NTU Museum writing competition winning entry
By Jess Lim

Marvin Tang, 'Further Reading' (installation view), 2025. Image courtesy of NTU Museum.

Zeno’s paradox posits that it must be impossible for Achilles to catch up to a tortoise, since for every unit of distance he covers to reach its initial position, the tortoise must have advanced an additional further distance. Yet, everyone always asks whether Achilles can catch up to the tortoise, but no one ever asks: “How is Achilles?”. While Achilles can of course, in practice, catch up to the tortoise, what if Achilles were an undergraduate student at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) completing a four-year programme and the tortoise was a metaphor for a utopia where their university experience was no longer hampered by never-ending construction on campus, fraught with delays, and the associated road diversions, felling of shade-providing trees and distracting noise pollution? In that case, we can probably all relate to how Zeno’s Achilles must feel.

If I think back on the past four years of my undergraduate life, there has never not been some form of construction constantly morphing the landscape of this campus. In fact, every batch of matriculated students probably imagines NTU differently. When I think of the bus stop to get to Pioneer Hall from the Hive, I think of a janky old-school orange-and-white makeshift bus stop at the edge of Yunnan Garden, while a newly matriculated student would think of the bespoke pine wood bus stop at the base of the (fairly) newly constructed Gaia. When I think of getting to NIE from North Spine, I think of a breezy walk atop the pleasantly wide overhead bridge. With this bridge now demolished to create space for the upcoming Nanyang Crescent MRT station, the commute is now a confusing and tedious trek across a narrowed road divided by brutal concrete road blockades.

Sarah Choo Jing and Mathias Choo, 'A Walk in the Park' (installation view), 2025. Image courtesy of NTU Museum.

The exhibition ‘Construction in Every Corner’—a title that is humorously blunt and pulls no punches—reflects on this phenomenon that we inhabitants of this campus have been subjected to through three artworks by students of NTU past and present. Each piece brings unexpected and refreshing perspectives to the conversation and invites us to consider the varied facets of what “construction” may entail.

Marvin Tang, ‘Further Reading’

Do virtual snails meander on pixel trees? ‘Further Reading’ by Marvin Tang— a multimedia installation combining construction hoarding, photography and video—suggests so, with a particularly memorable scaffolding wall in forest green populated by digital snails living in tiny rectangular screens embedded into the wall. These molluscs are hypnotic to look at and elicit the snail's pace at which the construction on campus seems to proceed. The whole set-up is bizarre and unnatural, with the snails being bisected as soon as they crawl past the boundaries of the screen, but this is to be expected. After all, there is nothing natural about the phenomenon Tang draws our attention to: the adorning of temporary construction scaffoldings with the simulacrum of nature that inhabitants of NTU, and perhaps all of Singapore, have become more than familiar with in recent years.

The installation features a pile of green and brown scaffolding panels—usually arranged to form a tree—placed parallel to form a conspicuous square in the centre of the installation; elevated to the level of found object art and visually resembling colour field painting, viewers are asked to consider them as objects of visual culture. In the process, they shed their original role as barricades and now ironically need to be protected by the construct of gallery etiquette, as asserted through the imperative of “Please do not touch” repeated across the black demarcation line on the ground.

Debbie Ding, ‘Wastelands’

‘Wastelands’ by Debbie Ding can be experienced in two formats: as an elegiac video work where a narrated lyric poem ruminates on lost or unwanted objects within a site for future development, or as an immersive VR game within the same setting where players can wander around a wasteland and pick up and hurl garbage at other players. More than just an unbelievably fun and satisfying mechanic, the gameplay of ‘Wastelands’ echoes the work’s core theme, what we might once value as treasure, such as an object uncovered with great effort from within the vast wasteland, can just as quickly become trash to be tossed aside without a care.

The peculiarities of the objects that can be found within the wasteland make it clear that this is no mere commentary on the cycle of consumerism, but also the cycles of the systems valued by society. Notable objects included within the plethora of objects are a European-style bust whose provenance traces to the United Kingdom, as the narrator tells us, a symbol of Western cultural hegemony; and a PhD thesis, perhaps made even more poignant by the fact that the artist is currently completing her PhD in NTU. On a site rich with unknown future potential, Ding asks us to reflect on what items of the past we choose to discard (or perhaps demolish?) may reveal the values of the zeitgeist.

Sarah Choo Jing & Mathias Choo, ‘A Walk in the Park’

Finally, ‘A Walk in the Park’ by Sarah Choo Jing & Mathias Choo presents a video installation where “construction” is not perceived as an arduously unpleasant process in the lead-up to completion, or even through its final products. Rather, attention is drawn to the labour it takes to “construct”, something that may usually be taken for granted, by giving us melancholic glimpses into the aftermath of the “construction” of events. The multichannel video installation invites viewers to experience it in the round, revealing the frameworks and bracings that constitute the hardware of the work. Charmingly, even the form of the work resonates with the theme of usually unseen efforts underpinning the videos.

Across all three works in the exhibition, the utilisation of virtual images is compelling in capturing the sense of alienation between the grating present lived experience and the promises of a promised future that may or may not come to fruition. While this exhibition will not expedite any construction works, perhaps the poetic lenses the works lend to construction can make things slightly more bearable.

‘Construction in Every Corney’, presented by NTU Museum, is on view from 14 January 2025 to 17 April 2025 at The Art Gallery @ NIE NTU, Singapore.