A tribute to the Substation by Tan Ngiap Heng and Lim Chin Huat

I have been wanting to work with Lim Chin Huat for a while and the opportunity arose when Alan Oei invited us to create an installation in the box office of The Substation for The Rubble Series. I remembered Alan mentioning that the bricks in The Substation was made in Singapore out of Singaporean soil. Chin Huat and I took this as our starting point, using ‘soil’ as a metaphor for The Substation being the fertile ground upon which many Singaporean artists grew up.

We gamely stepped out of comfort zones and worked on a plant and video installation for Soil. The video was based on the Chinese story 《夸⽗父追⽇日》(kua-fu-zhui-ri) where a giant chasing the sun collapses and his body becomes a mountain upon which a forest grows.

Soil

Sound design: Chong Li-Chuan
Technical installation: Xiang Bin
Pixel Mapping: Yuspri Sapari
Plant advisor and supplier: Fireflies Organic Farm
Projector Sponsor: BenQ