SEASTATE 6: Phase 1
2014 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
15:06 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:
Other related works, blended automatically
» see more
© » KADIST
Charles Lim
2014In 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...
Related works sharing similar palette
» see more
© » KADIST
Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis
2022Five Hundred Twenty-Four, a single-channel video installation by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, features singers from over twenty Cleveland-area choirs counting numbers in an iterative process: one person sings “one”, then two people sing “two”, and so forth, to 524...
© » THEARTNEWSPER
Italy donates replica of Bull of Nimrud destroyed by Isis to Iraq Art market Museums & heritage Exhibitions Books Podcasts Columns Technology Adventures with Van Gogh Search Search Heritage news Italy donates replica of Bull of Nimrud destroyed by Isis to Iraq The 3D-printed reproduction of the Assyrian statue was previously displayed at the Colosseum in Rome and the Unesco headquarters in Paris James Imam 9 February 2024 Share The replica of the Bull of Nimrud at the Colosseum © Museo Archaeologico del Colosseo Italy has donated a reconstructed Assyrian statue to Iraq in what has been described as a “miracle of Italian cultural diplomacy”...
© » THEARTNEWSPER
The Big Review: Caspar David Friedrich at the Hamburger Kunsthalle ★★★★★ Art market Museums & heritage Exhibitions Books Podcasts Columns Technology Adventures with Van Gogh Search Search Exhibitions review The Big Review: Caspar David Friedrich at the Hamburger Kunsthalle ★★★★★ This curatorial triumph highlights the measured artificiality of the German Romantic artist who made work that still mesmerises J...
Other works by: » Charles Lim
» see more
© » KADIST
Charles Lim
2014In 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...
Related artist(s) to: Charles Lim » Jia Zhangke, » Lawrence Weiner, » Pak Sheung Chuen, » Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, » Sopheap Pich, » Teppei Kaneuji, » William Kentridge
» see more
© » 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...
© » KADIST
Pak Sheung Chuen
2017The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement...
© » KADIST
Pak Sheung Chuen
2008Pak created New York Public Library Projects (NYPLP) (2008) during a residency in New York, using public libraries as exhibition spaces and the books they house as raw materials...
Related works found in the same semantic group
» see more
© » KADIST
Ranu Mukherjee
2011Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining....
© » KADIST
Mateo Lopez
2012With Roca Carbón (Charcoal Rock, 2012) and Roca Grafito ( Graphite Rock , 2012), López plays with our relationship to inert and unremarkable objects such as rocks...
© » MODERN MET ART
Epic Performance Animates JR's Paris Opera Façade Home / Art / Installation Epic Performance Animates JR’s Paris Opera Façade By Jessica Stewart on December 1, 2023 Photo courtesy of Palais Garnier In September, when JR transformed the façade of the Paris Opera House into a Platonic cave, it was only the first sign of what was to come...