Published by The Institute of Critical Zoologists

Singapore is often known as a Garden City, but this is an impersonal image of anonymous trees and gardeners. This project aims to boil this generic image down to specifics by exploring the concrete, personal connections that Singaporeans have made with trees. After all, what is loving nature without loving the individual plant?

Through interviews, the artist found that people relate to plants in touching and occasionally surprising ways. For example, a group of Buddhists have been circling a rubber tree for an hour a day, for the past few years, as a form of walking meditation and to absorb the tree’s “energy”. A mangosteen tree has been sheltering a man for 20 years, since he saved it from the bulldozers. Another woman cries when her trees don’t fruit.

Besides featuring in individual stories, trees are living, breathing markers of history. The trees in this collection are of different ages. Some are old native species from pre-colonial times, when Singapore was mostly a freshwater swamp forest; others are younger trees that their owners planted from seeds.

The images on show are influenced by vintage hand-tinted Singapore postcards. In fact, Singapore, very old tree is named after the title of one of the oldest postcards in the National Archive, a 1904 picture of an unspecified tree.

113 x 175 x 39 mm
contains book (stories), folded poster (large print), 30 postcards (photographs), fold-out leaflet (additional information on other trees of interest)
ISBN 9789811449468
English
Designed by gideon-jamie
2020