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 expulsion from Malaysia. Exactly why the former 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 a streak of white tearing across the screen. The obliterating stroke reflects on the ambivalence of the moment when the birth of a new entity (an independent Singapore) is tied to the demise of another (a Greater Malaya).