2015
Digital print mounted on fabric in aluminium-framed light box
300 x 110 x 12 cm
Tear Screen (A Separation) commemorates a historic fissure. It remakes a detail captured on a film still that apparently shows the tears of Lee Kuan Yew as they were shed on the occasion of Singapore’s exit from Malaysia. Exactly why the Prime Minister had cried continues to be the source of much speculation. In the work, the visible trace of that birth cry, reframed in a vertical format, is reimagined as an obliterating streak of white “tearing” across the screen in a reflection on how Singapore came into itself as a nation through an act of negation.