Chinatown #2 (2001)

While at Plastique Kinetic Worms, Vincent Leow invited me to participate in “Deriving Spaces”, an affiliate exhibition of Nokia Art 2001. The site of all 19 works was Singapore’s “Chinatown” and each one of us was asked to respond to it in some way. My piece attempted to question the term “Chinatown” itself, and for this I created a series of four identical maps but each with texts in the different official languages to articulate the two areas of “Da-bo” and “Xiao-bo” [“Big Town” and “Little Town”] as a better representation of enclave formations by Chinese dialect groups rather than that specific area in Kreta Ayer marked out for tourism. The audience could also collect a miniature postcard of the work from the site, outside a branch of the DBS bank at Hong Lim.