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January 30, 2026 — 5:00am
The ugly truth is that almost all of us are playing host to tiny creatures that feast on dust and human skin. Household casebearers, a species of moth, are barely visible but once you know about them – and have seen them up close – they become impossible to unsee.
It’s the push and pull between discomfort and function that has inspired artist Tan Zi Hao to make them the centrepiece of his work, The Scale of One.
Inspired to spotlight them during COVID lockdowns, the Malaysia-based artist describes them as “one of the most fundamental non-human life forms that exist in domestic spaces”. These creatures, he says, “make use of materials humans consider worthless and aged to create their own home”.
The Scale of One is one of many works featured in the Singapore Biennale that examines how humans interact with nature.
Curated by Selene Yap, Duncan Bass, Hsu Fang-Tze and Ong Puay Khim, the Biennale includes over 80 local and international artists and over 100 works, including 30 new commissions. This year’s theme is Pure Intention.
Co-curator Yap says Zi Hao is “trying to present something that is small, minute and domestic and everyday in a different light”. Sure, they may make you feel a bit uncomfortable, she says, but they are an inherent part of our world.
Australian artists Emily Floyd and Angelica Mesiti are also on the bill, with Floyd creating a playful hybrid space in the gardens called Field Library with seating and books that invites visitors to pause and take stock. It comments on learning outside the classroom and who has access to knowledge.
Drivers along Peninsula Link would know Floyd’s 13-metre high Public Art Strategy, 2006, colloquially known as the Bird and Cheese, which references Melbourne landmarks, including the Denton Corker Marshall ‘cheese sticks’ at the beginning of the Tullamarine Freeway and sculptor Ron Robertson-Swann’s Vault in the yellow of the cheese.
Yap says when the curators came together to consider what Pure Intention means, they came up with the idea of the city of Singapore as a proposition.
“That helped us to consider the different practices we had encountered that could draw or introduce parallels to the theme,” she says. “You can assume Singapore is authoritarian or carries a certain mood … but what we wanted … [was] the idea of artists introducing gaps within this system that is always designed for efficiency.
“So the way that artists carry stories with them, whether it’s through myth-making or rumours or folklore or geopolitical history that is factual, it’s about bringing in these voices and trying to introduce them to a local public.”
For the first time in its history, works in the Biennale are located in a series of clusters – across the historic Fort Canning Park and by the Rail Corridor (created by the British that ran from the port through Singapore up to Malaysia), inside the Lucky Plaza and Far East shopping centres, as well as in the old Raffles Girls School.
By embedding art in unexpected places, locals will happen across the Biennale in their everyday lives, and visitors will be taken to unexpected domains.
At the Lucky Plaza shopping centre, frequented by the large Filipino community in Singapore, a shop space is transformed into the domestic: an apartment complete with couches, television, photos on the wall - and a karaoke machine.
To make The Filipino Superwoman X H.O.M.E. Karaoke Living Room, Filipino artist Eisa Jocson teamed up with migrant worker rights group Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics (HOME) and Filipino domestic workers to make music videos. Exploring ideas of kinship, care-giving and displacement, the space doubles as a rest stop and a political statement.
The environment outside the domestic is explored in Alvaro Urbano’s stunning Garden City, (Orchidaceae), a stainless-steel rendering of flora and fauna, inspired by 19th-century illustrations. It references Singapore’s Orchid Gardens, part of the Botanical Gardens, a curated, man-made space that bends nature to its will while at the same time creating conditions for the stunning flowers to thrive.
The work also riffs on the orchid as a tool of diplomacy; many of the species in the gardens are named after visiting dignitaries, Nelson Mandela and Margaret Thatcher among them.
It also conjures ideas of the economic crops introduced and cultivated by the British East India Company during early colonial times in Singapore, such as coffee, nutmeg and pepper.
Artist Tehching Hsieh eschewed the natural world altogether, spending a year in a loft in Tribeca, New York. Known as the One Year Performance 1978-79, or the Cage Piece, it involved him locking himself in a cage inside the apartment.
During the year he didn’t talk, read, write, listen to the radio or watch television. His friend, Cheng Wei Kuong, brought him food, removed his waste and documented the project by taking a daily photograph. A glimpse of this process is displayed at Singapore Art Museum.
Exploration of the interplay between humans and the world around them runs through the works. For Tan Zi Hao, it navigates both the big picture and the personal. Seeing the tiny creatures rendered large “reveals so much about human exceptionalism, our perspective – and our size – in relation to the world”, he explains. But his work with the moths also relates to his ageing parents. When studying overseas a few years ago, whenever he returned to his parents’ place he noticed more and more household casebearers.
Knowing his parents are tidy and clean up frequently, he saw the proliferation of the bugs as indicative of an unusual buildup of household dust, “reflecting my parents’ gradual decline in ability to clean up the house”.
“I became curious about the ambiguity in the very idea of ‘dust’. Is dusting our home a means to erase traces of our impending mortality? Is ‘dust’ nothing but stuff undergoing a process of ageing or decay? What do we imply when we describe a society as ‘ageing’; what does it say about our understanding of use, worth and value?”
Singapore Biennale, organised by Singapore Art Museum, runs until March 29.
Kerrie O’Brien travelled courtesy of Singapore Biennale.
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