Hi everyone, I just had an exhibition this year (but unfortunately it was over so you can't go). As the name suggested, it's about the environment, about Singapore, about the place I live on. The series of sculptures were based on four topics, namely 'deforestation', 'destruction', 'extinction' and 'transformation'.
The topic wasn't new and unprecedented. For many years my positions have been stemming from a life-long involvement in nature as a vital force and as a gragual transforming process. This in turn, influences my choice of material and preferred technique of sculpting. Stone has always been my favourate material. The process of chiselling, drilling and hammering allows me to discover a lot more new things beneath the surface of material and provides me with the energy to continue my life as a sculptor.
Ok, back to the original topic. I care a lot about nature and thus I'm worried for it as well, especially when some not so good things are happening right in Singapore. An essay by T.K.Sabapathy (I don't know who he is) has well summarised my feeling:
"Under the government's green policies, Singapore has been reconstructed as a garden city. The messy natural landscape- the rainforest- has been replaced by a man-made landscape... However, the substitution of the natural in recent years has, according to Sai Por and for all of us, led to profound estrangements and severe dislocations."
Hence in my sculptures, I signify these de-natured, divorce consequences of substituting nature with artifice.
For example,
The clearing away of the "messy rainforest" to make way for a beautiful but artificial landscape "garden".
Garden. Just think of this word.
Destruction.
Extinction.
Deforestation.
In the series, I used two types of materials: marble and polished granite.
The pristine white of marble gave the organic forms a sense of delicacy and fragility while the dark and partially reflective surface of polished granite portrayed an artificial and inhumanised urban landscape.
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