From Construction to Critique

A Review of Construction in Every Corner

by Jess Lim

Zeno’s paradox posits that it must be impossible for Achilles to catch up to a tortoise, since for every unit of distance he covers to reach its initial position, the tortoise must have advanced an additional further distance. Yet, everyone always asks whether Achilles can catch up to the tortoise, but no one ever asks: “How is Achilles?”. While Achilles can of course, in practice, catch up to the tortoise, what if Achilles were an undergraduate student at NTU completing a four-year programme and the tortoise was a metaphor for a utopia where their university experience was no longer hampered by never-ending construction on campus, fraught with delays, and the associated road diversions, felling of shade-providing trees and distracting noise pollution? In that case, we can probably all relate to how Zeno’s Achilles must feel.

If I think back on the past four years of my undergraduate life, there has never not been some form of construction constantly morphing the landscape of this campus. In fact, every batch of matriculated students probably imagines NTU differently. When I think of the bus stop to get to Pioneer Hall from the Hive, I think of a janky old-school orange-and-white makeshift bus stop at the edge of Yunnan Garden, while a newly matriculated student would think of the bespoke pine wood bus stop at the base of the (fairly) newly constructed Gaia. When I think of getting to NIE from North Spine, I think of a breezy walk atop the pleasantly wide overhead bridge; with this bridge now demolished to create space for the upcoming Nanyang Crescent MRT station, the commute is now a confusing and tedious trek across a narrowed road divided by brutal concrete road blockades.

The exhibition Construction in Every Corner— a title that is humorously blunt and pulls no punches— reflects on this phenomenon that we inhabitants of this campus have been subjected to through three artworks by students of NTU past and present.  Each piece brings unexpected and refreshing perspectives to the conversation and invites us to consider the varied facets of what “construction” may entail.

Marvin Tang, Further Reading

Do virtual snails meander on pixel trees? Further Reading by Marvin Tang— a multimedia installation combining construction hoarding, photography and video—suggests so, with a particularly memorable scaffolding wall in forest green populated by digital snails living in tiny rectangular screens embedded into the wall. These molluscs are hypnotic to look at and elicit the snail's pace at which the construction on campus seems to proceed. The whole set-up is bizarre and unnatural, with the snails being bisected as soon as they crawl past the boundaries of the screen, but this is to be expected. After all, there is nothing natural about the phenomenon Tang draws our attention to: the adorning of temporary construction scaffoldings with the simulacrum of nature that inhabitants of NTU, and perhaps all of Singapore, have become more than familiar with in recent years.

The installation features a pile of green and brown scaffolding panels—usually arranged to form a tree— placed parallel to form a conspicuous square in the centre of the installation; elevated to the level of found object art and visually resembling colour field painting, viewers are asked to consider them as objects of visual culture. In the process, they shed their original role as barricades and now ironically need to be protected by the construct of gallery etiquette, as asserted through the imperative of “Please do not touch” repeated across the black demarcation line on the ground.

Debbie Ding, Wastelands

Wastelands by Debbie Ding can be experienced in two formats— as an elegiac video work where a narrated lyric poem ruminates on lost or unwanted objects within a site for future development, or as an immersive VR game within the same setting where players can wander around a wasteland and pick up and hurl garbage at other players. More than just an unbelievably fun and satisfying mechanic, the gameplay of Wastelands echoes the work’s core theme— what we might once value as treasure, such as an object uncovered with great effort from within the vast wasteland, can just as quickly become trash to be tossed aside without a care.

The peculiarities of the objects that can be found within the wasteland make it clear that this is no mere commentary on the cycle of consumerism, but also the cycles of the systems valued by society. Notable objects included within the plethora of objects are a European-style bust (whose provenance traces to the UK, as the narrator tells us)— a symbol of Western cultural hegemony— and a PhD thesis, perhaps made even more poignant by the fact that the artist is currently completing her PhD in NTU. On a site rich with unknown future potential, Ding asks us to reflect on how what items of the past we choose to discard—or perhaps demolish?— may reveal the values of the zeitgeist.

Sarah Choo Jing & Mathias Choo, A Walk in the Park

Finally, A Walk in the Park by Sarah Choo Jing & Mathias Choo presents a video installation where “construction” is not perceived as an arduous unpleasant process in the lead-up to completion, or even through its final products— rather, attention is drawn to the labour it takes to “construct”, something that may usually be taken for granted, by giving us melancholic glimpses into the aftermath of the “construction” of events. The multichannel video installation invites viewers to experience it in the round, revealing the frameworks and bracings that constitute the hardware of the work; charmingly, even the form of the work resonates with the theme of usually unseen efforts underpinning the videos.

Across all three works in the exhibition, the utilisation of virtual images is compelling in capturing the sense of alienation between the grating present lived experience and the promises of a promised future that may or may not come to fruition. While this exhibition will not expedite any construction works, perhaps the poetic lenses the works lend to construction can make things slightly more bearable.

Exhibition Review: Construction in Every Corner

by Charissa Gurvinder

Within the modern cityscape of Singapore, urban renewal and development are not foreign concepts. While it seems to be an inevitable result in the pursuit of progress, change may not always be welcome; it is exciting, but also disruptive. The NTU Museum’s latest exhibition, Construction in Every Corner, addresses just that. Set up in response to the extensive construction projects scattered across the NTU campus to make way for MRT stations along the new Jurong Regional Line, this exhibition negotiates the physical and emotional facets of navigating spaces in flux.

The exhibition is split into two showcase spaces within the gallery featuring works by NTU-trained artists, Marvin Tang, Debbie Ding, Sarah Choo Jing, and Mathias Choo. Visitors may begin with either room as there is no prescribed order in which the artworks should be viewed. Within the first room we find A Walk in the Park by Sarah Choo Jing and Mathias Choo, and Further Reading by Marvin Tang. The space, while appearing with the visual familiarity of an art gallery, feels oddly unlike one. The overall environment can be described as somewhat of an aestheticised construction site; walls lined with construction material, large scale pictures leaning against the walls, and a scattered set up of video screens. This curatorial choice proves effective in reinforcing the thematic discourse of this exhibition, where this ordered chaos is reminiscent of the interrupted landscapes found in areas undergoing construction.

Further Reading in particular, transforms this space into a creative adaptation of the construction spaces around the campus by incorporating elements such as concrete bricks, metal hoardings as well as structures that resemble wooden scaffolding. These items, while placed alongside photography works, are not simply juxtaposed for effect, but are equally a piece of art in their own form. As the name implies, the recontextualisation of these mundane items in construction sites into active collaborators with art invites visitors to read beyond their surface meaning and value; passive, simple objects like these have infiltrated our landscape to form the aesthetic expressions of change in our city.

While themes of change and transformation are addressed uniformly within the exhibition, how each artwork interrogates facets of change are quite distinct. A Walk in the Park uncovers ‘hidden narratives’ that highlight not just how change affects us but how and through whom it has happened. It highlights the imperativeness in viewing change in our urban environment with cognisance of the people who laboured both physically and emotionally to bring about this change we see. However, there is a clear missing link here: while the investment of labour is acknowledged, there is a lack of specificity in who it comes from. This is significant as it overlooks the opportunity to spotlight blue collar migrant workers; they built our city and the spaces we inhabit, yet remain so invisible and marginalised in our society. By leaving out this point of discussion, the artwork’s attempt to provoke reflection instead reflects a continuing tendency in Singapore’s urban narrative: celebrating progress while sidelining the labouring persons that make it possible. A better engagement with these social realities would not only give more depth to the work, but also award those toiling daily, right outside the doors of this gallery, the recognition they deserve.

The highlight of this exhibition can be found in the second gallery room, where visitors can engage not just as a passive observer, but immerse themselves in the artwork. Debbie Ding’s Wastelands invites visitors to navigate a simulated environment by employing the use of digital elements, such as virtual reality headsets, to explore a virtual wasteland ridden with various artefacts. This experience underscores the navigation of liminality where we experience emptiness of a space as it gives way to future development; existing in the aftermath of what it was with the promise of what it can become.

The exhibitions main strength comes from its lack of binary discussion. Instead of adopting a dichotomous approach, it has been curated in a way that acknowledges how urban redevelopment is an ongoing, inevitable condition, but also seeks to discuss what has been lost and gained in the process of change. Such a perspective is particularly relevant in Singapore, where the development of spaces is a constant and continuous state of our city. Notably, the accompanying texts on the wall should be commended for contextualising the work without being overly didactic, making this discussion of change more accessible to the general audience.

There are areas where the exhibition could benefit from a stronger sense of purpose and further curatorial interventions. As mentioned, the exhibition, and by extension the museum, has potential to engage deeper with social issues that are distinct in discussing construction and redevelopment in Singapore. Going one step further, the museum could offer guided tours and even host discussions with the NTU community beyond the gallery space. This would probe the audience to think critically beyond surface consideration; to assess how they fit into this process of change within their lived environment. In doing so, perhaps the exhibition can adopt a more active role in social discourses and extend their impact to facilitate the conversation around urban redevelopment, not just in NTU, but also in the broader context of Singapore.

Overall, the exhibition did display a laudable attempt in balancing both the emotional and intellectual experience. For some, the works could evoke a sense of loss and nostalgia for places that used to be familiar, but have now been changed beyond what they remember. For others, viewing these works may breed curiosity and excitement for things to come. This exhibition allows for a (re)consideration of the spaces we inhabit and offers a fresh perspective on how we view construction sites. Perhaps there is more to what we see under the scaffolded surfaces and we should all pause to think about our sentiments on living in a city that is being constantly refreshed, redeveloped and rebuilt.

Where is the Labourer?: Invisible Labour in Construction in Every Corner (2025)

by Stephanie Jaina Chia and Yu Ke Dong

Drawing near the National Institute of Education (NIE) building, we are thrown immediately into a hive of construction activity: deafening drilling, jagged edges of green corrugated hoarding carving out new routes on the pedestrian walkway, the shouts of workers perched on scaffolding. It is a blistering afternoon, and as we make our unshaded way toward NIE’s cube-shaped gallery building, we wonder how the labourers toiling away on the construction site are able to survive, much less work, in this heat.

Construction in Every Corner (2025) is an ongoing exhibition organized by the NTU Museum, hosted at NIE’s Art Gallery. The show, as hinted at by its rather catchy name, investigates the type of building most commonly found in Singapore’s cityscape: the one being built. In its catalogue’s introductory paragraph, the exhibition explains that its artists were invited to “reflect on the seeming perpetual nature of construction”, the debate between “City [revewal’s] [...] advocates [and] detractors”, and ultimately question whether the horrors of construction – “noise, dust, detours, and bulky machinery” – are truly a “necessary inconvenience” in the name of development.

The exhibition is small in scale, presenting three works produced by four returning NTU alumni. Unfortunately, it is even smaller in its curatorial scope: for an exhibition about urban construction and all its material effects, its range of mediums is remarkably un-tactile, primarily featuring immaterial mediums such as photography, video, and virtual reality. There are the occasional nods to the physicality of its theme scattered throughout the gallery – the odd sandbag, wooden beam, or green construction hoarding – but these read like afterthoughts, merely rustic decorations beside shiny digital works in high-definition. Moreover, the exhibition indulges in almost exclusively academic, philosophical ideas surrounding perpetual construction, tossing up buzzwords like “ecology”, ”visibility”, “anthropocenic”, “urban psyche”, and “liminal zone”. While there is nothing inherently wrong in grounding the works in art theory, the exhibition’s thematic exploration conspicuously omits construction’s most central figure: the migrant worker.

That being said, the works by themselves are not without merit. In a room by itself, we encounter the ambitious multimedia project ‘Wastelands’ by Debbie Ding, centered around an interactive computer game where visitors can explore a never-ending grass field, sparsely populated with enigmatic relics of a human society long since obliterated. Sorting through soccer balls, nuclear hazard signs and an anonymous Ph.D thesis, we are reminded of a work of a similar title: T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’. In it, Eliot writes: “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water”. In Ding’s post-apocalyptic wasteland, silence lies heavy on the mind, the human body unnervingly absent in a landscape still littered with signs of human civilization. Roaming the lush desert, we reflect on the hubris of mankind, endlessly constructing monuments of progress in an attempt to thwart the entropy of time. Another poem comes to mind, this time by Percy Shelley: “My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings / Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Progressing onto the adjoining room, we discover the exhibition’s two other works: Sarah and Matthias Choo’s ‘A Walk in the Park’, and Marvin Tang’s ‘Further Reading’. The latter consolidates photographs of half-built infrastructure into a library of construction signifiers: concrete towers, fluorescent lights, traffic signs, etc. Placed alongside large-scale digital prints of the forest, the work attempts to expose the state’s habit of literally plastering nature-as-simulacra over its endless construction efforts. Yet, this aspect of Tang’s work merely holds a mirror to a reality most Singaporeans consider to be mundane, matter-of-fact. Nearby, Tang has built a wall made of green construction hoarding material, on which he has embedded tiny screens playing hyper-lapse loops of even tinier construction projects, workers scurrying like ants over toy-like concrete structures. Tang intersperses these screens with recordings of snails crawling, ever-so-slowly, over a seamless surface. The artist juxtaposes two measures of time: frenetic and leisurely, human and animal. However, the message ultimately remains elusive: does he intend to portray human progress as mindlessly swift, or emphasize its short lifespan amidst deep time?

Feeling somewhat puzzled by the previous work, we find ourselves re-energized by the Choo siblings’ video sculpture ‘A Walk in the Park’. Consisting of interconnecting LED screens, the work resembles a miniature cityscape of moving images, each screen depicting intimate moments of solitude captured by the duo at East Coast Park. We watch as lone strangers lounge in public playgrounds or gaze out into the shoreline in a state of silent ennui, documented in a strikingly elegiac style which subtly references the filmic work of Wong Kar Wai. These massive screens, some placed facing upwards on floors and pedestals, others constructed in squat T-shapes or arching U-shapes, evoke familiar shapes of objects found at a construction site, yet inject a deeply human presence into the work. In so doing, the work sheds light on growing urban isolation and alienation experienced by the denizens of a city increasingly marked by aggressive construction and expansion.

Throughout the exhibition, however, the foreign labourer continues to be absent. It is certainly not found in Ding’s post-apocalyptic landscape, and in Tang’s ‘Further Readings’, workers are reduced to ant-like specks, sped up in a frenzied spectacle of human labour. In the Choos’works, the human body is centered; yet, these are bodies at rest, as opposed to the labouring bodies of foreign workers who single-handedly fuel Singapore’s thirst for urban expansion. This omission reflects a missed opportunity to explore a different angle of critical exploration of Singapore’s urbanization, one that allows for artists to expose conspicuous absences in state and social narratives surrounding nation-building, and the myth of the exceptional city-state.

“Noise, dust, detours, and bulky machinery”, the exhibition catalogue states, are the painful conditions we are made to endure for a prettier, more convenient urban experience. Yet Construction in Every Corner fails to consider the people who must work for years in these dust-filled sites, unprotected by noise barriers or our nation’s manpower laws. Rather than revive well-trodden discourse surrounding urban alienation or man-versus-nature binaries, the exhibition would have certainly been more powerful and provocative if it had chosen, from the outset, to examine the implications of removing foreign labour from national narratives.

Exiting the blissful air-conditioned cool of the gallery and re-entering the afternoon blaze, we chance upon a group of four migrant workers gathered in the shade of their truck in the carpark. Sitting cross-legged on the concrete pavement, they eat their lunches out of styrofoam containers. As we approach and begin to cross onto the grass to walk around their gathering, one of the workers stands up to let us through. “No, no, please sit, it’s okay,” we hurry to say, but he has already tapped his colleagues on their backs to alert them and now, they are all standing up, shifting their weary bodies aside to make way for us on the pavement. Mumbling our thanks, we hurry through, the phrase “necessary inconveniences” ringing in our heads as the workers are left behind us, out of sight, in the searing heat.

CONSTRUCTION IN EVERY CORNER: Art in the In-Between

Zine for Construction in Every Corner

by Nurul Kaiyisah

Initially I had penned down my thoughts on the show on loose paper (scraps if you will) when I realised there is also a kind of construction, a kind of worlding in putting them together...

And so, drawing attention to the scaffolding of our exhibition review, I decided to gather and present my jotted notes on the show through the world of zines.

p.s. can art writing exist in zines too?

[Excerpt from Page 2 of Zine]

A Construction People: A Walk in the Park Reflects on Social Constructs