SUDDENLY THE GRASS BECAME GREENER by Kevin W Y Lee
Plant and soil experts came to Singapore in 1978 to study our soil conditions. Our harsh equatorial sun and heavy Southeast Asian rains were not favourable to growing healthy green gramineae. The rains would wash away our topsoil and leach all nutrients.
The experts recommended constant layering of heavy compost fertiliser and lime to our porous soil. The gardener at Istana tested this on his lawns. Suddenly the grass became greener.
Suddenly The Grass Became Greener by Kevin WY Lee is a book of photographs made in Singapore during her 50th year as a nation, and the coincidental death of her gardener.
About Kevin WY Lee
Kevin WY Lee is a photographer and creative director based in Singapore. He has worked in the creative industry in Asia and Australia for over 20 years. In 2010, he founded Invisible Photographer Asia (IPA), an influential platform for Photography & Visual Arts in Asia. Through IPA, Kevin participates vigorously in photography and art across the region as a practitioner, curator and educator.
In his own practice, Kevin is interested in Singapore – her temperament, aesthetic and growing pains. A broader canvas is marked by a curiosity in mortality, and how people cope with the finiteness of being mortal.
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LOST AND FOUND by Do Not Design
DEAR is a zine that collects, archives and immortalises in print, all things fun and unique. From casual conversations to visual essays that aim to assault your senses, to basically anything that piques our curiosity, DEAR celebrates the unusual and the interesting in the spirit of fun. With a healthy pinch of humour and just a dash of seriousness, DEAR is for the everyday person who wishes to uncover the little oddities in everyday life.
For their inaugural issue, they visit nostalgia by exploring the theme Lost and Found in our salad-bowl of a nation, Singapore. Mixed cultures, forgotten identities and the quest for meaning in retrospection are uncovered and probed into by contributing artists Ang Song Nian, Aik Beng Chia, Caleb Ming, Cleo Tsw, Debbie Ong Gie, Ernest Goh, Esther Goh, GT Gan, John Clang, John Nursalim and Yang Tan.
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POINTS OF DEPARTURE by Juria Toramae
Physical landscape of Singapore islands have seen tremendous change over five decades of independence where many feel the disconnect with places regarded as home. In trying to find familiarity amidst the change, photographic articles as memory artefacts are reconstructed and interwoven to form new narratives indicative of their locations at the time. By drawing reference to the sea as a constant, these new narratives localises the artefacts by the present shoreline in hope to make the past less foreign. These narratives are not a literal recollection of the islands or the coast, but a meditation on the ebb and flow of time and the clarity of human memory. Through this exploration, the artist seeks to embark on a journey to understand the nature of belonging.
Points of Departure is an extension of Toramae’s photographic series entitled Temporality that questions memory, familiarity, and displacement by looking into what people choose to document, keep and remember.
With support of the Singapore Memory Project (SMP) and irememberSG fund from 2014 to 2015, the project further incorporates an audio-visual installation and stories inspired by a selection of memories from the islands in collaboration with naval architect/heritage blogger Jerome Lim.
About Juria Toramae
Juria Toramae is a visual artist and photographer based in Singapore. She was born in Morocco, raised in Egypt and Thailand and educated in Malaysia and Singapore. Having lived as an itinerant, she is guided by an interest in place attachment and displacement and her practice reflects on how the environment changes through the lens of memory. Her work often employs archives, fieldwork, and photography to construct realities that are grounded in social memories. Since 2013, her work has been showcased at the Singapore Art Museum at 8Q, the Singapore International Photography Festival, The Photobook Exhibition for Athens Photo Festival (Greece), the Obscura Festival of Photography (Malaysia), and the Chiang Mai University Art Center (Thailand).
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RESIDUE by Marcel Heijnen
This is photography. No double exposures or Photoshopping; just pure photography. Asia-based Dutch artist Marcel Heijnen has developed a simple yet unique method to capture and present an alternate visual reality of our world using just a camera and an untreated clear glass panel.
He roams Asia’s urban centres to find weathered walls, places a large glass pane in front of them, and then waits for the light to hit nearby buildings just so. For a fleeting moment, he can capture their reflections while the patina of the wall behind it steals through. Two realities collapsed into one in a single moment.
In these dreamlike visions, it feels as if the organic distress of the wall is happening to the architecture itself and that is precisely the point. The future contains its past and the past reveals its future, and the only time to experience this is right now, in the present moment.
Residue is about duality and paradox. The old versus the new, the geometric versus the organic, urbanisation versus nature – tensions that ultimately lead to some kind of equilibrium, like a perpetual dance between decay and renewal.
About Marcel Heijnen
Marcel Heijnen is a visual artist, designer and musician. Originally from the Netherlands, Asia has been his home since 1992. Marcel’s creativity is driven by a general curiosity about life and its meaning. He currently uses photography as the main medium for his art, exploring its boundaries in a quest for beauty and expression that goes beyond realism, but gets perhaps a little closer to truth.
Over the past few years he has had solo exhibitions at Month of Photography Asia, Vue Privée and Galeri Utama. He has participated in numerous group shows and the Affordable Art Fairs in both Singapore and Hong Kong. He is represented by Eduard Planting Gallery in Amsterdam and Blue Lotus Gallery in Hong Kong.
Marcel is a co-founder of both Chemistry – the design collective, and Artistry – the Gallery Cafe.
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We Will Have Been Young
The projects presented in this book are the result of the South-East Asian Photography Masterclass, supervised by Jörg Brüggemann and Tobias Kruse during the OBSCURA Festival 2016 and 2017 in Georgetown, Malaysia. The Masterclass was organised as a regional cultural project of the Goethe-Institutes in South-East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.
Photographers featured: Alvin Lau (Malaysia), Amrita Chandradas (Singapore), Muhammad Fadli (Indonesia), Dennese Victoria (the Philippines), Kanel Khiev (Cambodia), Dwi Asrul Fajar (Indonesia), Elliott Koon (Malaysia), Watsamon Tri-yasakda (Thailand), Lee Chang Ming (Singapore), Geric Cruz (the Philippines), Linh Pham (Vietnam), and Yu Yu Myint Than (Myanmar).
The exhibition featuring these works was presented at Objectifs from Jan – Feb 2018.
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NATIONAL THEATRE POP UP KIT
The National Theatre Pop-up Kit is designed as a tribute to relive the memories of National Theatre. It is part of Singapore Design Week 2017 and Archifest 2017.
WAKING UP IN STRANGE PLACES ZINE by Juliana Tan
In 2015, photographer Juliana Tan spent 14 months travelling through 9 countries and 33 cities. Waking Up in Strange Places is a zine that encapsulates her experience in photographs and words.
The zine is designed by Do Not Design. There are 5 chapters that are bound together by magnet. This allows the reader to re-arrange the chapters in any way that they want. Therefore, there is no fixed way of viewing or displaying the zine. The viewer decides their own version of the journey.
The zine also includes some postcards of Juliana’s photographs. Juliana sent out postcards frequently when she was on the road and hopes that the reader will do the same. There are also pages which are large enough that they can be displayed as prints and hung on the wall. All in all, our hope is that the zine is bigger, deeper and larger than the sum of its parts.
Waking Up in Strange Places was selected as part of the Tokyo TDC Annual Awards 2018 book and is also a finalist the Invisible Photographer Asia Photobook Awards 2018.
About Juliana Tan
Juliana Tan is a Singapore-based photographer and director. Trained as a filmmaker, Juliana creates mise-en-scène in her photographs to situate the narrative of her subject. In both stills and motion, she uses lights, colours and composition purposefully, resulting in a crafted image that evoke a carefully-chosen emotion.
She has been published by The New York Times, Fast Company, Neon (Germany), Credit Suisse Bulletin (Switzerland) amongst others. Her advertising and commercial clients include Google, R/GA, T Brand Studio, Rolls-Royce, United Overseas Bank, MediaCorp, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and many others.
While not on assignment, Juliana enjoys exploring new cities to learn about history and culture.
永远同在 Always With Me by Ken Koh
永远同在 Always With Me is a retrospective compilation of photographer Ken Koh’s work from 2007 to 2017. This book was created as a record of what he has done and the places he has been during the past 10 years. The book is meant to inspire and describe to you, through his lenses, a world of both chaos and bliss.
This book contains an introductory personal note on his journey of photography and travel, 10 short poems and 81 photographs taken in over 15 countries, each with an accompanying caption.
Objectifs Gift Certificate
Selecting the perfect gift for any occasion has never been easier. Give your loved ones the gift of choice in the form of our Objectifs Gift Certificate, available in denominations of $20, $50, and $100. The Gift Certificates may be used to offset purchases of our retail products or our workshop fees in the SGD amount stated. For products of higher value, the bearer will be responsible for the difference in prices. Kindly note that we do not personalise Gift Certificates.
A physical copy of the Gift Certificate will be mailed to you upon purchase, which you may then present to your lucky recipient. Alternatively, you may provide us with your recipient’s contact details under the shipping information in the checkout section of our online shop if you would like us to mail the Gift Certificate directly to them.
Redemption:
Simply present the Gift Certificate to our staff when making your purchase at our retail store at 155 Middle Road, Singapore 188977 to redeem.
Before it All Goes by Darren Soh – The Golden Mile
The Golden Mile depicts one of the buildings featured at Darren Soh’s solo exhibition, which was held at Objectifs from August – September 2018. This exhibition presented images of eight iconic sites from Singapore’s early independence years that are now getting demolished and redeveloped. The eight sites are: Pearl Bank Apartments, People’s Park Complex, Golden Mile Complex, Golden Mile Tower, Bedok and Buona Vista Swimming Complexes, Queenstown Cinema, Tanglin Halt Estate and Rochor Centre.
About Darren Soh
Darren Soh’s photographic practice explores architecture, urban landscape and space. An established photographer who is most recognised for his documentation of vernacular architecture, Darren has been placed in several international photography awards over the years, including the Commonwealth Photographic Awards, the Prix de la Photographie, Paris, the International Photography Awards, PDN and ICON de Martell Cordon Bleu. His works have been shown widely, including solo exhibitions at The Esplanade and Objectifs (Singapore Art Week 2015), and internationally at photography festivals like Noorderlicht (The Netherlands) and Obscura (Penang). He has published several monographs including While You Were Sleeping (2004), For My Son (2015) and In the Still of the Night (2016).
Darren was one of the co-founders of Platform.sg, an initiative to showcase photography of Singapore or by Singaporean photographers. As champions of local photography, Platform.sg has gone on to support and publish 22 Singapore photography books and most recently, an exhibition of 34 Singaporean photographers in Istanbul (Apr-May 2018). He continues to advocate for photography as an art form, and contributes actively to the community through frequent public talks and ground up projects that focus on documenting Singapore.