This Land Is ( ) Land
2025 l Skin of Land Series l Solo Exhibition ｜ Richard Koh Fine Art, Singapore
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2025 l Skin of Land Series l Solo Exhibition ｜ Richard Koh Fine Art, Singapore
This Land is ( ) Land (2025)
This Land is ( ) Land (2025)
Who does the land belong to? To those who own it, those who inhabit it, or the many forms of life that depend upon it? The empty parentheses in This Land is ( ) Land leave questions of ownership, identity and belonging unresolved, creating space for those whose presence is often overlooked in decisions about land.
The exhibition grew from Zelin Seah's longstanding fascination with maps and his personal encounters with land development in Malaysia. During the COVID-19 pandemic, while confined largely to his home in Ampang, he witnessed changes in the surrounding forested landscape and the increasing presence of displaced wildlife. These experiences prompted him to examine how land is classified, represented and transformed through planning systems, often beyond the participation of those who inhabit it.
Collecting historical and official topographic maps, Seah became interested in their elaborate language of contour lines, boundaries, symbols and colours. Forests, plantations, settlements and waterways are assigned distinct identities, transforming complex environments into categories that can be measured, managed and reassigned.
Oil palm plantations became a particularly revealing subject. As one of Malaysia's most extensive agricultural land uses, they reflect a history of land conversion driven by changing economic priorities. In some regions, forests were replaced by rubber and oil palm estates, while former plantations subsequently gave way to urban development. Although plantations may appear as another expanse of green on a map, their relatively uniform vegetation differs significantly from the ecological complexity of tropical forests. Such classifications rarely convey the relationships and habitats lost through these transformations.
Seah responds by physically dismantling the maps. Through cutting, washing, scraping and burning, he removes layers of paper, producing fragile, translucent surfaces punctured by countless openings. Using a soldering iron, he follows roads, contour lines and settlements, echoing processes of clearing, extraction and erosion. Place names become incomplete, sometimes revealing unexpected words and meanings. These acts of subtraction challenge the apparent authority of official maps while transforming them into ambiguous, tactile landscapes.
The works take various forms. In Gone with the ( ), fragmented maps become vertical window blinds, recalling the experience of observing a changing landscape from behind a window during lockdown. In Land is a Liquid, historical maps are transferred onto aluminium and manipulated into fluid surfaces, questioning the perceived permanence of geographical records against ongoing environmental change.
In Un-Bear-Able and Spot the Stray, altered maps evoke animal skins and unfamiliar creatures. Incorporating wool and copper, these works consider the vulnerability of species surviving between plantations, roads and expanding settlements. Animals often regarded as intruders may, in fact, be navigating environments transformed by human activity.
Throughout the exhibition, Seah questions the distinction between wilderness and civilisation. While boundaries and land-use categories serve human systems of administration, they do not necessarily reflect the experiences of other forms of life. A city, plantation or forest may all be part of an animal's habitat, regardless of the names assigned to them.
This Land is ( ) Land does not suggest that landscapes should remain unchanged. Rather, it questions who holds the authority to define, value and transform them. Through the destruction and reconstruction of maps, Seah invites viewers to reconsider land beyond its status as property or resource, and to ask whose sense of belonging disappears when a place is redrawn.
Keywords: #LandUse #Cartography #PoliticalEcology #OilPalm #LandClassification #Displacement #HumanAndNonhuman #MaterialTransformation #MakingAndUnmaking
Land Is A Liquid l 2024Topographic Maps Washed, Transferred, Carved and Burnt with Soldering Iron onto AluminiumTriptych 60 x 116cm (each)
Gone with The ( ) l 2022Topographic Maps Washed, Torn, Burnt and Waxed onto Vertical Window Blind Rail215 x 275cm
JER _ _ _ UT l 2023Topographic Maps Washed, Burnt, Waxed onto Aluminium158 x 56cm (map)
76 x 135cm (mounted)
76 x 135cm (mounted)
_A_A_ _A_A l 2023Topographic Maps Washed, Burnt, Waxed onto Aluminium88 x 74cm (map)
95 x 81cm (mounted)
95 x 81cm (mounted)
A Handful of Land l 2023Fragments of MapsVariable Dimensions
_ _ _CA_G_ _ _E_ _ _ _ l 2024Topographic Maps Washed, Burnt, Waxed and Wool Felting onto Aluminium116 x 146cm
_ER_ _NG l 2023Topographic Maps Washed, Burnt, Waxed onto Aluminium66 x 65cm (map)
76 x 75cm (mounted)
76 x 75cm (mounted)
_LUANG l 2023Topographic Maps Washed, Burnt, Waxed onto Aluminium66 x 65cm (map)
76 x 75cm (mounted)
76 x 75cm (mounted)
T_T_ l 2023Topographic Maps Washed, Burnt, Waxed onto Aluminium66 x 65cm (map)
76 x 75cm (mounted)
76 x 75cm (mounted)
_AMPUN_ GAJAH l 2024Topographic Maps Washed, Burnt, Waxed onto Aluminium66 x 65cm (map)
76 x 75cm (mounted)
76 x 75cm (mounted)
_AMPUN_ _ _BANG BUAYA l 2023Topographic Maps Washed, Burnt, Waxed onto Aluminium66 x 65cm (map)
76 x 75cm (mounted)
76 x 75cm (mounted)
_AMPUN_ BIAWAK l 2023Topographic Maps Washed, Burnt, Waxed onto Aluminium66 x 65cm (map)
76 x 75cm (mounted)
76 x 75cm (mounted)
_ _MAYA_ l 2023Topographic Maps Washed, Burnt, Waxed onto Aluminium56 x 55cm (map)
65 x 64cm (mounted)
65 x 64cm (mounted)
_AHA_ l 2023Topographic Maps Washed, Burnt, Waxed onto Aluminium56 x 55cm (map)
65 x 64cm (mounted)
65 x 64cm (mounted)
_ _OH l 2023Topographic Maps Washed, Burnt, Waxed onto Aluminium56 x 55cm (map)
65 x 64cm (mounted)
65 x 64cm (mounted)
Spot The Stray l 2024Topographic Maps Washed, Burnt, Waxed and Transferred onto Copper60 x 120cm
Spot The Rabbit l 2024Topographic Maps Washed, Burnt, Waxed and Transferred onto Copper60 x 60cm
Un-bear-able l 2023Topographic Maps Washed, Torn, Burnt, Waxed and Wool Felting130 x 110cm
This is a piece of “land” that submits to you, often laid out as a carpet to welcome you, or displayed as a trophy in a prominent place. The outer edges of the map fragments I have casually assembled are surrounded by primeval forests threatened by plantation expansion, while thecenter represents a town in the midst of expansion, facing internal and external troubles. The wool embroidery highlights its value, but whose wool is it really?(羊毛出在羊身上, a Chinese idiom)
Parenthetical Spaces
Louis HoSculptor Tony Smith’s account of riding down the New Jersey Turnpike is a frequently referenced bit of art historical lore:When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the ‘50s, someone told me how I could get on to the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn't be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn't know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there which had not had any expression in art.1Smith’s lightbulb moment, flickering on amidst the Garden State’s infrastructural development, has commonly been read into the artist’s vernacular of geometric minimalism. The anecdote was made famous, of course, by Michael Fried’s seminal piece, “Art and Objecthood”, which extended its discussion of Minimalist “theatricality” to Smith’s nocturnal joyride, with Fried remarking that “It is as though the turnpike … reveal[s] the theatrical character of literalist art, only without the object, that is, without the art itself …”2 Around the same time, in the summer of 1967, Lucy Lippard likewise alluded to the anonymous structures of suburbia and industry – “the inexpressive stability of water towers, windowless buildings, highways, parking lots, concrete pillboxes, and military and utiltarian architecture” – as presences lurking behind Smith’s forms, an attempt by “useless” sculpture to ape the forms of “useful” objects, jettisoning the art while retaining its so-called artifactness.3
Zelin Seah’s latest works, while pictorially abstract, are hardly minimalist. They are tactile, surficially dense objects that involve laborious intervention into, and transformation of, found maps – palimpsestic images that also function as expressions of estrangement from the built environment, and the depredations of bureaucratic and capitalist heedlessness on land use. What is of interest here, vis-à-vis the tale of Smith’s epiphany, is the idea of an artificial landscape that serves as the basis of a disconnected, destabilizing ur-moment. The analogy is located in originary catalysts: an alien-seeming topography, neither pristine nor serving merely aesthetic ends (“artificial, and yet it couldn't be called a work of art”), that is channelled into shapes and materialities that are correspondingly interstitial, repurposed into images that approximate the ambivalent character of their inspiration. Not unlike Smith’s confrontation with unfamiliarity as revelation, Seah writes of his works in the present show that they embody “the sense of dissonance between myself and the world I inhabit.”4Seah goes on to recount a redolent moment of his own, a realization about the decidedly manufactured character of the geo-physical terrain of his native Malaysia. Based in an area that is sandwiched between the outskirts of the capital city, Kuala Lumpur, and the large forest reserve of Hulu Langat in Selangor state, he spent much of the COVID-19 pandemic at home, witnessing, from his vantage point behind a window, the development-led disappearance of green spaces around his home, and displaced wildlife encroaching on urban space. “During the pandemic lockdown”, he observes, “I reflected on my relationship with the landscape outside my window, observing ecological changes in the species around me, and realizing the quiet disappearance of the primeval rainforest behind my home.” These changes in his immediate environs triggered the insight that “wilderness is a concept constructed by humans—a way to differentiate between man-made landscapes and the natural world. For a cat, both a city and a mountain are equally wild.”The accelerating deforestation and development in Ampang Jaya, as his neighbourhood is known, inspired Seah’s involvement in land use activism but, just as crucially, the ecological damage that he increasingly witnessed around him found its way into the present works as a self-consciously reflexive approach to materiality – the scarring of the surface of the image as a parallel to the mutilation of the land. As the artist points out, he utilizes a panoply of methods such as cutting, burning and scraping to simulate the action of “human activities like logging, slash-and-burn, and mining on natural landscapes”, with one injurious act analogically mirroring the other. The process often begins with the washing and scraping of a found map, water being used to soften the paper and to allow for the subsequent removal of underlying layers, so that only a wafer-thin, quasi-translucent sheet remains. A variety of measures are then deployed to disfigure or mark the topographic image along roads, contour lines and land formations (such as plantations). One common tool is a thin, pencil-style soldering iron, which Seah employs to carefully cut out minute holes in the map to suggest ecological destruction; another is the use of a felting needle to punch holes into, and thread skeins of massed wool through, the paper, so that wool appears to be organically sprouting. In the case of certain works, such as the triptych, Land is a Liquid, a means of image transfer occurs first: using a mixture of water and latex on the map, the image was transferred onto another surface – an aluminium panel – before its edges were carved and scratched with a soldering iron, creating a hair-like texture along the fringes.The process of assiduously reengineering cartographic images, according to the artist, is both a material gesture, as well as a socio-political one. Intervention into these objects “not only reveals scars left on the land but also reimagines maps as abstract, dynamic spaces, questioning the authority of official narratives.” In other words, if one of his aims is to reveal the manufactured character of modern Malaysia’s topography through the material manipulation of these maps, he is no less interested in uncovering the forces responsible for that manufacture – i.e. the machinations of official authorities. Seah has, of late, been involved with AJ Rimba, a grassroots organization formed by residents of various communities in the broader Ampang Jaya district, particularly those residing in locales that border forested areas. The group, according to its website, intends to “empower residents of Ampang Jaya to participate in the city planning process in a meaningful and effective manner”, and to “ensure that the environment is healthy and safe by preventing unplanned developments while protecting the natural treasures of Ampang Jaya.”5 Their activities are oriented around deforestation, land encroachment and displacement due to large-scale development projects in and around the district, raising awareness about the ecological and cultural impact of land exploitation; one project, for instance, campaigns for UNESCO accreditation for the broad swath of the Gombak-Hulu Langat Geopark spread across more than a thousand square kilometres.6 Spurred on by his work with AJ Rimba, Seah began collecting maps related to sites mentioned in various reports on issues of land use and development. Many of these were highlighted in a statement published by the independent watchdog, Rimba Disclosure Project – now known as RimbaWatch – alleging that large parcels of forested lands were being offered for sale.7One of the biggest ongoing development projects in Malayia in recent years is the massive East Coast Rail Link (ECRL), a railway that links Port Klang on the Malay peninsula’s west to Kota Bharu in the northeast, infrastructurally connecting the two coasts. The Land is a Liquid triptych consists of a suite of continuous maps of the central mountain range of peninsular Malaysia, from Kuala Lumpur to the east coast, that dates from the 1990s. Using a mixture of water and latex, Seah liquified the transferred image of these maps, giving the final product a watery appearance that hints at the possibilities of soil erosion, among other environmental mishaps – thanks, of course, to the construction of the ECRL that is cutting its way through the terrain. _ _ _CA_G _ _ _E_ _ _ _ (LANCANG, TEMERLUH) features as its main element a map of the titular town, situated in the state of Pahang, from which the artist cut out a multitude of diminutive sections, emphasizing the presence of small, privately-owned farmland; in its centre is blank space that indicate protected forests, a fact that the artist calls to the viewer’s attention with wool-felted lines that follow the sinuous undulations of existing forest pathways. He observes that the ECRL’s passage through these forests will endanger native species, such as elephants, with the authorities “discussing how to build fences to prevent .. [them] from entering the tracks.”8 The threat to wildlife posed by rampant development is also coded into the trio of works that includes _AMPUN_ GAJAH (KAMPUNG GAJAH), _AMPUN_ _ _BANG BUAYA (KAMPUNG LUBANG BUAYA) and _AMPUN_ BIAWAK (KAMPUNG BIAWAK). Seah alludes to the displacement of fauna from the green spaces around his home:The mountain behind my house is a primeval forest … Development activities have been quietly taking place on the other side of the mountain. I have witnessed the changes in the animals' ecosystem: wild boars rummaging through trash, lizards electrocuted by cables, monkeys being forcibly relocated, and so on. In recent years, news about elephants and tigers frequently appearing within human habitation zones has been constant, and crocodiles, once key species for monitoring river pollution, have been declining.9The spaces represented in these works are, once again, interstitial, ambivalent phenomena. They are sites teetering on the precipice between ecological imperatives and capitalist desire, represented as objects that are simultaneously documentary image, inflected readymade, and material palimpsest. Their hybrid character recalls, obliquely yet evocatively, the vision conjured by Tony Smith, of a topography the artificial, alien reality of which fed into sculptural monuments that both resembled, and were ontologically removed from, the structures of industrial New Jersey. Ultimately, perhaps, the most pointed signifier of the equivocal nature of Seah’s objects does not lie in their material make-up or discursive formulation, but in a fundamental element of their textual identity: titles. Many of the works in the exhibition, as with the exhibition itself, contain absences in their title, in the form of missing letters or words (the aforementioned works being a case in point). The title of the show marks the trace of linguistic excision with a set of parentheses, which serve to carve out a semantic lacuna in its midst – what land is this land, precisely? Dislocated, destroyed, undiscovered, blank, null and void? All of the above, none of the above? The titles of works, on the other hand, simply have letters missing, as if the artist were playing a game of Hangman, or, as is the case, indulging in a punning exercise. What is left of words, after their mutilation, are tongue-in-cheek witticisms: _ _ _CA_G _ _ _E_ _ _ _ (LANCANG, TEMERLUH), for one, has the English word, “cage”, as a remnant, while _AMPUN_ GAJAH (KAMPUNG GAJAH) translates, in Malay, into a plea for an elephant’s forgiveness.The interstitial spaces of these textual gaps correspond to the conflicted status of the real-life sites they name: places that stand at risk of obliteration by bureaucracies and corporations, that yet remain in the collective consciousness through the work of NGOs like AJ Rimba and, yes, the work of artists such as Seah. In his hands, these ambivalent localities are given new life as composites of readymade images, perforated and pierced surfaces, and latex and wool and wax and aluminium and copper, assemblages of hybrid substance. Here, then, the contestations of land use and exploitation, the juxtaposition of imbricated materialities, and the hollowing out of linguistic convention find a cogent nexus in the present exhibition.
1 Qtd. in Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., “Talking with Tony Smith”, Artforum 5:4 (1966), pp. 14–9; see p.19. 2 The essay was first published in Artforum in 1967, and reprinted in Fried’s Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 148–72; see p. 159. 3 Lucy Lippard, “Tony Smith: The Ineluctable Modality of the Visible”, Art International 11:6 (1967), pp. 24–6; see p. 26. 4 Unless otherwise stated, quotes from Seah are derived from his artist’s statement elsewhere in this e-catalogue. 5 As noted on the “Mission” page of AJ Rimba’s website, at <https://www.ajrimba.org/mission>. Last accessed February 3, 2025. 6 See the relevant page on AJ Rimba’s site, at <https://www.ajrimba.org/ghl-geopark-en>. Last accessed February 3, 2025.7 The report, “Are Malaysia’s forests being sold online?”, dated February 3, 2022, is available on the organization’s website, at <https://rimbawatchmy.com/reports>. Last accessed February 3, 2025.8 See the description for the piece elsewhere in this e-catalogue. 9 Refer to the description for these pieces elsewhere in the e-catalogue.
Louis HoSculptor Tony Smith’s account of riding down the New Jersey Turnpike is a frequently referenced bit of art historical lore:When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the ‘50s, someone told me how I could get on to the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn't be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn't know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there which had not had any expression in art.1Smith’s lightbulb moment, flickering on amidst the Garden State’s infrastructural development, has commonly been read into the artist’s vernacular of geometric minimalism. The anecdote was made famous, of course, by Michael Fried’s seminal piece, “Art and Objecthood”, which extended its discussion of Minimalist “theatricality” to Smith’s nocturnal joyride, with Fried remarking that “It is as though the turnpike … reveal[s] the theatrical character of literalist art, only without the object, that is, without the art itself …”2 Around the same time, in the summer of 1967, Lucy Lippard likewise alluded to the anonymous structures of suburbia and industry – “the inexpressive stability of water towers, windowless buildings, highways, parking lots, concrete pillboxes, and military and utiltarian architecture” – as presences lurking behind Smith’s forms, an attempt by “useless” sculpture to ape the forms of “useful” objects, jettisoning the art while retaining its so-called artifactness.3
Zelin Seah’s latest works, while pictorially abstract, are hardly minimalist. They are tactile, surficially dense objects that involve laborious intervention into, and transformation of, found maps – palimpsestic images that also function as expressions of estrangement from the built environment, and the depredations of bureaucratic and capitalist heedlessness on land use. What is of interest here, vis-à-vis the tale of Smith’s epiphany, is the idea of an artificial landscape that serves as the basis of a disconnected, destabilizing ur-moment. The analogy is located in originary catalysts: an alien-seeming topography, neither pristine nor serving merely aesthetic ends (“artificial, and yet it couldn't be called a work of art”), that is channelled into shapes and materialities that are correspondingly interstitial, repurposed into images that approximate the ambivalent character of their inspiration. Not unlike Smith’s confrontation with unfamiliarity as revelation, Seah writes of his works in the present show that they embody “the sense of dissonance between myself and the world I inhabit.”4Seah goes on to recount a redolent moment of his own, a realization about the decidedly manufactured character of the geo-physical terrain of his native Malaysia. Based in an area that is sandwiched between the outskirts of the capital city, Kuala Lumpur, and the large forest reserve of Hulu Langat in Selangor state, he spent much of the COVID-19 pandemic at home, witnessing, from his vantage point behind a window, the development-led disappearance of green spaces around his home, and displaced wildlife encroaching on urban space. “During the pandemic lockdown”, he observes, “I reflected on my relationship with the landscape outside my window, observing ecological changes in the species around me, and realizing the quiet disappearance of the primeval rainforest behind my home.” These changes in his immediate environs triggered the insight that “wilderness is a concept constructed by humans—a way to differentiate between man-made landscapes and the natural world. For a cat, both a city and a mountain are equally wild.”The accelerating deforestation and development in Ampang Jaya, as his neighbourhood is known, inspired Seah’s involvement in land use activism but, just as crucially, the ecological damage that he increasingly witnessed around him found its way into the present works as a self-consciously reflexive approach to materiality – the scarring of the surface of the image as a parallel to the mutilation of the land. As the artist points out, he utilizes a panoply of methods such as cutting, burning and scraping to simulate the action of “human activities like logging, slash-and-burn, and mining on natural landscapes”, with one injurious act analogically mirroring the other. The process often begins with the washing and scraping of a found map, water being used to soften the paper and to allow for the subsequent removal of underlying layers, so that only a wafer-thin, quasi-translucent sheet remains. A variety of measures are then deployed to disfigure or mark the topographic image along roads, contour lines and land formations (such as plantations). One common tool is a thin, pencil-style soldering iron, which Seah employs to carefully cut out minute holes in the map to suggest ecological destruction; another is the use of a felting needle to punch holes into, and thread skeins of massed wool through, the paper, so that wool appears to be organically sprouting. In the case of certain works, such as the triptych, Land is a Liquid, a means of image transfer occurs first: using a mixture of water and latex on the map, the image was transferred onto another surface – an aluminium panel – before its edges were carved and scratched with a soldering iron, creating a hair-like texture along the fringes.The process of assiduously reengineering cartographic images, according to the artist, is both a material gesture, as well as a socio-political one. Intervention into these objects “not only reveals scars left on the land but also reimagines maps as abstract, dynamic spaces, questioning the authority of official narratives.” In other words, if one of his aims is to reveal the manufactured character of modern Malaysia’s topography through the material manipulation of these maps, he is no less interested in uncovering the forces responsible for that manufacture – i.e. the machinations of official authorities. Seah has, of late, been involved with AJ Rimba, a grassroots organization formed by residents of various communities in the broader Ampang Jaya district, particularly those residing in locales that border forested areas. The group, according to its website, intends to “empower residents of Ampang Jaya to participate in the city planning process in a meaningful and effective manner”, and to “ensure that the environment is healthy and safe by preventing unplanned developments while protecting the natural treasures of Ampang Jaya.”5 Their activities are oriented around deforestation, land encroachment and displacement due to large-scale development projects in and around the district, raising awareness about the ecological and cultural impact of land exploitation; one project, for instance, campaigns for UNESCO accreditation for the broad swath of the Gombak-Hulu Langat Geopark spread across more than a thousand square kilometres.6 Spurred on by his work with AJ Rimba, Seah began collecting maps related to sites mentioned in various reports on issues of land use and development. Many of these were highlighted in a statement published by the independent watchdog, Rimba Disclosure Project – now known as RimbaWatch – alleging that large parcels of forested lands were being offered for sale.7One of the biggest ongoing development projects in Malayia in recent years is the massive East Coast Rail Link (ECRL), a railway that links Port Klang on the Malay peninsula’s west to Kota Bharu in the northeast, infrastructurally connecting the two coasts. The Land is a Liquid triptych consists of a suite of continuous maps of the central mountain range of peninsular Malaysia, from Kuala Lumpur to the east coast, that dates from the 1990s. Using a mixture of water and latex, Seah liquified the transferred image of these maps, giving the final product a watery appearance that hints at the possibilities of soil erosion, among other environmental mishaps – thanks, of course, to the construction of the ECRL that is cutting its way through the terrain. _ _ _CA_G _ _ _E_ _ _ _ (LANCANG, TEMERLUH) features as its main element a map of the titular town, situated in the state of Pahang, from which the artist cut out a multitude of diminutive sections, emphasizing the presence of small, privately-owned farmland; in its centre is blank space that indicate protected forests, a fact that the artist calls to the viewer’s attention with wool-felted lines that follow the sinuous undulations of existing forest pathways. He observes that the ECRL’s passage through these forests will endanger native species, such as elephants, with the authorities “discussing how to build fences to prevent .. [them] from entering the tracks.”8 The threat to wildlife posed by rampant development is also coded into the trio of works that includes _AMPUN_ GAJAH (KAMPUNG GAJAH), _AMPUN_ _ _BANG BUAYA (KAMPUNG LUBANG BUAYA) and _AMPUN_ BIAWAK (KAMPUNG BIAWAK). Seah alludes to the displacement of fauna from the green spaces around his home:The mountain behind my house is a primeval forest … Development activities have been quietly taking place on the other side of the mountain. I have witnessed the changes in the animals' ecosystem: wild boars rummaging through trash, lizards electrocuted by cables, monkeys being forcibly relocated, and so on. In recent years, news about elephants and tigers frequently appearing within human habitation zones has been constant, and crocodiles, once key species for monitoring river pollution, have been declining.9The spaces represented in these works are, once again, interstitial, ambivalent phenomena. They are sites teetering on the precipice between ecological imperatives and capitalist desire, represented as objects that are simultaneously documentary image, inflected readymade, and material palimpsest. Their hybrid character recalls, obliquely yet evocatively, the vision conjured by Tony Smith, of a topography the artificial, alien reality of which fed into sculptural monuments that both resembled, and were ontologically removed from, the structures of industrial New Jersey. Ultimately, perhaps, the most pointed signifier of the equivocal nature of Seah’s objects does not lie in their material make-up or discursive formulation, but in a fundamental element of their textual identity: titles. Many of the works in the exhibition, as with the exhibition itself, contain absences in their title, in the form of missing letters or words (the aforementioned works being a case in point). The title of the show marks the trace of linguistic excision with a set of parentheses, which serve to carve out a semantic lacuna in its midst – what land is this land, precisely? Dislocated, destroyed, undiscovered, blank, null and void? All of the above, none of the above? The titles of works, on the other hand, simply have letters missing, as if the artist were playing a game of Hangman, or, as is the case, indulging in a punning exercise. What is left of words, after their mutilation, are tongue-in-cheek witticisms: _ _ _CA_G _ _ _E_ _ _ _ (LANCANG, TEMERLUH), for one, has the English word, “cage”, as a remnant, while _AMPUN_ GAJAH (KAMPUNG GAJAH) translates, in Malay, into a plea for an elephant’s forgiveness.The interstitial spaces of these textual gaps correspond to the conflicted status of the real-life sites they name: places that stand at risk of obliteration by bureaucracies and corporations, that yet remain in the collective consciousness through the work of NGOs like AJ Rimba and, yes, the work of artists such as Seah. In his hands, these ambivalent localities are given new life as composites of readymade images, perforated and pierced surfaces, and latex and wool and wax and aluminium and copper, assemblages of hybrid substance. Here, then, the contestations of land use and exploitation, the juxtaposition of imbricated materialities, and the hollowing out of linguistic convention find a cogent nexus in the present exhibition.
1 Qtd. in Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., “Talking with Tony Smith”, Artforum 5:4 (1966), pp. 14–9; see p.19. 2 The essay was first published in Artforum in 1967, and reprinted in Fried’s Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 148–72; see p. 159. 3 Lucy Lippard, “Tony Smith: The Ineluctable Modality of the Visible”, Art International 11:6 (1967), pp. 24–6; see p. 26. 4 Unless otherwise stated, quotes from Seah are derived from his artist’s statement elsewhere in this e-catalogue. 5 As noted on the “Mission” page of AJ Rimba’s website, at <https://www.ajrimba.org/mission>. Last accessed February 3, 2025. 6 See the relevant page on AJ Rimba’s site, at <https://www.ajrimba.org/ghl-geopark-en>. Last accessed February 3, 2025.7 The report, “Are Malaysia’s forests being sold online?”, dated February 3, 2022, is available on the organization’s website, at <https://rimbawatchmy.com/reports>. Last accessed February 3, 2025.8 See the description for the piece elsewhere in this e-catalogue. 9 Refer to the description for these pieces elsewhere in the e-catalogue.
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