Public Installation · Concept Development · Material Production · Collaborative Art Direction
In 1963, Lee Kuan Yew planted the first tree in what would become one of the most ambitious urban greening programmes in the world. Fifty years later, Singapore is a city where expressways disappear into canopy and biodiversity has been reintroduced into the fabric of the urban environment. The Art of Greening was commissioned to mark that anniversary — not as monument, but as experience.
The installation was developed in collaboration with fellow artists under the guidance of senior artist Steven Lim, and installed at Scotts Square, Orchard Road, in association with Wheelock Properties. It brought public art into one of Singapore's most commercially dense corridors.
The installation was developed in collaboration with fellow artists under the guidance of senior artist Steven Lim, and installed at Scotts Square, Orchard Road, in association with Wheelock Properties. It brought public art into one of Singapore's most commercially dense corridors.
The work is built from 8,000 hand-painted bamboo sticks and paper origami — each one made by hand, each one part of a larger field that together evokes the richness and variety of Singapore's urban biodiversity. The choice of bamboo is deliberate: it is fast-growing, renewable, and deeply embedded in the material culture of the region. The choice to hand-paint each element is equally deliberate. At the scale of the whole, the installation reads as lush and abundant. At the scale of a single stick, it reads as careful — as something a person made, one at a time.
That relationship between the individual gesture and the collective effect is the work's central proposition: that a landscape, like a nation, is built from accumulated small acts.
That relationship between the individual gesture and the collective effect is the work's central proposition: that a landscape, like a nation, is built from accumulated small acts.
Installed in a shopping mall atrium — a space defined by transaction and transit — the work introduced a different register entirely. Visitors moved through it, stopped inside it, looked up. The density of the vertical elements created enclosure without walls: a grove in a glass building, colour and material where there is usually only surface.
Project: The Art of Greening • Commissioned by: Wheelock Properties • Installed at: Scotts Square, Orchard Road, Singapore
Collaborating artists with guidance from Steven Lim • Scope: Public Art Installation
Collaborating artists with guidance from Steven Lim • Scope: Public Art Installation
