zelin seah - 2019 - Kunst im Park

Kunst im Park- Habitat

2019 | Outdoor Sculpture Project | Cammin Castle, Germany l Container Series | Rattan | 400cm(H)
Kunst im Park — An permanent outdoor sculpture exhibition co-operate by 9 German and 1 Malaysian artist at Gutshaus Cammin, Germany.Other exhibiting artists: Silke Bartsch / Georg Brinkies / Emily Collard / Veronika Radulovic / Jakob Roepke / Susanne Schirdewahn / Daniel Hartlaub / Andreas Wolf

Habitat (2019)

Returning to Cammin in 2019, Seah participated in Kunst im Park, an outdoor sculpture project bringing together artists working within the landscape surrounding the historic estate.

For Habitat, he brought rattan from Malaysia and suspended it between trees using a structure held together through binding and tension, without nails or adhesives. The long, flexible strands descended into an open circular formation, creating a sculpture that appeared to float within the surrounding landscape.

Rather than imposing a solid form upon the site, Seah allowed the material's flexibility and the spaces between its strands to shape the work. Visitors could look through the sculpture towards the trees and landscape beyond, approach it, touch the rattan and experience its physical properties. The work remained visually permeable, becoming part of the environment rather than an object separated from it.

Rattan is often associated with furniture, basketry and familiar domestic objects across Southeast Asia. Yet its material history extends beyond these conventional uses. Harvested from tropical forests, rattan is connected to Indigenous knowledge, skilled labour and forest-based livelihoods. Its collection and trade also raise questions about access to natural resources and the relationships between economic activity and ecological conservation.

By introducing this material into a German landscape, Seah questioned how something originating elsewhere might establish a relationship with its new surroundings. Rather than presenting rattan as a symbol of tropical identity or traditional craftsmanship, Habitat invited visitors to encounter it as a living material history expressed through flexibility, tension and touch.

Across the two projects, Cammin became a place for considering different forms of belonging. The residency explored how people recognise meaning in the traces and patterns of an unfamiliar environment, while Habitat examined how a material from another geography might enter a landscape without obscuring what was already there. Both projects ask how an encounter with something unfamiliar might change the way we understand a place.

Keywords: #SiteSpecific #MaterialCulture #Habitat #PatternsAndChance #MaterialMigration #Rattan #Ecology #Belonging

The making of "Habitat".

Residenz Cammin

2018 | AIR Exhibition | Cammin Castle, Germany

Residenz Cammin (2018)

During a residency at Cammin Castle, a historic manor house in Germany, Seah became interested in its attic, a large but seldom-visited space used primarily for storage. Unlike the more carefully maintained rooms below, the attic retained traces of the building's past, including marks and inscriptions left on its structural elements.

On one wooden pillar, he discovered a date that coincided with the day and month of his exhibition opening, though separated by many years. The coincidence prompted him to consider the relationship between chance, time and the patterns through which people attempt to make sense of their surroundings. Was the encounter simply accidental, or did its significance emerge from the act of noticing it?

His investigations extended towards mathematical patterns and the apparent irregularities of natural systems. Influenced by Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, Seah became interested in the relationship between repetition, order and unpredictability. One reference was the periodical cicada, whose emergence follows cycles of 13 or 17 years — both prime numbers. These unusual intervals have been studied in relation to evolutionary strategies that reduce synchronisation with other biological cycles.

Using reclaimed paving stones found around the property, Seah arranged a composition based on prime numbers on the ground. The intervention brought an abstract mathematical structure into contact with the physical history of the site, where traces of human construction, natural processes and personal encounters overlapped.

Rather than suggesting that coincidences reveal a predetermined order, the residency explored how patterns acquire meaning through observation. The attic, the inscribed date and the arrangement of stones became different ways of questioning the boundary between what is discovered and what is imagined.

Belongings II l 2018

Magic Cicadas l 2018

一方净土 A Piece of Purity l 2018

Belongings l 2018

GEB l 2018

Bis dahin

2018 l Site-specific InstallationFound Objects on Site
Dimension Variable
Attic of Cammin Castle, Germany