Robert Zhao stages solo show as S'pore marks strongest presence ever

Supposedly extinct Sambar deer loitering around the Bukit Timah Expressway (BKE). A colony of parrots coming home to roost on a particular tree in Choa Chu Kang.

- Clement Yong

Monitor lizards mating and making use of a container left by migrant workers as a watering hole.

These are some of the Passover stories captured by artist Robert Zhao on film over his more than eight years studying secondary forests in Singapore. They are on show at the Singapore Pavilion in Venice, at the "Olympics of art" Venice Biennale, which attracts 500,000 visitors each edition and will officially open to the international public on April 20.

Organised by the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) and commissioned by the National Arts Council (NAC), Zhao's solo exhibition, titled Seeing Forest, is at the Arsenale in Venice, one of two main venues showcasing the best of artistic endeavours from countries around the world at the biennial spectacle.

Broadening the theme Stranieri Ovunque, or Foreigners Everywhere, Zhao, like many of his counterparts, have sought to explore it along the veins of ecology.

His show, which he worked on with SAM curator Haeju Kim, is mainly sited in a dark space created from tinted windows and opaque partitions.

It comprises three works: a twochannel, 46-minute video installation telling 10 segmented stories of how the urban blends into the natural in Singapore; a lattice structure embedded with screens and found glass objects; and a digital print of a buffy fish owl. This is a species of owl in Singapore that has found a way to exist by feasting on catfish in drains, rather than survive in its usual pristine environments.