Breath of the Land 《呼吸之地》is a response to Singapore’s ever-evolving built environment, reflecting on themes of belonging, utility and memories embedded in the urban landscape. Lim Soo Ngee and Yang Jie explore the idea of spaces “breathing”, drawing on the constellation of relationships and layered histories that circulate places. Rooted in a shared interest in our relationship with the past, the artists work extensively with found materials and objects in their practices, examining how material culture bears the imprints of passing time.

The Esplanade Concourse is transformed into a stage reminiscent of those used for street operas in 1960s Singapore. Large architectural structures are sheathed in construction materials like tarpaulin and safety netting, alluding to the country’s constant pursuit of urban renewal. The installation comes alive as the sculptures expand and contract, revealing traditional objects like a coffee pot, tingkat and cooking implements hidden within, evoking scenes of streetside hawkers and bygone days. Breath of the Land 《呼吸之地》reclaims and retells shared memories, of how echoes of a distant past continue to reach into the present.

In Conversation with the Artist

In this interview, Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay's CEO Yvonne Tham and Visual Arts Programmer Ge Xiaocong sit down with artists Lim Soo Ngee and Yang Jie in conversation about Breath of the Land 《呼吸之地》, their new exhibition at the Esplanade Concourse.

On collaboration

Yvonne Tham (YT): How did this collaboration take off—did the conversation start with this project, or has it been an ongoing discussion between you both? How did your practices come together through this work? 

Lim Soo Ngee (LS): When I was first approached to contribute a work for the concourse, I felt that it is quite a big and challenging space. I decided firstly that I wanted no carving, no figurative representations, as it would be difficult for me to populate a space of such size with carvings alone. The second thing I thought about was material; I had been thinking about the striped tarpaulin canvas. As I reflected on the material, descriptions and connections slowly emerged, word by word, forming a text that helped me to visualise the concept. Then I thought of how things should be dynamic, and naturally Yang Jie’s practice came to mind. 

Yang Jie (YJ): When Mr Lim contacted me, I offered to come onboard as a producer. However, he encouraged me to participate as an artist and insisted that I make my own mark on the work, as well as to develop my own practice through it. The tarpaulin canvas and the ways in which they were used had been in our discussions since my time as a student under Mr Lim. We pick up our past conversations, and slowly different kinds of movements come to mind, like how it quivers and flutters with the wind. I responded to Mr Lim’s ideation process by adding my own fragments of thought and phrases to his text. And slowly, the dialogue unfolds through these exchanges. 

LS: The practice of writing down fragments of thoughts came from my habits in woodcarving, where I like to inscribe a few lines of description about the figures created. The descriptions are intentionally kept vague so each viewer can freely imagine the story, which helps to add dimension to the sculpture’s character. Since I don’t sketch before I make my sculptures, I become an observer to my own creation as it takes shape. The facial expressions of my wooden figures, as well as their individual personalities, are only revealed towards the end. I believe an artwork should have a certain poetry, a certain literary quality to it, a potential to evoke narratives and emotions. That matters a lot to me as an artist.

YT: Can I understand from your perspective, since the work took shape over the exchange of phrases, why have you decided to leave out the text in the final presentation? 

LS & YJ: Although we included the text in our proposal, we never intended for it to be part of the work. To us, it is a part of our process. We feel that a work should be able to stand on its own without texts, especially for a work that aims to evoke individual experiences. Therefore, the work should not require language but to surpass it and resonate with viewers on an intuitive and instinctive level. The text is important to the process, but we don’t see it as the thing that defines the work. We hope to convey our concepts through the visuals and sounds of the work and to leave room for the viewer to interpret what these mean to them personally.

On individual practice

YT: Where are you now in terms of your respective artistic practices? This project involves quite a few ready-mades compared to Mr Lim’s sculptural practice, where forms are usually created entirely from the material. Do you see this as a sort of departure or continuation or something that has always been a part of your creative process? 

LS: I don’t really have a fixed ‘style’ or method; it depends on the medium and the concept. It isn’t always figurative, and it isn’t always with wood. I’ve done stone carving and painting as well. The choice of material also influences the style, as each medium or material comes with its own set of limitations and qualities. With this project, making so many large sculptures would mean that they’ll likely end up being stored indefinitely or thrown away, which would be a waste either way. 

YT: For Yang Jie, movement has been a big part of your practice, but usually on quite a different scale, something that corresponds to human interaction, something that feels quite life scale and intimate. However, this project seems to operate on an almost landscape scale; how did you approach this shift? 

YJ: I have Mr Lim to thank for this part because he pushed me to make things bigger. My choice of objects and forms comes from a very human-orientated perspective. I always had a bit of apprehension when it comes to big works because it’s something I feel I have very little control over. How should I approach big spaces from the scale of bodily gestures and everyday objects? It helps to rethink our spatial relationships. We are surrounded by our environment; how then do we observe and reflect upon these everyday interactions and make them sculptural.¹ It is from this vein that I expanded upon the objects and their connections—from a single object to the space it inhabits and to the series of relationships that enmesh various objects within that space. Ultimately, it is still about the human experience. How we perceive movement, how we react and interact with these moving objects, and how the interaction evokes memories is interesting to me.

YT: Mr Lim’s practice has that kind of almost instinctive and poetic response to the moment. On the other hand, Yang Jie’s works seem to require a sort of planning and exactness to create machines that work as intended. How have your differing methods come together in this project?

LS & YJ: With kinetic sculptures, planning and precision are mostly a part of the execution process, perhaps a technical necessity in realising the creative impulse. The mental space of ideating and conceptualising is quite separate from the process of making. However, the two parts do influence and inform each other; every work emerges from a process of negotiating between concept and making.

On responding to the material and the space

Ge Xiaocong (GX): Architectural spaces and structures feature prominently in your ideation text, highlighting a certain site-specificity to the phenomenon and memories described. How much of the work was conceived in response to the concourse space, and what were the considerations?

LS: When pondering over the concourse space, I was thinking about the various directions of my practice, what other things I have done, and the Wind Chamber² came to mind. The Wind Chamber series began as a wooden sculpture and has expanded into four or five iterations now, exploring into structures and space, as well as different materials and their histories. Previously, I made some of my wind chambers out of rubber wood collected from the rubber plantations in Johor Bahru. It made me think about the historical contexts that frame my material, how it carries its own meaning and significance. Another of my wind chambers responded to the history of a brick factory, which inspired me to make wind chambers that could perhaps rise to two or three stories high, maybe even allowing viewers to enter the structure. These were the ideas on my mind when I approached this site. Therefore, with each new material and each new space, the wind chamber evolves, and it will likely continue to evolve into new forms in the future.

YJ: When we came down for a site visit, our first impression about the space was that it is quite complex, with high ceilings and such a long shape, in addition to the ground being a flight of stairs. Our first thought was, how do we compose this space visually? And Mr Lim was thinking about how we could adapt Wind Chamber for this space, and perhaps we can break the horizontality with a towering structure. For me, the ramps running lengthwise inspired me to create a sort of corridor.

YT: I remember these tarpaulin canvases from Wayang stages; they were used to create the backstage. And I thought it was a serendipitous link to us being a performing arts centre, harking back to that tradition and the visuals of streetside performances.

LS & YJ: It was quite unintentional that work resonated with the site in this way; perhaps the material itself contains latent associations that were activated by simply being in this space. It was also a nice coincidence that our setup played with light and shadows quite theatrically. As we brainstormed further, we wanted to give a feeling of a backstage, like the back of the Wayang stage, where you could catch glimpses of actors doing their makeup and their moving shadows cast on the tarpaulin as they rehearsed their parts.

YT: With the use of tarpaulin and the shadow play of cups, steamboat pots, and tableware, there is a very intuitive connection that we can draw between the backstage, the actors, and the activity of eating. But at the same time, the setup also conjures memories of a mundane family meal. These oddly specific materials combined with somewhat ambiguous narratives really open the work to resonate with a wide spectrum of experiences.

YT: The elements of the works come together very poetically, even with the title of the work, Breath of the Land. For me, it recalls the history of the site: how the Esplanade sits on reclaimed land that is completely new, and therefore a site on which we can witness its first breaths. The work also embodies many immaterial aspects—light, sound, movements, winds—as opposed to common perceptions of visual art to be solid and static. All these fleeting and reactive elements bring the work into the realm of performance, which echoes the nature of Esplanade being a performing arts centre. The interactivity of the work further enhances the feeling of participation. Was it always part of your intention for the work to be interactive? 

YJ: We knew we wanted to have some form of audience participation. The idea of speaking into a horn came about when I was testing other concepts during my residency in Berlin. I shared a video of it with Mr Lim, and he thought it was rather fun and symbolic, and perhaps we could explore the idea of ‘breathing life’ into something. As artists, we’ve always contemplated how places are products of human activity. We make spaces into places with our movements and memories, which give meaning to them.³ This concept anchors the project. We were thinking about how our movements can breathe life into a space, how human breath and human voice can influence a space, how we can amplify that through the tower, how we can make the tower breathe, how we can make a space breathe.

On nostalgia and progress

YT: You mentioned how humans create meaning of a land by existing on it. We exist in a cityscape that is constantly changing. Looking at the work, there seems to be a very strong element of nostalgia, which is also a common sentiment in Singapore, where things are taken away from us quickly. Is nostalgia something that has informed this work, or is it something you are trying to transcend through the work? 

YJ: I do a lot of collecting in my practice; most of them are used and old things such as cups and plates, partly because I need plenty of them to test in prototypes. Sometimes they perform very specific functions, such as being counterweights or weights that stabilise movements. While it is perhaps not a conscious decision, I do feel a sense of sadness when things change. Perhaps there is an urge to preserve, to keep a piece of something from the past so it may conjure a memory that can inform us on decisions of the present. Like the hotpot, the shape of the pot may change, and looking at an old pot may evoke nostalgia, but the memory of eating together with family is something that is still applicable today. Old objects act as points of reflection, which could perhaps help us navigate the present and locate ourselves in time and space.

LS: Nostalgia was not necessarily at the forefront of my thought process. I tend to gravitate towards things that are discarded, forgotten, or overlooked and how I may bring them into different spaces and contexts. I am drawn to that kind of disruption. 

YT: Yes, in fact, I have overheard people who walk past the work and assumed that it was an incomplete construction project. They instinctively recognise the tarpaulin as part of the visual language of construction and renovation. 

YJ: In a way, our familiarity with this visual language is proof of the changefulness of our country; something somewhere is always being renewed, changed, or revamped. 

GX: Yang Jie’s practice often explores the idea of things being perpetually in progress, incomplete, and developing. In fact, maintenance and repairs are a common part of your practice, and you are very frank about the nuts and bolts behind your artworks. Added with Mr Lim’s use of an industrial material like tarpaulin, the work seems to shed light on labour that is often overlooked or ignored. Is that something the project hopes to convey through these artistic decisions? 

LS: To me, the material is a witness to times. It used to be a common sight in Singapore to see constructions clad in them; now you rarely see them anymore. Maybe with the change in our living standards, other things have changed too. I have a desire to bring this ‘low-class,’ ‘forgotten’ material and its memories into this space. 

YJ: I think that the whole idea of maintenance being an invisible activity, something that should only happen out of public eyes, concealed behind tarpaulin or in the dead of the night, is a very common societal expectation in Asia. And when things break down, it is seen as a failure of the maintenance team and of the machine itself. There is a general intolerance of failures regardless of scale and severity. In a society where people and machines are sometimes subjected to the same pressures of productivity, the machines’ failure perhaps imbues them with a human quality. To make machines imperfect perhaps also means to make them more human.

As part of their creative process, Lim Soo Ngee and Yang Jie explored their ideas by constructing a text collaboratively. Download the accompanying poem below.

Breath of the Land《呼吸之地》 is on view at Esplanade Concourse from 16 Jan – 6 Jul 2025.