Skin of Land (2020- 2022)

In Chinese, the term 地皮 (di pi), literally translated as “skin of land”, is commonly used to describe a piece of land in terms of its commercial value. A site becomes something to be measured, owned, traded and developed. Extending this expression beyond its everyday usage, Seah imagines the land as the skin of an animal, stripped from its body and preserved as a trophy after being hunted.

The series began during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Seah's longstanding fascination with maps developed into a closer examination of how land is represented, classified and administered. Collecting historical and official maps, he became increasingly attentive to their elaborate systems of contour lines, boundaries, symbols and colours. Forests, plantations, settlements, waterways and other forms of land use are assigned distinct visual identities, transforming complex environments into categories that can be surveyed, managed and altered.

While these cartographic systems make landscapes legible, they also reveal how human institutions determine what is recognised, named and valued. A forest may become a development zone through a change in planning designation, even before any physical transformation becomes visible on the ground.

These questions became particularly immediate when Seah encountered proposed developments affecting a wooded area near his home in Ampang, Malaysia, during the pandemic. The surrounding land, with its environmentally sensitive ground conditions, was subject to competing expectations of conservation and development. His experience of examining local planning documents and questioning proposed land-use changes exposed the distance between the administrative representation of a place and the lived experience of those who inhabit it.

Seah began physically dismantling the maps he had collected. He tore and cut the paper, carefully washed away layers of its fibres to make the sheets thinner and more translucent, and used a soldering tool to burn through selected areas. Place names, boundaries and cartographic symbols were partially erased, interrupting the maps' original function as authoritative documents. These interventions echo the processes of clearing, extraction and transformation imposed upon the land itself.

The altered fragments were subsequently reorganised into different forms. In a series of scroll-like works, Seah arranged pieces according to their cartographic colours, creating a progression resembling the changing colours of fallen leaves, from green to yellow, red and pale, exhausted surfaces. The analogy connects the natural cycle of decay with the repeated reclassification and exploitation of land, where each new designation can signal another stage of human intervention.

In other works, the maps retain portions of their geographical structure while losing much of their identifying information. Burnt openings interrupt the printed terrain, making the familiar distinction between settlements, infrastructure and natural environments increasingly difficult to recognise. The destruction of cartographic information becomes another way of revealing the consequences of the activities that such maps organise and legitimise.

The series culminated in a large, animal-hide-like composition assembled from altered maps of the area surrounding Seah's home. Its central opening corresponds to a wooded area threatened by development, while the surrounding fragments resemble the spotted skin of an unidentified creature. Animal hair and synthetic fibres extend its edges, blurring the distinction between natural remains and manufactured material.

Presented like a hunting trophy, the work transforms the map into the remains of a body that has been divided, claimed and exhausted. Yet the apparent emptiness at its centre also carries a contradiction: what appears as a small opening on a map may, when experienced on foot, be an expansive living forest.

This work received the 2022 UOB Painting of the Year Malaysia Top Winner award.

Skin of Land considers how the authority to classify and represent land is connected to the power to transform it. Through acts of cutting, washing, burning and reassembling, Seah questions the distance between the land as a measurable commodity and the land as a living environment. The series is dedicated to those displaced by such transformations, including the animals and people left to navigate the increasingly fragmented spaces between them.

Keywords: #LandUse #Cartography #PoliticalEcology #UrbanDevelopment #Deforestation #LandClassification #MakingAndUnmaking #HumanAndNonhuman #MaterialTransformation

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