This installation comprises 6,425 honey sticks—the significance of the number lying in the fact that there were 6,425 registered births in 1941, the year that the artist’s parents were born. With each birth and the beginning of new life is the attendant notion of the passage of time, and death, although these unpleasant and uncomfortable realities are seldom contemplated or acknowledged. 

Project: Honey Sticks (6,425) extends artist Ye Shufang’s use of ready-mades and her interest in the ephemeral through the use of perishable materials. Visitors are invited to take and consume the honey sticks from the dispenser, experiencing the viscosity and the intensity of flavour on their tongue. With visitor participation over time, the level of honey sticks will gradually fall and the vibrant colour of the work slowly drains away, until all that is left is an empty container, standing solitarily like an epitaph.

Mella Jaarsma is best known for her costume installations which use materials such as animal skins, horns and clothing—items charged with metaphoric potencies of race, identity, human nature, sexuality beliefs, politics and origins. 

In her work Shaggy, Mella Jaarsma takes on hair as a symbol of womanhood, and all its attendant associations with eroticism, gender stereotypes and identity. The inspiration for this piece came from the artist's observation that during a certain period, impressionable young girls in rural Java went to the hair salon requesting the same style of haircut called the 'shaggy', which was considered trendy at that time. This piece originated as the artist's commentary on how contemporary obsession with image and conformity with fashion 'trends' results in a loss of individuality and a dehumanising same-ness. Concurrently, the work also makes a powerful statement about certain cultures' obsession with hair (and by extension, the universal vanity of women and their anxiety to preserve their beauty), transforming something conventionally 'feminine' and alluring into monstrous proportions.

Commissioned for the Singapore Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, The Cloud of Unknowing enfolds artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s wide-ranging interests which include art, art history, historiography and philosophy. This video installation takes as its central subject, the cloud, and explores its symbolic and aesthetic representation across cultures, history and geography. Comprising elaborate and evocative tableaus that refer back to canonical artworks, The Cloud of Unknowing condenses the artist’s multiple, eclectic sources of research and reference. Shot within a block of public housing in Singapore, the narrative revolves around eight characters and their encounters with a cloud or cloudlike figure. The Cloud of Unknowing portrays the characters in a moment of revelation, and their experiences reference a medieval text of the same name—a meditative contemplation upon the divine, where the cloud paradoxically represents both the moment of uncertainty and connection with divinity.