EMERGENCIES
2025
(15:00, short film)
A Singaporean man mixes up two memories: one of a colonial-era propaganda film about communist insurgencies in rubber plantations, and another of his Malaysian ex-playmate.
‘Emergencies’ dwells in the memories of multiple entities - those of European planters, Southeast Asian coolies, communist terrorists, suspects of being communist terrorists, modern day rubber fetishists, the land transformed for agricultural purposes, and the Western studio films made there - tuning into the tensions that emerge from their ambiguous and sometimes contradictory interactions.
Similarly, the title echoes a plurality of crises, be it personal or collective, momentary or sustained. Spectres of the Malayan Emergency loom large in period cinema’s imaginary and in collectively inherited traumas. Land transformation for rubber cultivation irrevocably altered landscapes and river systems, leading to unruly floods that devastated local communities. Rubberists in the region grapple with the feverish desires and anxieties of ‘stealthing’. Violence is diffused and entangled through rubber’s far-stretching relations with human lives and societies. The film traces the scar tissue of the resultant wounds with an off-centre sense of humour, confronting the absurdity of individual complicity under an extractionist political economy.
Created for Rubber Dreams of Its Lifetime, supported by Kone Foundation.
Field Interviews
2025 - (ongoing)
(5 - 9 mins, single-channel videos)
An ongoing series of auto-fictional interviews with rubber fetishists discussing how their personal lives and interests have been inflected by the uncanny allure of rubber. Through their hybridised positionality, the fetishism of rubber is connected to broader themes, such as historical materialism, the Malayan Emergency, martial arts physiology, sympathetic magic, synthetic biology, and the enigmatic nature of the laticifer cell.
The interviewees (so far) include:
BP102; an October evening in the 2040s; Hanoi, Vietnam
M. Shah; February 2025; Tengah Plantation District, Singapore
Stella Cheng; July 2025; Quartier Asiatique Paris, France;
p’Pun; December 2024; Chanthaburi, Thailand
A moving image output of Rubber Dreams of Its Lifetime, supported by the Kone Foundation.
‘These Laticifers Keep Bleeding…’
(a trailer)
2025
(56:41, 3-channel video)
‘Laticifers…’ functions as a trailer to the wider Rubber Dreams of Its Lifetime project.
In it, four interviews with rubberists from the SEA region discuss the multifarious impacts their obsession with rubber has had upon their professional and personal lives; while phantasmagorical scenes from the unfinished film Heveaphilia provide a visual backdrop that extends or counterpoints their narrations. These segments coalesce with haunted excerpts of Southern Thai myths, revolutionary struggles, familial memories & global warfare from In the Land of Lady White Blood. By entangling these fragments from the two projects, ‘Laticifers…’ creates new linkages and resonances that continually expand on each other.
The exhibition at Jim Thompson Art Center includes a 3-piece bamboo structure inspired by traditional latex-drying contraptions, and two glass tables showcasing a diverse array of printed research.
A collaborative work with Komtouch Napattaloong and Kaisa Saarinen, made specially for Ghost2568: Wish We Were Here.
Curated by Amal Khalaf.
Score composed by Kamal Sabran.
Supported by Kone Foundation.
Somerset House CUTE commission
2024
(approx 1:30, single-channel videos)
A series of five short videos responding to the five curated thematics of cuteness - Play Together, Sugar-Coated Pill, Monstrous Other, Hypersonic and Cry Baby.
A shapeshifting dancer performs within the frame of a mobile phone, whilst inundated by pop-ups of cute-inspired popular culture that correspond with the theme of each cluster. Her performance and entanglement with these digital materials mirror the supercharged self-narrativising and hyperkinetic intensity of internet cute culture. This series of videos were installed alongside curated cultural artefacts.
CUTE was staged in Somerset House in 2024 and the Rotterdam Kunsthal in 2025.
It is curated by Claire Catterall and William Seung.
Performer: Chiara Martina Halter
HMU: Martina Derosa
DoP: Kate Siu
Styling: Xintong Qin
Set Assistant: Timothy Martin
人在江湖 (out in the world)
2022
(9:57, single-channel video)
Composited over found footage of patrons eating out at Chinese restaurants, a latex-clad figure spins in tandem with the lazy susans commonly found, and used as an object of entertainment, in Chinese restaurants. The exaggerated, cartoonish and sometimes flirtatious performances that this stock-image body brings out of its audiences, blur the line between derision and affection, othering and intimacy. In the second half of the film, a rupture occurs and with it, a chance for transformation beyond binaries.
music composed by Teddie Fitzpatrick
HMU by Martina Derosa
Prayer for a Lonely Ornament
2021
(2:30, single-channel video)
The second half of ‘out in the world’ was first presented to the world as a finalist of the inaugural Circa x Dazed prize. It was screened on the Piccadilly Lights (London), Yunika Vision (Tokyo) and COEX K-POP Square (Seoul).
A History of Rubber Commodities
2023
(5:20, single-channel video)
A brief account of rubber commodities available in the modern age.
The Very Thought of You
2022
(10:20, short film)
Set 10,000 years after the myth of Chang-E’s ascension onto the Moon, ‘The Very Thought of You’ centers around the hallucinatory experience of a Moon refugee who was broken out of his cryo-vacuum stasis by reasons unknown. In his helpless and delirious state, the man began wondering if he was really hearing the voice message of an ex-lover who he had to abandon in a bid for personal survival. The boundaries between freedom and restriction, past and present, individualism and collectivism, will blur and may even dissolve, in this dusky corner of the Moon.
Commissioned by Tour de Moon and UNBOXED.
44 Minutes, compressed into a lifetime
2021 (mixed presentations)
The goodest best boy Luigi as the most adorbz cat-maid(?)boy enduring the iconic thirst trap choreography of our times for 44 very cute, but sometimes torturous, minutes 🥺🐱