Culture, memory and sensemaking
By Sarita Abeyesundere

Midpoint is a monthly series that invites established Southeast Asian contemporary artists to take stock of their career thus far, reflect upon generational shifts and consider the advantages and challenges of working in the present day. It is part of A&M Dialogues and builds upon the popular Fresh Faces series.

Perception3, ‘We can no longer be strangers after this’, 2022, text installation (in two parts) with mirrored acrylic and LED light, 198 x 210 x 122cm (each). Installation view at the green space near the National Museum of Singapore. Commissioned by Singapore Night Festival. Photo by Seah Sze Yunn. Image courtesy of Perception3.

This month’s guest is Regina De Rozario, a Singaporean artist, writer and educator. Drawing from psychogeographic methodologies, she uncovers emotion, memory and power structures embedded within the fabric of society. Her work is reflective and beckons the viewer to pose questions to themselves. Regina is also part of the interdisciplinary artist duo ‘Perception3’ together with Seah Sze Yunn.

Perception3, ‘Locus’, 2012, Video still. Single-channel video with sound, 2mins 39secs. Image courtesy of Perception3.

Could you share a decision or event that marked a significant turn or moment in your path as an artist?

I would say meeting my partner Seah Sze Yunn (in 2004) is undoubtedly one of the key moments of my life, in both personal and artistic terms. It was Sze Yunn who suggested the idea of working together as a creative duo. We were coming from different areas of practice – she is a design practitioner, while I was trained as a painter and had worked in different fields like theatre, film, and publishing. We bonded over a shared love for film and photography, and worked on several experimental videos that were showcased both here and abroad. At first we used our own names, as we each had our own respective artistic and design careers. Eventually, we decided to formalise our partnership by establishing Perception3 in 2007.Over time, I became more vested in developing this collaborative practice instead of my solo work, mainly because I saw the value and enjoyed the process of working in partnership with her. We continue to have the right balance of alignment and friction when it comes to honing our ideas and vision.

Regina De Rozario, ‘The distance that the dead have gone (does not at first appear)’, 2010, digital print on Hahnemuhle photo rag, 50cm x 90cm (each panel). Image courtesy of the artist.

You implement psychogeographic practices such as writing, mapping and walking in your artistic outcomes. How did it become a part of your process and how does it aid in defining your explorations and enquiries?  

I was introduced to the notion of psychogeography by Ben Slater, who was one of my writing tutors at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) in 2007. I was pursuing my BA in Fine Art and Contemporary Writing at the time, which was an interdisciplinary course that foregrounded both material experiments and narrative inquiry, that is, how we “read” the world through narrative arcs, tropes, poetry and semiotics. Ben introduced me to the writings of Iain Sinclair, Tim Etchells and Guy Debord and these got me thinking about how one could “make sense” of one’s environment, just by walking the ground and creating new pathways and maps for others. It also got me thinking about who these walkers and writers were; who had the time and space to do this kind of work; why did they tend to be white, European and male? What would a map made by me–who is none of those things–be like?

My other tutor at the time was Felix Cheong, who taught poetry and encouraged me to work in a multi-sensory way. That is, to move beyond visual observations to incorporate more details of how things tasted or felt like. It sounds rather obvious, but it helped me to recognise how much I tended to foreground one sense over another.

This trajectory of practice led me to joining NAFA’s Masters in Contemporary Practice programme the following year, where I had the opportunity to be guided by Susie Lingham, Susie Wong and Ho Hui May. My project delved into walking as an embodied practice of remembering and sense-making.

From 2008 to 2010, I explored Bidadari, a former cemetery site that was awaiting redevelopment. It was then that I began to delve into the work of Virginia Woolf, Rebecca Solnit, Sophie Calle, and also got to converse with artists such as Suzanne Victor and Amanda Heng who worked with spaces in an embodied way.

A large part of my practice is about examining the sites that I inhabit and the conditions that shape these sites. By this, I mean what a site might look like, and how it is understood through narratives and notions about it. To take a psychogeographical approach is to be in the site in an embodied way, but also to consider all these narrative and assumptive layers that exist. This is especially so for the site-responsive or site-specific work that I do, such as the installations that Perception3 makes for public space. But it is also important for photographs I take or drawings that I make or texts that I write. Even though a site may appear in the background, it informs how I photograph, draw, write, and so on.

A lot of this has to do with how a space affects me psychologically. I have grown particularly sensitive to visual textures, light conditions, scent–and these play a big part in forming my memories. My memories begin quite specifically with sites, where the memory takes place, rather than incidents, or what happened. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I had the opportunity to witness major changes in the landscape. I grew up in a kampung (village) near the seaside which was eventually redeveloped. The shoreline was pushed out and reclaimed. Open skies were blocked out by high-rises, and small shops gave way to big malls. A number of childhood haunts were erased–in the sense that they have been redeveloped to the point of unfamiliarity. So there are no markers to help you to recollect certain memories.

In a way, the psychogeographic approach was a means of wayfinding through memory, but also a means of making sense of a “new” environment in a multisensory way. It produced an interesting tension; an anticipation of loss that I was keen to relay through my work: “The space you are in is temporary. You too are temporary.”

“My project delved into walking as an embodied practice of remembering and sense-making.”

You have called yourself, “a minority within a minority within a minority” and your work ‘Faultlines (or, The questions you ask today will be the questions I ask tomorrow)’ (2018) highlights your experiences with Otherness.  Could you describe these experiences growing up as an Eurasian female in Kampung Siglap, Singapore?

My memory of Kampung Siglap was that it was multi-racial and largely working class. My family was a primarily English-speaking household, but we conversed in Malay and dialects with our neighbours. It was in school though that I began to sense myself as a square peg in a world full of round holes. Sometimes it would come in the form of someone plainly telling me that I was different in some way and did not “fit in”, or recognising when I was left out or not chosen for who I was. Other times, it would come in the form of having to explain some part of myself – like, why is my skin colour this way, or why is my name like that, or why could not I afford certain things.

I suppose as a child, you do not think very much of it, even while being on the receiving end of outwardly racist or bigoted comments. You do not have the language then to make sense of it or to respond. You are told not to make a fuss, to learn how to go along with it. But then these memories would come back from time to time, in the sense of “Hmm, I wonder why these things keep happening.” Or, why do these questions feel intrusive even when I am told that they are coming from a place of curiosity or ignorance? In a way, it has shaped the way I think about notions of identity, difference and belonging, and how one might feel “othered” through language.

Regina De Rozario, ‘Faultlines (or, The questions you ask today will be the questions I ask tomorrow)’, 2018, handwriting on pillar with photographs, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of The Private Museum.

This work is made up of 101 questions that you pose to yourself and your audience, wrapped around a pillar along with childhood photographs. Could you describe the process and what it gave to you? 

The work did not come easily to me and I have the show’s curator, Susie Lingham, to thank for planting the seed of my thinking. It was initially conceptualised as a series of handwritten texts on paper, that would accompany the childhood photos that I would include. But it felt too “contained” to showcase the writings and photographs within frames. Susie encouraged me to spend some time in the gallery at The Private Museum, and that was when it occurred to me to work directly with the site’s interior architecture. The Private Museum was graciously open to the idea and so I used their space as a studio to write and think in. I brought my photographs in and spent a great deal of time thinking about the spaces I had inhabited as a child.

One of the things I used to do was draw on the walls of my home–in particular, I would hide behind the main door and make illustrative vignettes of what happened during the day. Remarkably, my mother encouraged me to express myself this way. The drawings and writings were left up until the day we moved out and the house was demolished. I know this because we revisited the site shortly before the developers tore the house down. Making ‘Faultlines’ was, in a way, a means of reflecting that sense of childhood innocence and expression, but also layering it with the questioning and sense-making that I was engaged with even as a child.

In ‘Faultlines’ as well as many other projects, how do you go about in the selection process of text-based ideations?

It begins with stream-of-conscious writing, and then editing. I take an embodied, multi-sensory approach to both. For example, the initial drafts might be written in response to a particular site, or within a specific time frame. I may write from observations or from memory to describe particular textures and scents. The editing process is about distilling and clarifying. I look at how the words appear. I read them aloud to get a sense of how they resonate with other words. I consider how the texts might evoke other memories, or how they might create entry points towards encountering the work. Overall, the text needs to work as a prompt, for you to encounter not just the artwork itself, but to pay attention to the site in which the text is situated. Also, to pay attention to yourself within this encounter.

Photograph of Hong Lim Park fountain, taken as part of Regina De Rozario’s research for ‘Neither X Nor Y’ (2023). Image courtesy of the artist.

Your latest work ‘Neither X Nor Y’ (2023) is a site-specific audio piece that invites the audience to engage and contemplate upon places, namely, the National Library, the Victoria Theatre, and Hong Lim Park in Singapore. What made you select these particular places? 

‘Neither X Nor Y’ was conceptualised as a part of a larger study about art in public spaces in Singapore, and a questioning of what a “public” is composed of. So the shortlisting of sites was guided by some initial broad questions: where is public art usually located? Where could we place art? What makes a public space a public space? Historically, where could you find different types of publics gathered? How do they usually behave in this space? What are the ways in which they encounter art in these spaces?

There were also personally embodied reasons. Did I have specific memories of these sites? How familiar was I to their histories? Were there particular narratives about these sites that are not often talked about? In a way, all three sites were reflective of our shared cultural history, but had entry points to thinking about other hidden or suppressed histories. For example, Hong Lim Park is an unremarkable, banal green space on the surface when you compare it to some of our other parks. But it is rich with political history and is currently a designated spot for advocacy purposes. Yet, how often do we visit? How present is it in our consciousness? If it was redeveloped tomorrow, would it matter? Why or why not?

Apart from this, I had to consider the overall design of the work. To enable a participant to listen to all three parts of the audio in a single day, I needed to situate the parts within a reasonable distance of each other. You could walk or take a bus between the sites. The sites also needed to be accessible to all types of persons. I was mindful of participants who could be disabled or less mobile.

“What I hope to do is to use my voice and my abilities to relieve someone else’s suffering.”

What do you think has been or is your purpose? How has it kept you going, or at times, how has it been challenging to push against boundaries in order to keep your focus? 

I do not think I have a neat or consistent response to this question of purpose. When I was younger, my purpose was about learning as much as I could and honing my voice. Currently, and broadly speaking, what I hope to do is to use my voice and my abilities to relieve someone else’s suffering. I hope that what I do or say – whether it is through my art or my teaching, or other work that I undertake – helps someone feel comforted or affirmed in some way. I can think of several people, women especially, who have been a source of strength for me, and I would like to be that for others. That said, I am still learning how to do this.

In a way, finding a group of people who provide collective strength and solidarity is important. It is rare to find people who show up for you when you succeed and when you fail. So when I do, I work at those relationships. Knowing that there are people who care about me and who are vested in what I do motivates me. I feel a sense of accountability, so I try to be the best version of myself even when it is hard.

As an art educator what do you believe is your role with students pursuing art education in Singapore?

I see myself as a sounding board. Art students are increasingly diverse, come from different backgrounds, and have different expectations. They might think they know what they want but then soon recognise that they don’t know what they don’t know. Then they graduate and see that the art scene is not as they imagined it to be. It can be quite isolating for some to continue practising after art school, especially if you are introverted or find it challenging to make connections with others. So, I see myself as someone who listens to them, and tries to impart some habits of thinking and making. I ask them questions about what they value: what’s important to you here? What is it about this topic or this material that you care about? And if you care about this, how do you demonstrate this care? What processes or actions do you need to follow through?

What would be a key piece of advice to young art practitioners?

Show up and do the work that you personally care about. Take care of the people you work with. Respect your time and your labour, as well as the time and labour of others who show up for you. Engage with the art world critically. You don’t have to work in it to be an art practitioner.

“Engage with the art world critically. You don’t have to work in it to be an art practitioner. ”

Are there upcoming projects you would like to share?

I am currently writing my doctoral dissertation about public art in Singapore, and teaching at both NAFA and LASALLE College of the Arts. I have a couple of post-doctoral proposals that I am considering which will continue my investigation into artistic practice in public space. Sze Yunn and I have also been discussing a possible retrospective of Perception3’s work to mark over 15 years of practice. We are also looking into a new series of site-responsive works.

Access the full Midpoint series here.