamt into being from a shared sea of images, or are they dim reflections of a...
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Asleep A Room Awakens
Each work begins from a dream – a simple desire, a wish. Based on ficticious characters, everyday objects are removed from their normal contexts and functions in an atttempt to physically realise a unfulfilled childhood fantasy or dream. The desk being a common place from which dreams are first imagined...
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The Sixth Day
The title refers to a passage in the bible where Man was created on the sixth day in the story of creation. In this architectural representation of a woman’s psychological space, white delicate furniture is set poignantly against the vastness and rough concrete of an unfinished room. Metaphorically and symbolically,...
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The Meeting
Based on the 1927 Friendship Doll Project, “The Meeting” is a series of two to three minutes long black and white films, where dolls from two different countries (Japan and America) encounter each other within the interior of dollhouses. Each of the fifteen meetings is similarly staged, with two dolls...
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The Caretaker
“The Caretaker” takes its bearings from a little-known chapter in the history of 20th century Japanese-American diplomatic relations. The story begins against the tense background of the Oriental Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1924 to keep East Asian immigrants out of the US. Hoping to foster mutual understanding between...
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In the Secret, In the Quiet Place
“In the Secret, In the Quiet Place” is a series of eight miniature installations placed within the rectangular openings of a standard shelf. Made in response to the artist’s three-month stay in Japan under a residency programme, they reflect the uniquely “Japanese” living conditions– the intensely private, secret interior both...
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Project: Eden
Ironically, though Singapore is known as the garden city – rows of beautiful trees and shrubs line every street In Singapore - 70% of the population live in HDB flats where the space constraints of sky-rise living do not allow for private gardens. However, the desire for a garden does...
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The Great Escape
This site-specific installation recreates the environment and bug-like denizens of a tree’s trunk, through the use of found objects. Antique wooden clocks and their interior working mechanisms are playfully transformed into spiders and homes for butterflies. The interior surfaces of the clock-cases are covered with wallpaper, bringing to mind the...
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Secret, interiors: chrysalis (19)
Secret, interiors: Chrysalis (19-22) is a 4-room installation installed in Singapore’s former Supreme Court. Situated in the chambers of the judges, they explore the secret lives and fantasies of 4 judges – the private self behind the implacable public façade. Grand projects are dreamt up and an attempt to realise...
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Secret, interiors: chrysalis (20)
Secret, interiors: Chrysalis (19-22) is a 4-room installation installed in Singapore’s former Supreme Court. Situated in the chambers of the judges, they explore the secret lives and fantasies of 4 judges – the private self behind the implacable public façade. Grand projects are dreamt up and an attempt to realise...
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-2006.jpg)
Secret, interiors: chrysalis (21)
Secret, interiors: Chrysalis (19-22) is a 4-room installation installed in Singapore’s former Supreme Court. Situated in the chambers of the judges, they explore the secret lives and fantasies of 4 judges – the private self behind the implacable public façade. Grand projects are dreamt up and an attempt to realise...
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-2006.jpg)
Secret, interiors: chrysalis (22)
Secret, interiors: Chrysalis (19-22) is a 4-room installation installed in Singapore’s former Supreme Court. Situated in the chambers of the judges, they explore the secret lives and fantasies of 4 judges – the private self behind the implacable public façade. Grand projects are dreamt up and an attempt to realise...
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In a Beautiful Place Far Away
Dandelions are associated with the idea of the wish, the desire for flight and the dream of escape. “In a Beautiful Place Far Away”, dandelion seeds are carefully and meticulously drawn using technical pen. This precise method of drawing is often used in the fields of architecture and engineering, to...
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Etymologies (I)
Etymologies is a series of images that were made through manipulating and collating hundreds of found images of caves and similar underground sites. The work explores how images are transformed in relation to notions of etymologies and digital processing.
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Secret, Interiors
This black and white film features light streaming through various rectangular openings. The light defines and animates the spaces, describing them as well as giving them atmosphere. As the light wanes and moves, it also describes the openings from which it is entering from, and allows them to move from...
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Project: Waterfall
“Project: Waterfall” was commissioned for a display window situated within a busy underground shopping mall. In order to blend into this unique environment, a conscious effort was made to echo the visual aesthetics of store display –discreet white shelves, clear or white containers and simple metal stands. Yet, despite the...
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Palace of Dreams
The art installation features 2 works – 24 technical drawings of insect wings and a desk that has been transformed into a plane - that explore and communicate the desire to recover a lost childhood dream. Susan Stewart in her book, “On Longing – Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic,...
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The Pause
A small black room made out of discarded office furniture stands in the centre of a large white room. Black wooden tables, shelves and cabinets define the boundaries of the room and create a permeable space that vacillates between sculpture and architecture. The reduced monochromatic palette of the interior gives...
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Pandora’s Menagarie
Inspired by the myth of Pandora, this series of photographs attempt to give a physical representation for the contents of Pandora’s box. The scenes were constructed using creatures specially created for this project.
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Altarpiece
Entering the old chapel, one ascends a narrow staircase into a dimly lit attic. Tucked away in one corner of the room is a strange contraption lit by an eclectic assortment of lamps. The warm glow illuminates and describes dusty glass containers connected by rubber tubes, ornamental stands and large...
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Dr. Auctor
A set of 24 photographic images depicts the domestic laboratory of a female scientist called Dr. Auctor - “auctor” is Latin for the word “creator”. The room is littered with personal items, odd apparatuses, anatomy drawings and bottled specimens that hint at an absent presence and a strange hidden narrative....