impasse to verbal, 2018 aluminum dibond prints, zoning maps, shanzhai t-shirt, cellphone car holders, blue light








A visual assemblage merging wall notices, official zoning maps, personal routes, and various extracts sampled from the urban landscape, "impasse to verbal" evokes the ‘semiotic thickness’ of Geylang, its diffuseentanglements of bodies and surfaces, behaviors and networks. As an area located on the east-side of Singapore, where informal mesh networks, covert and vice activities, shifting urban plans, building laws, and datamining protocols are increasingly intertwined, the site serves as an informational ecosystem counterpoint to Singapore's state-led Smart Nation digitalisation program, where technological is approached in anoptimistic, utilitarian and depoliticized manner.Through the installation's intricate interplay of stratifications and transparencies, it creates an imploded visual environment where information is simultaneously displayed and withdrawn, revealed and cloaked. Materialsfrom the streets, such as workers insulation gloves, mingle with maps and snapshots of forms of display that are opaque as they are revealing. Steeped in a pervasive blue glow reminiscent of the light of electronicdevices, the signs are left to float and clash into leaky configurations that shatter conventional patterns of readability.The work emerges out of engagement with the neighborhood where soft/WALL/studs, the artist run project I co-founded, is located. Interested in excess and resistance to capture, the site demonstrated aninformational ecosystem that exerted itself as a felt disposition, while remaining somewhat opaque and beyond description. This gap between what things declare themselves as and is actually operating beneath that --the play between description and disposition, to follow some of architectural theorist Keller Easterling’s terms, is where an impasse with latent revolutionary potential lies.The title “impasse to verbal” was taken from a 2017 text I had written for a previous project, Horizon99, in which I considered alternative, unrecognized signals as forming a diffuse, other-world, and where acts ofrelating, receiving, and relaying these signals differently creates a kind of “lo-fi sci-fi”. It follows Lauren Berlant’s exhortation of “living within an impasse”, elaborated on in her book Cruel Optimism (Duke UniversityPress, 2011), which is to come out the other way by existing absorbingly within the time and space of a breakdown, where the scripts for life have gone awry.
Commissioned for the Vitrine by the NTU Center for Contemporary Art, Singapore