The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

125 ARTISTS Top: ROBERT ZHAO RENHUI The Nature Museum 2017 Mixed media installation / Installed dimensions variable / Image courtesy: The artist and ShanghART Gallery Below: DONNA ONG From the tropics with love 2016 Installation with artificial tropical plants, antique or reproduction furniture and ceramic and wooden animal statues / Installed dimensions variable / Image courtesy: The artist and FOST Gallery, Singapore donna ong and robert Zhao renhui Born 1978 and 1983, Singapore Live and work in Singapore My forest is not your garden 2015–18 is a collaborative cabinet of curiosities by Singapore artists Donna Ong and Robert Zhao Renhui. A critical take on attitudes towards the natural world of the tropics, the installation integrates Ong’s evocative arrangements of artificial flora and tropical exotica on antique-style tables — collectively titled From the tropics with love 2016 — with Zhao’s The Nature Museum 2017, an archival display narrating Singapore’s natural history through documentation, both authentic and fabricated. Both artists’ projects stem from research into the ways the tropical forest has been represented, and how these depictions influence human interactions with nature. Since 2008, Zhao has been presenting his work through the creative framework of the Institute of Critical Zoologists, whose mission claims ‘to advance unconventional, even radical, means of understanding human and animal relations’. 1 Under this umbrella, Zhao has produced a series of self-consciously pseudo-scientific investigations of both real and imaginary interactions between humans and animals, taking the form of extensive photographic series, lavish natural history publications, and dense museological installations. While Zhao’s projects involve elaborate narratives, they also provide insights into attitudes towards the natural world and the social histories of particular sites — such as introduced species control on Christmas Island or the legacies of colonialism in Singapore. 2 The Nature Museum is a meticulously organised presentation of objects and images, arrayed across study tables, vitrines and partition boards to illustrate stories whose lighthearted tone belies considerable moral force and troubling questions. Where Zhao’s work originates from a critical admiration of zoology, Donna Ong engages with the ordering principles of botany, landscaping and the representation of flora in European and Chinese art. As a child of urbanised Singapore, Ong was fascinated with the way in which the wild landscapes she finally encountered when travelling as an adult were both similar and dissimilar to the impressions of nature she had gained from books and images. She uses found materials in her sculptures and installations — finely cut-out images from printed matter, readymade objects and furniture, and occasionally live plants — and arranges them according to techniques for reproducing the effect of forests and jungles found in instructional guides to gardening and illustration. For instance, her dioramas layer two-dimensional illustrations of plants and mountains onto transparent sheets to create the illusion of depth. From the tropics with love features lush arrangements of plastic plants whose picturesque qualities reference Singapore’s self-consciously tropical outlook, specifically its selective planting of particular types of vegetation within a landscape of sleek skyscrapers and concrete apartment blocks. My forest is not your garden was created against Singapore’s contradictory background. The city-state rightly celebrates its natural heritage, and actively promotes vegetation in visible locations, such as the verdant rain trees ( Samanea saman ) that line the parkway from the airport, the first sight welcoming tourists and visitors. On the other hand, population growth, urbanisation and industrialisation have seen widespread land reclamation and deforestation, with substantial environmental effects. As artists, Ong and Zhao seek to understand the role that culture plays in this phenomenon — the systems of representation and meaning that enable the two aspects to coexist. These in turn provide inspiration for moments of invention and play, drawing on the enduring wonder of scientific adventure, the narrative richness of anthropological, botanical and zoological fieldwork, and the lavishness with which the jungle is depicted in art and literature. As their emphatic title makes clear, however, Donna Ong and Robert Zhao Renhui also regard these conventions as ‘lenses’, and as cultural constructions that facilitate particular views of the natural world that are as threatening as they are seductive. Reuben Keehan Endnotes 1 ‘Mission’, Institute of Critical Zoologists , 2008, <www.criticalzoologists. org/mission>, viewed July 2018. 2 Robert Zhao Renhui, Christmas Island, Naturally: The Natural History of an Isolated Oceanic Island with Photographs from the Archive of the Institute of Critical Zoologists , Institute of Critical Zoologists, Singapore, 2016.