Project Categories: Print

As a series, It won’t be long attends to room interiors as sites of suspended time. Each one is a scene; emptied of people yet still carrying residues of their presence: a turned bed, drawn curtains, some quiet evidence of a thing that has just happened or waiting to occur. Windows function as apertures; or thresholds between interiority and the world beyond, where what is near and what is distant are held briefly in the same frame. The photographs do not quite record arrival or departure, but the interval between; a moment of stillness, assurance, and anticipation.

An ongoing series of photo‑and‑text prints centred on landscapes captured by Seah Sze Yunn. Across sea, sky, fog, and treeline, the images linger on open, often indeterminate terrains that feel less like destinations than waystations. Handwritten texts by Regina De Rozario suggest a parallel voice, tracing memories of intimacies and estrangements without ever fully anchoring what is seen and felt. Each work stages a careful arrangement of spacings, placements, and silences that negotiate between what is shown and spoken, and what is distilled and restrained. While these landscapes may appear as stable, grounded vantage points from which a sense of ‘here’ and ‘there’ can be clearly discerned, yet they also operate as expanded, in‑between fields where relational histories and futures can be continuously imagined and revised. As a series, the works invite viewers to contemplate their own interior arrangements — to notice how notions of distance and proximity are negotiated within, and how other ways of being together might be tentatively assembled.

This print is an Hors Commerce edition of Still Building, a text work developed for the National Gallery Singapore’s National Day Light Up and projected onto the Gallery’s Padang Atrium Canopy between 24 July and 30 August 2020.

Still Building speaks to the ideals of the National Pledge, to the site (of the Padang, and of the former Supreme Court and City Hall which now houses the National Gallery) and to National Day itself. Its ‘prismatic’ form reminds us that the ongoing work towards justice and equality needs to include diverse voices and perspectives.

The work responds to Bumi Hangus (1987), a painting in the National Collection by artist Wong Hoy Cheong who in turn was inspired by W.S Rendra’s poem of the same title. We see the painting and the poem it references as a meditation on loss and sacrifice amidst the search for justice and belonging. Our work adapts Wong’s prismatic palette to reflect the facets and complexities of building a democratic society.

— Artist statement of Still Building (2020)

This work examines the notion of a pause – its nature, purpose and effect. Here, text and image relay a sense of rest as well as anticipation; a moment between ‘nothing is happening’ and ‘anything can’.

This set of photo and text prints examines the various distances and proximities we experience and navigate — from the physical, to metaphysical, to the emotional. Entwined in this sense-making is our reading of time, and how we perceive, and are shaped by its flow.