Artist takes on the natural world

The relationship between humanity and the natural world is reflected through artwork during “Land & Water”, which is running at Warin Lab Contemporary, until July 29,.

This is a solo exhibition by Singaporean artist and environmentalist Zen Teh whose art practice is shaped by her proficiency in photography and painting, alongside her continual interdisciplinary investigation into urbanisation and the impact of human interaction with the natural landscape.

For this show, she took the title from a Chinese term for landscape — shan shui, literally mountain and water. The term is also the name of a genre of traditional Chinese painting, depicting vistas of mountains and rivers.

Over the course of her artistic career, Teh has been researching various tracts of land, including forests and mountains, as well as bodies of water, studying the deleterious effects of encroaching development and human activity.

Land & Water” is a proposed two-part presentation of her practice. The “Land” part presents two bodies of work that address our consciousness of and about the landscapes that exist at the peripheries of our built environment — their layers of history, as well as the narratives and emotions attached to these places. One of the two is a series of photographic sculptures created in response to the state of the land in Chiang Rai.

The “Water” comprises a re-presentation of Mirror Of Water, a site-specific installation commissioned by the Esplanade Singapore in 2019. It captures the effects of pollution in a prismatic body of water and documents the effects of this pollution on the wider ecosystem.

Warin Lab Contemporary is located at OP Garden, Charoen Krung 36, and opens Tuesday to Saturday from 10.30am to 7.30pm.

Visit warinlab.com or call 083-095-2028.