Robert Zhao Renhui: Seeing Forest, Volume 1 of 2

Robert Zhao Renhui is an artist from Singapore trained in photography, and the founder of the Institute of Critical Zoologists (ICZ). He is known for his artistic investigations of the representation of Asia’s and Southeast Asia’s nature, history, and culture in the scientific and colonial archive, and his research often focuses on the evolutionary pressure exerted on other-than-human species by urbanization, global transportation, and the built environment. For the Singapore Pavilion, Zhao turns his gaze towards secondary forests and neglected pockets of greenery amid Singapore’s mostly urban environment. His project Seeing Forest is the fruit of several years of careful visitations to a terrain of secondary woodland that has proliferated on the grounds of a former, mid-twentieth century military camp and which is encompassed by high-rise apartment blocks, multi-lane roads, and numerous construction sites in the Singapore district along Alexander Road. Littered with the detritus of previous human use and inhabitation, this patch of ruderal forest also conceals the collective and improbable habitat of myriad wild species of vastly different origins. As the artist learns to be quiet and to attune himself to these creatures’ chrono-diverse rhythms and improvised rituals of survival, urbanization is recalibrated as a relational refuge for heterogeneous trans-territorial, temporally cadenced, and unexpected encounters.