My Ah Kong’s Big House

What kind of society takes shape when everything starts to look the same? Chua Chye Teck asks this through his sculptural installation. Twelve white structures stand upright, tightly packed. Their facades are old washing boards taken from Chua’s father's factory. They look like the exterior of Singapore’s public housing blocks, otherwise known as HDBs. A familiar sight in Singapore today.

Chua made this work in the late 1990s, as artists in Singapore were turning to installation, community projects, found materials and their surroundings. Trained in sculpture and later turning to photography, Chua worked with simple materials to reflect on Singapore’s changing landscape. He first showed this work at Plastique Kinetic Worms, an artist-run space in a Chinatown shophouse. Small, independent spaces made such experiments possible. In 1991, LASALLE alumna Suzann Victor co-founded 5th Passage, transforming a shopping mall corridor at Parkway Parade into a space for art. These alternative venues mattered. They gave artists more options, going beyond the white walls of traditional museums.