the singapore river as a psychogeographical faultline

THE SHAPE OF THE SINGAPORE RIVER

part of the THE SINGAPORE RIVER AS A PSYCHOGEOGRAPHICAL FAULTLINE
at The Substation from 2-26 september

a series of 20 illustrations of the map of the singapore river, based on collected sketches made by people and what they think the shape of the Singapore River looks like, without making reference to anything else.

The View from Cavenagh Bridge

Yesterday Keshav and Jared kindly helped me shoot a timelapse of the River, which we are going to edit down into a small introductory video for the exhibition. Coincidentally, in trying to find the words to articulate the tone I wanted to go for, I discovered the "Blue Hour". Apparently the French have already thought of a word for it (ah! they think of everything!) - with the expression "l'heure bleue", referring to the blue part of twilight, between darkness and daylight.

I've seen the phrase "Blue Hour" thrown around in photography forums such as like skyscrapercity, but bizarrely, for quite some time I always thought it was some internationally francised club that happened to set up shop at locations with magnificient aerial views of different urban cities. I was led to this mistaken conclusion because of the odd way in which it is sometimes spoken about - as if the Blue Hour is actually a physical space and not a time of day.

"Yeah, I was there at the Blue Hour yesterday, it was really cool."



my "blue hour" moodboard

a. ferris wheel scene, chris yeo's in the house of straw, 2010
b. photo i took at dawn, 2007
c. gaspar noe's enter the void, 2009

Have been preparing a huge canvas map for the last few days. After staring at this monstrosity occupying most of the living room floor for the last few days, this morning all of the Ding family realised that they had dreamt about the huge canvas the night before:

Mother dreamt that she woke up in the morning and saw that I had completed my entire painting in full colour! During the night!

I dreamt that I had subdivided the canvas into 6 parts and had painted for hours, only to discover that I had only finished 3 parts but inexplicably now had 4 more parts to go?

My father dreamt that I had accidentally made a horrifying and gigantic hole in the canvas and he was trying to figure out how to piece and patch canvases back together...

Now you know where I get my grandiose and yet paranoid tendencies from, respectively.