In Past Show

Singapore Biennale 2013: If the World Changed at Singapore Art Museum (SAM)

Erica Lai’s enigmatic, environmentally themed color photographs question spatial ownership, regulation, and security. “I’ve always been interested in special territories and power play,” she says. Produced within the context of her native Singapore and its cultural obsession with land, Lai’s photographs perform transgressive acts by metaphorically reclaiming control of certain spaces. Quiet in their darkness and force, her photographs take inspiration from romantic art and its focus on humankind’s struggle with nature, as in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich.