Intimate Landscapes is a curated discussion on methods: how does one survey, document, map, draw, represent, write, collect, picture, archive, or narrate a landscape? Taking the format of the prep-room, the exhibition is a studio-in-process that will develop and evolve over the span of a year, where three M.Arch graduates from NUS’ Department of Architecture (Lin, 2018; Mun, 2020; Goi, 2021) revisit their thesis archives, while a fourth who is presently undertaking a doctoral study at the Department (Wong, PhD candidate 2019—2023) assembles a new drawing archive.

Whether through the individuals’ own creative research practices, or as a collaborative studio, weaving through all four of their archives is also an enquiry to reconcile an idea of ‘landscape’ that pits modes of subjectivity, experience, situatedness and affect against usually irreconcilable and incompatible but dominant modes of knowledge-making. Across different types of sites — coastlines, intertidal beaches, highway infrastructures, sand hills, salt mines — the works present a detraction from traditional modes of reading and representing the vastness of landscapes often approached from aerial and rather detached and disembodied viewpoints of maps and masterplans. Conversely the visual explorations grapple instead with a different scale of landscape: it is an ‘intimate view of details’, concerned with materialising and making visual what is intangible, out-of-bounds, fleeting, or unquantifiable. Collectively through their methods of seeing, measuring, and documenting, they ask: what might an intimate view of a landscape bring to the designers’ working bench or drafting board?

Collaborators (DoA Alumni/PhD Candidate)
Goi Yong Chern; Lin Derong; Ian Mun; Wong Zi Hao

Mentor/advisor (DoA)
Associate Professor Dr. Lilian Chee

Titled Field Notes – Intimate Landscapes, the archival site is a repository for all materials gathered by the curators, Siddharta Perez and Nurul Kaiyisah (Kai), inspired from conversations with the artists themselves. These resources are from both the artistic explorations of the 4 artists and also, arising from the tangents explored by the curators themselves. Visit the website.