Alliance Française de Singapour presents Vestiges by Zen Teh. A year after having won the 6th France + Singapore Photographic Arts Awards (FSPAA), the artist returns to Alliance Française for a new solo exhibition.
The exhibition features two bodies of work, Garden State Palimpsest and The Imperative Landscape. Zen Teh’s photographic images represent a constant effort to trace and achieve a state of wilderness that the urban-dwelling artist has never experienced before.
A multi-disciplinary collaboration with the architectural researcher Nicole Teh, Garden State Palimpsest explores Singapore’s constantly changing landscape and its residents’ relationship with the land. The artist carried out interviews with previous kampong dwellers that became a starting point to reconstruct memories as images. Concurrently, the artist researched and analysed Singapore’s land use policies throughout the years to project a possible future environment. These imaginings of nature in their various modes of presentation – as sculptural photographic images, maps, videos and narratives – are complex layers of encounters that probe at ideals, nostalgia and desires with regards to our lived environments.
The Imperative Landscape series features images of forests at the edge of urban development in Chiang Rai, Thailand. The source photographs are manipulated and collaged into landscapes of ever-lush verdure, to be starkly delineated into three geometric silhouettes. Over-aestheticized but seemingly of natural environments, each composition is a visual feast that provides moments of escape.
At the heart of the exhibition, Zen Teh’s photographic images represent a constant effort to trace and achieve a state of wilderness that the urban-dwelling artist has never experienced before. In her work, nature is viewed and captured from behind the lens, imposing a distance that enables the act of observing and imagining – the construct of an innate primordial landscape.
Opening: Wednesday, 6th September at 7pm
Venue: LA GALERIE, Alliance Française de Singapour, 1 Sarkies Road, Level 2, Singapore 258130
Hours:
Tuesday: 1pm – 8pm
Wednesday to Friday: 1pm – 7.30pm
Saturday: 9.30am – 5.30pm
When: 7 Sep - 7 Oct 2017,
By: Alliance française de Singapour
