A set of four images gleams through my computer screen. The concept is simple enough — the artist, a young Singaporean named Christine Chua, has repeatedly placed her own hand flat against the wall and sprayed water around it to create a negative image, much like the original creators of cave art thousands of years ago. Yet for reasons difficult to articulate, the work’s effect on me, even through the screen, is profound.
Snapped along the banks of London’s River Thames, the four pictures are a study in contrasts. Physically, the small, insubstantial handprint clusters are dwarfed by the hulking concrete walls they’re printed on. Conceptually, there’s a yawning chronological gulf between these motifs from prehistory and these signs of industrialised civilisation. Watery ghosts reach out from the depths of the Thames, trying to communicate to a forgetful world.
Because Chua used water instead of pigment, the piece, entitled Early Graffiti (2023), would have lasted only a few moments. This theme of transience runs through the entirety of Chua’s practice, which also deals with construction, destruction, and our relationships with the land on which we live.
Breaking ground
Born in 2000, Chua (whom I spoke with via an online interview) has lived and worked in both Singapore and London. Her impressive résumé includes over a dozen group exhibitions as well as experience in workshop facilitation, arts management, and curation. And, as she tells it, the roots of this multi-pronged practice lie in a Seletar construction site.
Then a student at Singapore’s School of the Arts (SOTA), Chua discovered the site by chance in 2017, and was powerfully drawn to its ephemeral nature — the way it changed every day, subject to the vicissitudes of sun and rain. She made several trips back to the site to photograph it and forage art materials, feeling a “kind of urgency to respond.”
At the same time, the construction site also became a place for her to escape the pressures of school and home, as well as an avenue to take her practice in more investigative and interdisciplinary directions: “I did find a lot of freedom in that space.”
Chua sends me a link to a folder of over 400 photographs she took of the site in 2018 (you can view a selection of those images here). It’s indeed an utterly nondescript construction site, indistinguishable from the scores of others dotting the island. Most people would pass it by without a second look.
Yet, through Chua’s lens, the site is transformed into something new. Strong colours predominate: images of green grass, white clouds, blue tarps, blue skies. Diggers and cranes at rest or in action. Her own shoes, encased in mud; a tangled root system, torn from the ground.
And, most importantly, dozens and dozens of photos of earth — brick red or striated, cracked or waterlogged, jammed with stones of different patterns and colours. Chua is acutely attuned to the particularities of soil. Some images of mere dirt look like Martian landscapes in miniature. Others are so artfully striped and variegated as to resemble abstract paintings in themselves.
What comes through is an attentiveness or even obsession, what she calls a “desperation of documenting,” applied to what most would consider marginal or insignificant. Even at this early stage, there are intimations of what will most preoccupy her in the years to come.
Fragments and ghosts
From 2019–2023, Chua attended the University College London’s Slade School of Fine Art, where she specialised in sculpture, graduating with first class honours. There, she also picked up mudlarking, a practice in which hobbyists comb the Thames riverbed at low tide to find ceramic fragments, metal coins, and other relics of the area’s 2,000-year history. (This also informed the naming of Muddy Mudlarks, a collective she runs with friend and artist Zoey Chang that helps emerging artists exhibit in alternative art spaces.) This time, it was the pandemic lockdowns that drove her towards a place of escape.
“I felt there was an echo to the construction site in Singapore, where I was performing as some sort of amateur archaeologist, finding things and imagining their history or future.”
From the Thames, Chua sourced objects to use in her artworks, as well as bricks and other raw materials for pigments. Her emphasis on found materials harks back to the work of land artists like Robert Smithson, Andy Goldsworthy, and Tang Da Wu, whom she counts among her influences, along with the tradition of psychogeography (a term centred on how humans relate to urban space).
Looking across Chua’s body of work, other patterns emerge. One is her interest in history and particularly prehistory, before the advent of scientific thinking or even the written word. These interests surface in the spray-painted hands of Early Graffiti (which she has also created using clay pigment in more conventional white cube settings), as well as 2022 works in which she filled gaps and niches in buildings with miniature, rough-hewn houses made from nails and clay — tiny transplants from a distant age.
For her work Untitled Offerings (2023), exhibited in the Bedrock group show at London’s Crypt Gallery. she sculpted clay objects and laid them out on a stained cotton sheet in the orderly manner of a burial site or archaeological dig. Besides a pair of feet and a small headless figure, most of the objects are largely unidentifiable, their original purposes lost to time.
These works illuminate another characteristic of Chua’s practice: while the traces of early humans are everywhere, the human figure is largely represented in the partial, the anonymous, the abstract. Instead of recognisable individuals, we might find a shrouded, featureless figure or disembodied legs, feet, and hands, accompanied by spectral plastic sheets and rusted metal chains. The effect is spooky — a chorus of ghosts.
Asked whether her stylised approach to figuration is a conscious choice, Chua responds, “You can imagine it as something from the past or something from the future. There’s this sense of unease. You look at it and you get to think [beyond the] literal, because it’s more representative of a whole collective than one person.”
Through this abstract approach, Chua simultaneously creates a sense of timelessness (these figures could be from any time) while reminding us of our own ephemerality (our specific identities, names, and faces will be forgotten in a few generations). What is history, after all, but the accumulation of ghosts?
Rescue and return
But as much as Chua’s work is about transience and time, it’s also about the very human attempt to defy these forces, to rage against the dying of the light. It is this impulse that surfaces in works like Archiving the Dig, which features clay from construction sites around Singapore and references the Inca practice of using knots to record information. In Longing for Land, Chua papered a shrine-like structure with images of the now-vanished Seletar site. Construction sites, transient by definition, are made worthy of veneration and remembrance.
Chua draws a parallel between early cave art and contemporary graffiti. Both are motivated by a desire to say “I was here” — to leave a trace. “When I’m in a new space, an active but also abandoned kind of space, there’s this primal impulse to make a mark. I felt that at the construction site and in the different spaces that I’ve been exploring.”
She adds: “I feel that art has actually been very instinctual and even functional in that sense. I always felt like the art world, or the need to commercialise [art], detracts from its original essence.”
It is perhaps not inappropriate, then, to think of Chua’s practice in terms of rescue and return: the drive to salvage traces (be they photographs, found objects, or pigments) from the jaws of time, and to return to more instinctual, ancient ways of being.
In this vein, an important aspect of Chua’s practice is making her own pigments from found and foraged materials — to her, a way of emulating the resourcefulness of earlier civilisations. While in London, she also facilitated several workshops, teaching participants as young as four to make and paint with pigments from rocks found along the Thames.
“It ties back to the community,” she says, “because the land is something we all share and build things on … It [was] quite a touching experience.”
Island in the sun
This year, Chua returns from London to Singapore with plans of exhibiting work and facilitating community workshops; she has also submitted a residency application to independent arts incubator dblspace. Of course, the island’s relationship with land remains as complicated as when she first left.
To our progress-obsessed city, earth is less a ground full of ghost stories and more a resource to be pressed into the service of bigger, better, and newer goals. Chua’s work is an invitation to see it in another way:
“I’m trying to tell people that there’s this ever-changing, ever-evolving world, and it can be disorienting, but I want to bring this activeness of the world into the space […] When you go about your daily life, especially in Singapore, it’s very monotonous, or we always strive for a certain kind of uniformity.
For example, if there are cracks, you want things to look aesthetically perfect. But there’s all this noise and energy in the material around you that can be very interesting, and I hope to give a space for people to look at and explore that.”
To see the cracks in the earth as their own kind of perfection. To see a community, not a commodity. A relationship, not a resource. Feet firmly planted, Chua invites us to actually look at the earth we walk on, and all that surrounds it, in both space and time — to see all its whispery pasts, presents, and futures.
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Find out more about Christine at her website earthisdamnjoyful.wordpress.com, and follow her on Instagram @xtine.art.earthquake for updates on upcoming projects. Her handmade watercolour sets, made using hand-extracted pigments, are available for purchase through Etsy: etsy.com/sg-en/shop/earthisdamnjoyful.
Header image: Early Graffiti (2023), sprayed handprints along banks of River Thames.
