Robert Zhao’s metaphorical trek through the jungle began in 2017, when he started researching secondary forests (forests that regenerate largely naturally after being significantly disturbed by human activity or natural phenomena) during his artist residency at the Nanyang Technological University Centre for Contemporary Art. His focus then was a small wooded area in the Gillman Barracks compound. There, he set up camera traps to capture footage of the endemic wildlife, but soon discovered lingering hints of human impact, such as an abandoned tent that once sheltered a migrant worker, broken bricks and bottles from villages that used to exist at the site, and traces left behind by British military personnel housed nearby before the last of them withdrew from Singapore in 1971. “I found that human and natural histories were extremely complex and layered there—it felt like an inexhaustible universe unto itself that kept revealing more the more I explored it,” he says.
That seven‑year‑long fascination with and study of Singapore’s secondary forests have resulted in presentations such as the multidisciplinary exhibition Monuments in the Forest (2023) and the performance installation Albizia (2023), and will culminate in the exhibition Seeing Forest, Zhao’s immersive interdisciplinary installation at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (Biennale Arte 2024), which will run from 20 April to 24 November this year, after which it will be staged as a homecoming exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark in January 2025. “My long walk in the forest will come to fruition”, Zhao wrote on Instagram last July when he was announced as part of the artistic team for the Singapore Pavilion at Biennale Arte 2024, alongside Haeju Kim, senior curator at the Singapore Art Museum.
Built upon and curated from Zhao’s research and camera trap footage collected over the years, Seeing Forest bears resonance with “Foreigners Everywhere”, the theme for this edition of the international art exhibition, which is curated by Adriano Pedrosa, the artistic director of Brazil’s Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. While the expression might, at first glance, appear intended to provoke or criticise, Zhao approaches it with an attitude of intellectual curiosity and objectivity. “In secondary forests, alien and native species have found a natural balance amidst competition for survival. This fact is neither good nor bad—it just is,” he says. “I find it more fruitful to observe accurately what’s happening than to pass judgement on it.”
To Kim, the theme could even point to optimism. Referencing an exhibition she previously organised based on the cultural experiences of migrants and their use of language, with the aim of observing through art the rise of a third language when people who speak different tongues combine different forms and meanings, the artistic director of the 2022 Busan Biennale and former deputy director of the Art Sonje Center in Seoul shares: “Not only were the results formally beautiful, but they also revealed complex emotions that can be difficult to express using extant linguistic structures. For me, this movement and collision of cultures and languages is like water, a lubricant that dissolves rigid ideas and institutions, and makes the world around us flexible and soft. Foreigners are everywhere, and flowing everywhere. I trust that the main exhibition in Venice will provide a positive take on the beauty and power these populations create.”
For years, Zhao has seen secondary forests as deserving of study and protection for their intrinsic qualities, as the amorphous, dynamic boundary between wild green areas and developed urban sectors. “Secondary forests exist at the margins of our city; they’re sort of unwanted and unseen, and strong and precarious at the same time. They’re not primary forests, ecologically valued by conservationists for their ‘virgin’ and untouched qualities; neither are they manicured green spaces built for civic enjoyment and recreation,” he says. “They’re the last frontiers of untamed and undisciplined wilderness—they
spring up over abandoned land without any external intervention—that are simply allowed to be, until the next development comes along and they have to be cleared. To me, the secondary forest is a place of radical hospitality that allows hierarchies and categorical distinctions of native [versus] invasive, local [versus] foreign, and nature [versus] culture to dissolve, and which allows for a more organic equilibrium between different forces to emerge.”
I found that human and natural histories were extremely complex and layered there—it felt like an inexhaustible universe unto itself that kept revealing more the more I explored it. —Robert Zhao
Ultimately, both Zhao and Kim consider the relationship between nature and human society to be one of mutual influence and concurrency. “Ecological thinking, as I understand it, is about seeing the relationship between humans and nature as one of ongoing coexistence, rather than nature simply being something for humans to protect,” Kim says. “To me, this symmetrical phase transition—which forms the heart of ecological thinking—is a lens that can be applied not only to the relationship between humans and nature, but also to the root causes of the various inequalities that underlie so many conflicts in human societies.”
Zhao, meanwhile, is invested in the philosophy of “wild ethics”, which posits that humans do not stand apart from the animals, plants and elemental forces on Earth, and that there is no real distinction between nature and culture. “When we recognise that we’re part of these systems, and that other beings are subjects like us, we learn to live with respect and humility,” he says. “Another important part of ‘wild ethics’ is learning to respond to the world not through intellectual concepts but through our senses and the body. I hope my presentation in Venice invokes the sense of community with myriad beings, inspires a sense of wonder and mystery, and taps into the knowledge of bodily sensations and feelings.”
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