Mark Chua & Lam Li Shuen

Photos: Jeremi Khong, Joe Nair (National Gallery Singapore), Loh Shen Bo

We Are Toast (2025)

Presented at National Gallery Singapore as part of Painting With Light Festival 2025

We Are Toast is an expanded cinema performance utilising multiple 16mm film projectors to create a live film. The performance was staged with 16mm film loops – hand-processed with coffee and pandan leaves – featuring vignettes of kaya toast: its ingredients, gestures and rituals.

Deconstructing the image of kaya toast, the performance considers its stereotypical association as the “quintessential Singaporean breakfast” in an existential unpacking of the Singaporean psyche and identity. The repetitions of the film loops construct an obsession with an idealised picture of society and self, as it is both layered and dissolved, broken and reformed through audiovisual interventions. Within the performativity of light and cinemachinery, something is revealed underneath the surface of our everyday rituals. 

Live interventions like burns, knife scratches and modifications with organic and botanical materials such as kaya, pandan leaves, bread and eggs, were used on three 16mm projectors. The film loops were prepared in various experimental processes: broken down by moldy kaya, soaked in coconut milk and pandan paste, and some printed through DIY transfers – an invitation to chaos and chance over time. This was accompanied by an electronic high-BPM soundscape with the projector’s modified motor sending speed-to-note signals to a virtual synthesizer rack. 

The performance closed with the audience spreading kaya over the body of one of the performers, followed by a physical sandwiching of the two artists in underwear; with the performed films, a block of butter, and the slathered kaya between them.

Through light and texture conjured live, We Are Toast draws out what might lie within the image of kaya toast – the traces of a society and its appetites, discontents and memories.

攝影：陳又維，身體氣象館提供

Year Wax: Hear No Bullshit 《耳屎：廢話聽不見》(2024)

Presented at Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre 牯嶺街小劇場 as part of EX!T 14 Experimental Media Art Festival (Taipei, Taiwan)

Plumbing the depths of our ear canals, what innermost biological instincts might be excavated? Ear wax is secreted, discharged, a cycle of build-up and response, modulated by our inner perceptions and external conditions. Against the noise of ideological constructions, mass advertising and war-mongering, natural secretions protect our ear canals by forming a resistive barrier to bullshit.

Year Wax: Hear No Bullshit is an expanded cinema performance that explores the materiality of ear wax – collected by the artists over a few months as well as extracted live – through the analog moving image. Utilizing a hand-built portable analog projector, 16mm film loops are modified live with earwax, alongside improvised sound and movement.

The performance builds up to a moment of freedom of the performing body, from the constraints of the screen and the space; a response of filling, flowing, pushing out of the canal.

A tactile image-making that continues the artists’ exploration of personal drives and biological impulses through expanded cinema.

Three Views of the Lotus (2024)

Presented at the ArtScience Museum (Singapore)

An expanded cinema, audio-visual performance, presented as a companion piece to our sound installation, A Lotus Turns To Light, at the ArtScience Museum Oculus.

The performance is a reflection on the cycles of the lotus, light and time. In the composition of A Lotus Turns To Light, the sounds of three film loops played on a 16mm film projector were used as the basis of the three main motifs. In this performance, the three film loops are performed and recontextualized live with modified 16mm film projectors and lenticular interventions, alongside a minimalist and textural soundscape. A moment where sound is seen and image is heard in the echoes of each other, finding expression in the improvisational, ethereal and tactile.

The three film loops, created by printing directly onto 16mm film leader, images of lotus pods, lotus seeds and the Oculus space of the museum, are projected on a mix of hand built and modified 16mm film projectors.

The images are modified live with material from the lotus plant, such as fibres from the stem, and dye extracted from lotus petals. The three film loops are also swapped between the three projectors with varying motors and speeds, with each loop playing at different speeds and ‘cycles’ at different points of the show.

The soundscape is created by sampling the projector sounds, where the images printed on the film loop’s optical soundtrack are read as sound. This is accompanied by live music centred around the 3 musical motifs from A Lotus Turns To Light.

Participatory Expanded Cinema Performance – Playing and Becoming (2024)

Presented at the Esplanade Rehearsal Studio (Singapore) as part of Esplanade Contemporary Performing Arts Research Residency)

Presented under the Esplanade Contemporary Performing Arts Research Residency, Playing and Becoming is a performance-talk centred around participatory modes of expanded cinema performances. Devised as an experience of collective live film creation, the event engages audiences to contribute personal images printed on-site and incorporated into physical film loops. The film loops are projected on handmade projectors constructed during the residency period, inviting the audience to participate in live modifications and interventions on the projections, as well as sonic improvisation.

The event is an exploration of collective action and knowledge circulation, that fosters the potential of multiplicities through image and sound creation.

Bloody Hougang Guys (2024)

Presented at a void deck in Hougang

Expanded Cinema & Music Performance – The Yam is Alive (2024) | THE UNENDING ISLAND

Presented at LASALLE College of the Arts (Singapore) as part of Majelis Perayaan Intermission

A expanded cinema and music performance that presents a speculative fiction of Temasek (early Singapore) island 1000 years ago. As part of the performance, DIY 16mm film strips created using inkjet printing are projected and painted over live using yam starch, on a modified 16mm projector. Projected images of natural flora in Singapore evoke hazy reimaginings of old Temasek.

Expanded Cinema Performance – Taro, Taro (2023) | THE UNENDING ISLAND

Presented at Oldham Theatre as part of SOURCE presented by The Observatory and Asian Film Archive (Singapore)

A site-specific expanded cinema performance exploring the materiality of the taro root with modified 16mm projections, together with prepared and improvisational sound. Borne from sound and image as a singular action, it is a live experimental film experience.

Using taro root harvested at Oldham Theater and the National Archives, the taro skin, starch and flesh are adhered and used to stain the 16mm film loops live during the performance. Image-transferred prints of taro flesh textures are also incorporated on one of the film loops.

The images are paired with an improvisational soundscape, utilizing the projector’s reading of the taro components and prints on the film’s optical soundtrack. Thinking in this way, of the image-making device as itself a part of the sonic instrumentation – a soundscape formed around their interweaving rhythm.

The performance is inspired by the historical and spiritual traces of the taro as an ancient crop in early Southeast Asian history. A thinking on its connections to maritime Southeast Asia, the borderlessness of the region, the islands and rivers, as well as migratory and agricultural flow. In bringing forth intimately textural impressions of the taro, the performance seeks to cast our eyes to buried layers beneath our soil. A physical reanimation of the clashing and converging lines of flow, in place, identity and history.

Part of THE UNENDING ISLAND project