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
Drinks at 6pm, talk at 7pm What is the mirror effect between landscape and technology, and how do different perspectives and approaches affect our mental images of landscapes? On the occasion of the collaborative exhibition Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible? at YBCA, co-curators Betti-Sue Hertz, Ruijun Shen, and Xiaoyu Weng invite some of the artists in the exhibition to reflect on their individual relationships with and conceptions of landscape....
© » KADIST
Pascual Sisto
2013All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace takes its title from a 1967 poem by American writer Richard Brautigan, which describes a utopian future where computers are in harmony with and protective of mankind and nature, performing all the necessary work while we retreat back towards nature...
© » 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...
© » ART & OBJECT
The Art of Snow and Ice: Depictions Throughout Art History | Art & Object Skip to main content Subscribe to our free e-letter! Webform Your Email Address Role Art Collector/Enthusiast Artist Art World Professional Academic Country USA Afghanistan Albania Algeria American Samoa Andorra Angola Anguilla Antarctica Antigua & Barbuda Argentina Armenia Aruba Ascension Island Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bermuda Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia & Herzegovina Botswana Bouvet Island Brazil British Indian Ocean Territory British Virgin Islands Brunei Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada Canary Islands Cape Verde Caribbean Netherlands Cayman Islands Central African Republic Ceuta & Melilla Chad Chile China Christmas Island Clipperton Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands Colombia Comoros Congo - Brazzaville Congo - Kinshasa Cook Islands Costa Rica Croatia Cuba Curaçao Cyprus Czechia Côte d’Ivoire Denmark Diego Garcia Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia Falkland Islands Faroe Islands Fiji Finland France French Guiana French Polynesia French Southern Territories Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Gibraltar Greece Greenland Grenada Guadeloupe Guam Guatemala Guernsey Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Heard & McDonald Islands Honduras Hong Kong SAR China Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Isle of Man Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jersey Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Kosovo Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macao SAR China Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania Mauritius Mayotte Mexico Micronesia Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Montserrat Morocco Mozambique Myanmar (Burma) Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands Netherlands Antilles New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria Niue Norfolk Island Northern Mariana Islands North Korea North Macedonia Norway Oman Outlying Oceania Pakistan Palau Palestinian Territories Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Pitcairn Islands Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Romania Russia Rwanda Réunion Samoa San Marino Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Sint Maarten Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Georgia & South Sandwich Islands South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka St...
© » KADIST
Bruno Serralongue
2008The half-length portrait of Joe Shirley presents a man with a great presence, wearing several items that point to ancestral Native American culture...
© » 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...
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22496659/ss_856dc0a7fdf8bffb04cff24a3c9176e628879ff5.jpg)
© » LE MONDE
Sarah Brahim remonte ses souvenirs dans un maelström de gestes et de sons Cet article vous est offert Pour lire gratuitement cet article réservé aux abonnés, connectez-vous Se connecter Vous n'êtes pas inscrit sur Le Monde ? Inscrivez-vous gratuitement Article réservé aux abonnés Vue d’ensemble de « Sometimes We Are Eternal », exposition de Sarah Brahim, à Lugano (Suisse), en octobre 2023...
© » KADIST
Mario Garcia Torres
2004Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
© » KADIST
Elina Brotherus
A subject’s back stands before a landscape of mountains, arid and majestic, Der Wanderer 3 revisits the theme of man versus nature dear to Romantic painting and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich in particular...
© » 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...