Craving a dose of botanical reverie, I step into Thai-American, Singapore-based conceptual artist Isa Pengskul’s 2024 solo show Becoming ___ at Art Outreach Singapore. I am here to revisit her work Becoming coconut, a piece I first encountered a year ago and vividly remember for its distinct environmental humour. From signing a consent form with an asparagus fern to performing rainforest-themed charades, Pengskul’s work seamlessly entwines ecological deliberations with existential inquiries, playfully nudging us to reflect on the act of co-inhabiting the world. 

Peering into the hollowed-out coconut husk embedded with a RaspberryPi-powered touchscreen, I rewatch the looping video. Captured with a 360-degree camera, it shows Pengskul at a hawker centre, adorned with a palm frond twice her size, consuming a coconut identical to the one before me. This leafy appendage tied to her body clearly points to the coconut’s origins, hinting at the vast resource networks that underpin our daily consumption habits — networks that often go unnoticed in the context of fast-paced consumerism. 

By exhibiting the coconut next to a single-use plastic spoon and straw (remnants from the recorded performance), Pengskul starkly contrasts the glossy disposability of contemporary consumer products with the natural, rough-textured fibres of the coconut husk, conjuring an unsettling dissonance between the material timescales of human-made objects and botanical matter. 

As I continue watching the unusual lunch scenario unfold, I wonder about the correlation  between closeness and care. How close must we be to something before it becomes part of us, and we part of it? Can physical proximity even begin to serve as a measure of kinship? 

The recorded moment seems to probe the depth of our enmeshment with the world, with the act of consuming the coconut becoming a meditative reflection on the boundaries between the self and others. Drawing on Buddhist notions of interbeing, or the mutual interconnectedness of all things, Pengskul’s work blurs the lines between coconut palm and person, suggesting that the boundaries we construct may simply be comforting illusions designed to reinforce our ideas of individuality. 

For, to know what I am, I must also know what I am not, and detach myself from it. But if that perceived distance dissolves, boundaries become more vaporous, allowing things to pass through continuously. What, then, happens at the end of “being” and the start of “becoming”? 

While its title humorously suggests a literal transformation, Becoming coconut is more  about a mental shift, calling us to rediscover our inherent entanglement with the environment we exist in. Compared to its more fixed counterpart of “being,” indicating a state of existence, the term “becoming” suggests a fluid transition and continued (ex)change over time. 

In this space, clear-cut divisions between humans and nature become foggy, and Pengskul’s coconut kinships offer a way of experiencing our selves differently — inviting us to consider not just the coconut itself, but everything connected to it. If we “become coconut,” we are more likely to care about (and take care of) coconut. And, by extension, everything else. Coconut, both word and object, become stand-ins for a broader understanding of our ecological interconnectedness with all things.

Acting as a conduit for care, Pengskul’s work encourages us to reassess our interactions within the world we share with coconuts, dust, fibre, sand, stone, concrete, and cells — reminding us that we are an extensive, jumbled, ever-changing whole. Becoming more acquainted with this entanglement might be key to nurturing a deeper sense of environmental awareness and connected care. 

I left the exhibition feeling a little more coconut, and also a little more human. Perhaps what I needed wasn’t botanical reverie after all, but botanical wakefulness — an alert sensitivity to our interdependence, carried with me wherever I go.

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Becoming coconut was exhibited as part of Becoming ___ at Art Outreach Singapore from 22–30 June 2024. Find out more about the artist at www.isapengskul.com and follow her on Instagram for updates @therealvirtualpengskul. 

Header image courtesy of LASALLE College of the Arts.