| Green Zeng is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work encompasses visual arts, theatre and film. Zeng's current practice explores concerns related to Singapore's history and national identity. He was a member of the performance art group, Metabolic Theatre Laboratory, and performed with the company in Singapore and Japan. He is currently the Creative Director of Singapore film production company, Mirtillo Films. He has directed many films that have been selected for various international film festivals such as the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. His film, Passenger, was also awarded the Encouragement Prize at the Akira Kurosawa Memorial Short Film Competition in Tokyo 2006. In 2011, he held two solo exhibitions in Singapore, Malayan Exchange, at the Arts House and An Exile Revisits The City at The Substation. He recently was shortlisted as a Finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2011 in Hong Kong.
Exhibition Note:
Sentosa and Pulau Ubin are from of a wider series of work entitled An Exile Revisits the City that presents the return of a fictitious political exile to 21st century Singapore. Expanding on the hidden subtexts of national narratives, Zeng returns once more to the subject of the political exile, an inconvenient reminder of the Internal Security Act, still in effect in Singapore today. Here, he creates a tragic photographic travelogue across various natural and man made sites, relevant to the histories of dissent throughout colonial and postcolonial rule across the Nation State. Inspired by 19th century Romantic landscape painter Casper Friedrich, he employs a more poetic approach than previous bodies of works, through the use of the Rückinfigur, an isolated figure seen from behind in his emotively composed landscapes, that lure viewers into an otherwise sobering and critical prose of Singapore’s political past. These two works depict the now developed island of Sentosa and picturesque view of Pulau Ubin, both previous sites of detention. The elderly exile's presence in these silent and historically significant landscapes, therefore, question the official narratives of the nation and individual longing for community.
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