An ode to Singapore’s disappearing forests

SINGAPORE — For most of us living in Singapore, the shrinking natural wilderness in the face of construction and physical development is par for the course; in fact, it is a common state of affairs that anyone living in a hyper-urban 
city today would face.

But for one Singaporean artist-photographer, it offered an impetus to capture the country’s fast-disappearing forests in a series of abstract black and white photographs.

Chua Chye Teck, 43, who has been a conceptual photographer for more than 15 years now, paid frequent visits to the secondary forests of MacRitchie Reservoir Park, Lower and Upper Peirce Reservoir Parks and Bukit Timah Nature Reserve between 2014 to 2015. He also explored the trails from Dairy Farm Nature Park to Mandai, the Punggol area, and the areas on the reclaimed part of Coney Island where Casuarina trees and Liana vines grow wild, and got a chance to visit the former Bidadari cemetery before it was developed into 
public housing.

It was on those visits that the Fine Arts graduate from LaSalle College of the Arts got his inspiration, adding that he was intrigued by the disorderliness wrought by nature — as well as the various animals he encountered, such as monkeys and pangolins — during his survey of the forestry.

“I revisited routes through our forests regularly, and through the process of observing what is unfamiliar to me, I noticed the messiness and chaos of lines — interlocking branches, twigs, liana. It is through intuition that I noticed the potential of our natural wilderness,” he said.

He started taking photographs of the forests in earnest, and his work, which took around a year to put together, can now be seen in his new publication, Beyond Wilderness, which launched yesterday (Jan 19) 
at Objectifs.

“I don’t see myself documenting a forest of Singapore or capturing nature. I see abstraction in these images, and I am more interested in the emotion provoked by the expressive and poetic lines that are formed naturally in our landscape. I use these patterns in nature to express my frustration, sadness and need for choice, and the spaces that we lost when Singapore developed from a rural kampung island to an urbanised city state,” Chua told TODAY, adding that the book was also inspired by an artist residency in Berlin in 2010 and Daido Moriyama’s street photography.

Beyond Wilderness, which is Chua’s first publication and published by Epigram Books, is no ordinary book, either — it is a continuous accordion of 40 abstract black and white photographs, with one hidden image at the end.

Chua said his photographs, which resemble charcoal drawings of the natural wilderness rather than actual snapshots, were created through a lengthy procedure. “I used an analogue camera to capture my images and processed the images myself; one roll is processed at a time and scanned later. I overexposed my image slightly and underdeveloped them later in order to obtain a graphic effect that recalls impressions of charcoal or 
pencil drawings.”

Looking at these black and white photographs of the endless foliage associated with dense forests, one is hard pressed to find what is different, what sets each photo apart. For Chua, it was the opposite. He was more concerned with making the images “possess some similarity for the sake of continuity and flow through the experience of the series”, almost as if you are wandering through the 
forests yourself.

It is for this reason he decided to use black and white images for this project. “Black and white photography allows me to focus on structures, lines, light and shadow, and to present an almost abstract vision of reality,” 
he said.

“I see our secondary forests as something natural and free, they have a quality of beauty that reminds me of abstract expressionism, such as the paintings by Jackson Pollock, and Chinese cursive calligraphy.”

Beyond Wilderness (S$52) is available online at http://shop.epigrambooks.sg.