Mixed media installation with marine timber, solar-reflective canvas, lightboxes, one-way mirrors, fluorescent lights, dichroic film, sound and moving image
Commissioned by Singapore Art Museum as a public art installation from 2022 - 2024
Wayang Spaceship reimagines the traditional traveling Chinese opera stage — known as "wayang" in the Singaporean/Malaysian vernacular — as a futurist vessel suspended between past and future. Built in collaboration with the last master stage builder in Singapore just before his retirement, with his inherited knowledge of constructing such structures, the work combines marine timbers from Southeast Asia with solar-reflective canvases drawn from agricultural and aerospace industries. In place of traditional hand-painted opera panels, lightboxes made with one-way mirrors, fluorescent lights, and dichroic film create an infinity effect in the vivid, complementary color spectrum associated with Chinese opera design.
By day, the structure mirrors its surroundings at the busy container seaport behind the Singapore Art Museum.
At dusk, it reactivates as a traveling theater, animated by light, sound, and moving image evoking a Chinese opera from another dimension.
The moving image component splices archival Cantonese opera film from the 1950s–60s — featuring the iconic actor and male impersonator Yam Kim Fai across historic, mythological, male and female roles — with footage from Eastern Bloc science-fiction films of the same era, projected through layered dichroic film to produce a hologram-like effect.
The Wayang Spaceship becomes a portal of communication from a time-traveling, gender-bending scholar-warrior, a hybrid Cantonese opera archetype who moves freely between geographies and identities of past, present, and future.
Conceived with mobility and live activation in mind, the installation was first activated at the Singapore Art Museum’s backyard next to the container port in January 2023 with local video, sound, and voice artists, before relocating to the city centre outside the historic Victoria Theatre for several months.