SINGAPORE — Trust a piece of art to give you a bout of existential crisis.

I’m referring to Singaporean artist Jeremy Sharma’s Terra Sensa-Lovell, which is currently on display at the Singapore Art Museum.

Initially, looking at it gave me a sense of quiet melancholy — four high-density polystyrene foam boards on which “mountains” and “valleys” are carved, casting grey-toned dark shadows playing across the terrain of white-washed walls.

Yes, I felt peace washing over me and I tried to relax and not think about anything else.

But typical anxious me, I just had to think about *something*. So for the next half hour — existential crisis.

According to Sharma, who had apparently obtained radiographs of dying stars, Terra Sensa-Lovwell is the three-dimensional form of a dying star’s electromagnetic pulse.

Now aware that I was literally looking at a stellar last gasp, it suddenly hit me.

Everything is so much bigger than me. I felt so small in front of those four boards. My lifespan isn’t even going to be a tiny sliver of moment in that dying star’s death! I mean, we live an average of 80 years. These celestial bodies take millions of years just to die.

In those four foam boards, I saw a glimpse of space that I will probably never get to see in my lifetime. I saw how old our universe is, and how much it has seen while we’ve been fighting petty wars and complaining about traffic.

Mankind has always been fascinated with the possibility of extra-terrestrial life and the idea of outer space exploration. I myself have always loved the idea of outer space. It enchants me, because there’s so much we don’t know about it.

As Captain Jim Kirk from the television series Star Trek says, the mission of the starship Enterprise is to “explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no one has gone before”. In Terra Sensa-Lovell, I saw the exact same message being broadcasted. NICOLE ONG XIN TONG, SINGAPORE POLYTECHNIC

The Singapore Biennale runs until Feb 16, 2014. For more details, visit http://www.singaporebiennale.org For more updates on the Young Art Writers Programme, visit #artlanders (http://tdy.sg/artlanders) or For Art’s Sake (http://tdy.sg/artssakeblog)

This article was written under the Singapore Biennale 2013’s Young Art Writers Programme in collaboration with TODAY.