Named after the colloquial Chinese term for takeaway food, ‘TAK PAO’ is an experimental take on film as a medium for experiential mapping, resisting the bird’s eye view of conventional two-dimensional maps. The artist uses her camera to traverse the lived environment of a residential estate in Queenstown, circumnavigating through the corridors of Singapore’s earliest HDB flats, built so early they preceded the HDB’s public housing policy of creating void decks. The camera celebrates minor landmarks in the topography, lingering over areas of symbolic value or sites of social interaction such as pavilions and public tables to offer the viewer a visual exploration of the cultural data and spatial dynamics of the area.
Long takes which track the camera’s progress through the estate and its attendant wet market and hawker centre shore up deeper realisations of how the built environment shapes and reflects patterns of daily use and shared identity by inhabitants of the area. The installation evokes understandings that these communal areas of food and commerce are very much a natural extension, perhaps even an integral element, of residential estates in Singapore. The fruits depicted in the film are a result of a collaborative process between the artist and Alice (the resident), who pointed them out and explained them when taking her on her first tour of a Singapore wet market.
The fascinating sequences of the artist’s performance art executed in selective spaces and landmarks embody the artist’s attempts to reconstruct and recreate the participatory processes of the urban environment and landscape. By incorporating inter-disciplinary techniques of dance, mutual engagement with local residents and experiential community-specific fieldwork, the installation is a layered, visceral and evocative take on the cartographic process as a means of bringing to life notions of heritage, culture and identity.
