FURIOUS FIRES, 2020-ongoing

“Furious Fires” is an exhalation to release these pent up, locked up energies through visuals and sounds. These moving images presents a collection of ten 30 second looping animations, reacting to the tensions of contemporary pandemic living, juxtaposing bodily sounds such as coughing, sneezing, laughing, breathing, with natural phenomenon animated and photographed. The project started with “Furious Fires no.1” presented for National Arts Council Streets of Hope programme. “Furious Fires no. 1 & 2” were presented at the 2020 Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento (Buenos Aires Bienal of the Moving Image) in Argentina. “Furious Fires no.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7” were presented at the Thailand Biennale Korat 2021 Butterflies Frolicking on the Mud: Engendering Sensible Capital, at the Rajamangala University of Technology Isan Mueang Nakhon Ratchasima District in Thailand.

I gaze beyond my window of Covid-19 lockdown, at the luscious greens of Singapore’s highest hill, Bukit Timah Hill. A tropical storm had swept through tall tree crowns; lingering mists hover between their foliage. I am as caged in glass and concrete—away from a pandemic, away from a storm—as this primary rainforest is fenced in its self-preservation away from progress. It is protected from me. Humidity sinks in my lungs, as I swim through an equatorial sauna going about my sheltered day. 

Colonial and economic progress in the last century has chip away at native land, leaving less than 0.28% of total land area for primary forests. My ancestors are foreigners shored up by the optimism of trade and living; my grandfather chopped trees to build his village at the foot of Bukit Timah Hill. There was a time my family lived with the rainforest, its animals, its richness, its fertility. Now, I only see the rainforest during opening hours. I choke at the thought, embarrassed; hoping no one hears me coughing under my pandemic mask. The person next to me flinches and inches away. Nothing is said. Air conditioning hums. 

There is a fury in my lungs, a fire in the forest that fuels no words.

I have lost the ability to describe my relationship with nature, and this city child reacts uncomfortably, violently, and afraid. It sees and hears itself twitch, suspicious of every step taken in a cosmopolitan nation state, where every action transgresses nature’s growth, because the structure of modern living infringes on the grass that creeps along our feet.