Commissioned by the National Arts Council and organised by the Singapore Art Museum, the presentation at the Singapore Pavilion stems from years of research accumulated from many forest excursions and hours of observation—even from the windows of the artist’s apartment. “Seeing” is the medium and methodology behind the work, which features an assemblage of video works and sculpture installations, along with a cabinet of curiosities of artefacts.

“For Seeing Forest, I’ll be looking at secondary forests as spaces that are not inert, as spaces that have an agency of their own. While doing the work, I started to think about how I can give secondary forests a voice. So we are talking about the vitality of the space from the perspective of the forest itself,” says Zhao, whose recent immersive performance installation Albizia, a commission by the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, offered the point of view of the Albizia trees and their relationship with the surroundings.

Zhao has presented various expressions of his research on secondary forests, most recently The Forest Institute (2022), a large-scale architectural art installation at Gillman Barracks, and Untimely Meditations (2022), a body of work on alternative ways to look at history and nature through artefacts of the past and present. In his larger body of work, there are explorations on the relationship between human and nature, including A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World (2013), which looks at human interventions and their effect on the natural world. The artist also works under the name of the Institute of Critical Zoologists.

“As an artist, you have to be aware of what it means to be in nature, in all its forms. And then being an artist, you try to see how you can offer another perspective on nature, for audiences to think about it [in a way] that science hasn’t already done,” he says.

Growing up, Zhao has always been enamoured with nature. His house in Boon Lay overlooked the Tengah Forest. “For many years, it was left untouched. I used to go there when I was in primary school, but never dared to venture in. There is a strange attraction I have to forests, to natural spaces which I cannot quite understand,” he says. “In Singapore, we see greenery everywhere. While there are secondary forests around the world, Singapore is unique in the sense that it is a small island and yet there are places of nature existing extremely close to places of urbanity.”

At the centre of the presentation are two thermal video installations featuring secondary forests in Singapore, and the journey of two mysterious human characters. Working with two actors, and with a script by playwright Joel Tan, Zhao brings a new dimension to his art. “[In Seeing Forest], a lot of my images are pickup images from the forest, so I wanted to introduce a human element with the story of two people walking through the forest. You’re not really sure what they are doing because most of the time, they’re just picking up conversations as they move along. It’s shot on a thermal camera, so they’re all just energies, like any other energy going through the forest.”

Even though Zhao is fully immersed in the topic of secondary forests, it does not mean that he is comfortable going into the field. “I actually hate going in[to the forest]. It’s not a walk in the park or meant to be enjoyable. It takes a lot of toll on my mental space. It’s very, very tiring, and kind of dangerous too because there are a lot of snakes. The scariest part is when trees fall on you after the rain,” he shares. “So I do it just once a month; I will spend about three to four hours collecting data, or five to six hours if I’m filming.”

Through the work, Zhao hopes that visitors “realise that it can be very rewarding to slow down”. He explains, “A lot of the things that we see [in the work] are happening very slowly, not in the kind of time and space that we are used to. In the forest, everything unfolds itself really, really slowly. So I guess there’s a reward in paying attention to the things around [us], and that stories emerge from things that are seemingly banal and boring.”

And true enough, the excitement is palpable when we finally spot a large flock of parrots flying across the skies and coming to roost in the trees that evening in Choa Chu Kang. This is nature’s way of making its presence felt in our very own urban jungle—and that there is room for coexistence.

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