SEA STATE 6: Capsize
2014 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
8:02 minutes
Charles Lim
In SEA STATE 6 Charles Lim takes the viewer down the Jurong Rock Caverns in Singapore, a massive underground infrastructure for oil and fuel storage, built to support the commercial operations of oil traders, petrochemical ventures and manufacturing industries in the area. The first of its kind in Southeast Asia. Located at a depth of 130 meters beneath the Banyan Basin on Jurong Island, the Caverns provide infrastructural support to the petrochemical industry that operates on Singapore’s Jurong Island, a cluster of islets reclaimed into one major island and connected to the mainland in the 1980s. When it opened in 2014, Phase 1 of the caverns were holding some 1.47 million cubic meters of oil storage tanks. This is about the size of 600 Olympic swimming pools. The volume of undersea rocks excavated from Phase 1 equals 1.8 million cubic metres, enough to fill 1,400 Olympic swimming pools. In the opening scenes, we see the artist sailing, his boat ultimately capsizing, leading us to discover the Jurong Rock Caverns. Viewers are guided down a still-empty cavern, where there is ongoing construction and workers toil away to the comforting melody of a Malay song and the sailing boat appears as the metaphor of a possible escape.
Charles Lim Yi Yong’s work encompasses film, installation, sound, recorded conversations, text, drawing, and photography. Over the last thirteen years, he has developed a body of work entitled SEA STATE that explores the political, biophysical and psychic contours of the city-state of Singapore, largely through the visible and invisible lenses of the sea. SEA STATE premiered at the Singapore Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and has since been shown at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, where he developed the work over a nine-month residency. Lim’s multimedia project takes the sea as its focal point. Here, the sea is treated as a mapped resource, an abstract commodity, and an entity through which strategic nation-building, as well as economical and political pursuits, are built. A former Olympic sailor, Lim’s lifelong engagement with the sea reveals the invisible politics of Singapore’s relationship with the ocean as a political entity, a commodity and an imaginary boundary. The project’s early stages studied Singapore’s coastal ecology and the effects of industrial activities, while recent iterations examine Singapore’s expansion through land reclamation and the ongoing quest to make the finite, infinite.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » ARTS EQUATOR
A Malaysian under lockdown reviews Singapore Art Week 2021 | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints January 27, 2021 By Ellen Lee (2,500 words, 9-minute read) Looking through the 35-page programme booklet for the 9th edition of Singapore Art Week (SAW), I was fully struck by my Malaysian-ness...
:quality(70):focal(3635x2915:3645x2925)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/thenational/74ZGLA3OLJGYFOAOTPFRYRWT6Q.jpg)
© » KADIST
Didem Pekün
2018The black-and-white projection, Araf by Didem Pekün, begins, as a lithe man stands high up in the middle of the grand, rebuilt 16th-century Ottoman bridge in Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina...
© » KADIST
Sabelo Mlangeni
2019The Royal House of Allure is a name of a safe house on mainland Lagos where members of the queer community in need of boarding, due to various circumstances, live together...
© » KADIST
Minouk Lim
2012The Possibility of the Half by Minouk Lim is a two-channel video projection that begins with a mirror image of a weeping woman kneeling on the ground...
© » KADIST
Mario Garcia Torres
2004Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
© » KADIST
Yael Bartana
2006Yael Bartana’s video work A Declaration was shot in southern Tel Aviv, on the visible border between that city and Jaffa...
© » KADIST
Sabelo Mlangeni
2019The Royal House of Allure is a name of a safe house on mainland Lagos where members of the queer community in need of boarding, due to various circumstances, live together...
© » MODERN MET PHOTOGRAPHY
Photographer Endures Icy Temps to Photograph Arctic Animals Home / Photography / Wildlife Photography Photographer Endures Icy Temperatures to Photograph Beautiful Arctic Animals By Jessica Stewart on February 7, 2024 Photographer Konsta Punkka was just a teenager when he transformed his passion into a full-time career...
© » SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
Private Chinese art museum makes a comeback, 2 years after sponsor’s pull-out left it on life support | South China Morning Post Advertisement Advertisement Art + FOLLOW Get more with my NEWS A personalised news feed of stories that matter to you Learn more A preview of the auction for Guangdong Times Museum in January, held to raise funds for its relaunch...
© » KADIST
Teppei Kaneuji
2014In his White Discharge series (2002 to today), arguably his best known works, Kaneuji assembles old toys and plastic scarps into dramatic mounded heaps and covers the surface with white plastic resin, drawing on allusions to landfills, commodity fetishism, and creative repurposing...
