Pulau Sebakau by Green Zeng

8 - 17 December 2023 

Mon -Fri, 11am to 7pm Sat - Sun, 11am to 8pm

PULAU SEBAKAU continues Green Zeng’s exploration into the topics of identity, history, absence and displacement through a postcard installation. 

The exhibition features an imagined narrative about a character called PB who was exiled to Pulau Sebakau, a fictitious southern island of Singapore. The 1960s-1970s saw rapid depopulation in the offshore islands of Singapore due to the socio-economic needs of the new and developing nation. Mirroring that, Sebakau would also succumb to the relentless march of progress and its inhabitants would be resettled to the mainland. While living on the island, PB encounters the indigenous communities who live along the coast and make their living traditionally by fishing. Reflecting on the island’s landscape and the lives of its friendly inhabitants, PB would share these insights with his wife in a series of postcards. By so doing, he offers a moving portrait of a place and people who are facing the prospect of leaving their island home and the uncertainty of resettlement.

Using old photographs from the personal collection of Teo Yen Teck, an islander from Pulau Seking (which no longer exists), Zeng allows these real images of a lost island to speak for themselves, while PB’s narrative runs on the other side of the postcard. Through this work, Zeng seeks to explore Foucault’s notion that “fictions are experiments in truth” and how fiction upholds 'truth' in that it allows us to imagine an “alternative interpretation of the present”.

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