Before and After the Unknown (2025)
Multimedia exhibition, Fort Canning Park – Lewin Terrace (Singapore), Singapore Art Week
Multi-channel video (digital and 16mm), sculpture, interactive video game
Before and After the Unknown is multimedia exhibition by Mark Chua and Lam Li Shuen, set within a speculative fiction universe of Temasek island in the 11th-century Srivijaya period.
Our existence is an island in time, always before and after the unknown. What selves might we find, in the performance of a fictive past?
Past, present and future collide in a fantasy of materialities and histories. Between expanded cinema, a video game and sculptural fictions, the exhibition presents pieces of a deconstructed myth, centred around an elusive figure born from a yam.
The yam – which often actually refers to the taro in the local context – takes on various layers of significance across time. From an ancient root vegetable consumed in the region since millennia ago, to a symbol of wartime sustenance, the yam is an existential point of departure into a multilayered historical reimagination.
The works draw from the lost fragments of the land’s early history – thinking of their traces in both the bodily and the botanical. People, objects and images recur in different forms and materialities, suggesting multiple reconstructions, simulations and subversions of the same fragments.
For the artists, the past is always intertwined with our present state of being. Not just the recorded past, but its traces and figments in the realm of fiction – that bear essences of being, whose flashes we can glimpse and dream with, across past, present and future.
Perhaps by drawing from these traces, we might find ourselves in a state of being suspended free, as if before and after the unknown at once.
EXHIBITED WORKS
Inhabitants
2025, 3-channel video projection with sound
12:40
Various tableaus depict the lives of the inhabitants of the isolated island, as they scavenge, fantasize and perform dances of remembrance of the long-dead animals of the island. Ever present in their lives is the spectre of the yam-born man.
Although the forms of the animals of the island are largely forgotten, a longing for an unknown history lingers in the body.
Considering the performance of our identities or the identities latent within performativities, the works play between the lines of the histories present in our bodies as well as the fictions being conjured.
Yam Over Body
2025, spackled extruded foam, yam paste, single-channel video (digitised 16mm film), 3D-printed models
2:42
A large, deconstructed yam sits meditatively amidst our bodies. An impersonal presence that is central to the way of the island. It has taken root in their hearts. But what longings and laments hide in the realities, between what is under and above the ground?
The moving image work, shot on 16mm black-and-white film, depicts a man cleansing himself in the way. Rubbing raw yam on his body brings a burning itch that is at once unbearable and relieving – something revelatory.
The yam sculpture was created from a process of 3D-scanning an actual yam. In a reference to the 48-metre height of Bukit Larangan (Fort Canning Hill), 48 enlarged foam sections of the model were cut, assembled and painted with fresh yam paste. The process parallels the reconstruction of a fragmented history that is at once physical and imaginary, real and synthetic.
A Yam as I Am
2025, two-channel silent video, handmade film loops
The images of a mangrove coast in Pulau Ubin, an island off the coast of Singapore, pan from left to right. This same image sequence was handmade into two physical film loops, utilising inkjet printing and 16mm projections in two different ways. In one loop, the frames were printed into adhesive strips and were applied by hand to clear 16mm leader. The film, with its horizontal linearity of the panning, was hand-painted with yam starch, and modified with lenticular interventions during projection on a 16mm film projector.
In the other loop, the frames were printed directly on transparency paper and cut into 16mm strips. Due to variations in the cutting process, irregularities occurred within the projector mechanism. The film had to be partially hand pulled through the projector, causing the frames to skip intermittently and creating a vertical motion of the changing frames. This vertical motion reflects similar directionality of the manual interventions on the other loop.
A view between a mangrove coast, a yam, the 16mm film gauge and repetition: the contrasting motions in the two loops veer between similarity and difference, familiarity and unfamiliarity. The work thinks on the human experience of time and history, as mediated through perspective, intervention and the construction of time.
The two handmade film loops are displayed alongside the video projections.
Keladi Figments
2025, single-channel digital interactive video game
In 5 minutes, a giant statue will uproot and fall. You are a visitor who has arrived through a tear in the fabric of time. Three people on the island have much to tell if you will listen. Between the sands of truth and fiction, whose reality will you come to know, standing before the unknown?
The video game was created through a process of incorporating 3D scans of real-life actors and hand-crafted props into a virtual island drawing inspiration from Pulau Ubin. 16mm and digital moving images, together with music composed by the artists, are interwoven into the audiovisual textures of the world.
In the five-minute loop of time, players are free to explore and find three characters, learning about their side of the narrative while the statue falls. Multiple playthroughs will allow the unravelling of all the characters’ different tales.
On this island of conflicting narratives and shapeshifting realities, there is never a single interpretation. Playing on the materialities of the real and the simulated, the work reflects on the existential relationship between reality, fantasy and myth, its traversal across past, present and future.
Garments, headwear, accessories, artifacts, as seen in the moving images and interactive game work
Before and After the Unknown was held at Lewin Terrace at Fort Canning Park, a historical hill in Singapore with traces back to the land’s earliest recorded history.
CREDITS
Concept and Direction
Mark Chua
Lam Li Shuen
Producer and Project Manager
Wendy Lie
Exhibition Design and Build
Quek See Yee
Game Design, 3D Scanning and Modelling
Mark Chua
Lam Li Shuen
Game Programmer
Chen Chin Jieh
Moving Images – Actors
Ruby Jayaseelan
Hasyimah Harith (P7:1SMA)
Norhaizad Adam (P7:1SMA)
Lim Chin Huat
Yazid Jalil
Sanat Mehta
Game – Actors
Rizman Putra
Ruby Jayaseelan
Warren Sin
Costume Design
Irfan Kasban
Qalisha Fariq
Moving Images – Makeup and Special Effects
The Artists Inc.:
June Goh
Yvonne Yeo
Leonard Cai
Kelvin Wong
Moving Images – Set and Production Design
Quek See Yee
Jean Ferry
Moving Images – Analog Film Works
Mark Chua
Lam Li Shuen
Moving Images – Cinematography
Lincoln Yeo
Moving Images – Camera Assistant
Clyde Kam
Moving Images – Gaffer
Dan Song
Moving Images – Production Sound Mixer
Cheng Lijie
Chia Jenn Hui
Moving Images – Behind the Scenes Photography
Tanish Kadam
Moving Images – Production Manager
Warren Sin
Sound, Music, Editing
Mark Chua
Lam Li Shuen
Translations
Ridfan Abdul Hamid
Moving Images – Location Fixers
Ah Kiang (Pulau Ubin)
Mr. Soh (Bukit Brown)
Construction
CKW Products
Install Assistance
Lynette Quek
Irfan Kasban
Gabriel Goh
Seet Yun Teng
Deepag Charan
Zheng Hao
Part Of
Singapore Art Week 2025
Supported By
National Arts Council Singapore
NParks
Technology Partner
Dreamcore
Mark Chua & Lam Li Shuen 