top of page

From A. Nidus to Artivism: queer plants and bodies in the Garden City

Prepared for publication by Shannon Sim and Zhao Yushan

Abstract.

Asplenium nidus (A. Nidus), commonly known as Bird’s-nest Fern, is a subject of queerness in Singapore. Through asexual proliferation, A. Nidus defies the conventional gendered schema of reproduction, much like LGBTQ+ whose identities are considered by the state as not in line with cultural sensibilities. The fern's invasive growth makes it a weed, defined by desires of the bureaucratic gardener, who deems it a threat to spatial and social order within the Garden City. This echoes state attempts to sideline LGBTQ+ to the margins via hegemonic narratives of family for heteronormative nation-building. Examining botanical art in Singapore, this paper proposes that it can serve as a covertly strategic means of claiming queer visibility in a city that disciplines its plants and people. By ascribing value to artistic aesthetics, botanical art recognises plants as equally powerful, germinative counterparts in art making. Through the thematic ambivalence of artworks, queer visibility is reclaimed by shedding light on the past and present histories of oppression while demonstrating how queers have resiliently resisted persecution. Drawing on theorists José Muñoz’s Queer Utopia and Deborah Bird Rose’s Shimmer, this paper proposes a dialectical model where past, present, and future inflect upon each other to negotiate queer visibility with the state through botanical art, offering a powerfully hopeful and educated mode of contestation. By articulating a queer utopia while interrogating the immediate and past histories of LGBTQ+, botanical art demands an alternative future while recognising ancestral histories that flows into the present.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​
 

​

Fig.1: “Ferns along Yale-NUS” by Dylan Chan, 2023.
 

Asplenium nidus (A. Nidus), or commonly known as Bird’s-nest Fern, can be found nestled on wayside trees throughout Singapore. Fronds curl and twist in sinuous movements to the rhythms of an erotic dance, alluring critters of various forms which settle within its leafy enclosure. While the fern rewards mynahs, fungi and microscopic bacteria with nutrients and protection, it expects little in return from these dwellers. Unlike common flowering plants that rely on animals for pollination, A. Nidus can self-reproduce through its sporangia, minuscule sacs that coddle hundreds of life-propagating spores. 

​

From a heteronormative perspective, the fern defies the conventional schema of male-female reproduction—its deviance renders it a subject of queerness, much like LGBTQIA+ individuals in Singapore whose gender and sexual identities are considered by the state as ‘not in line with the cultural sensibilities of Asia or what it means to be asian’ (Ramdas 1449). Plants and bodies get entwined in a messy state of queer relations insofar as both are sidelined within the ‘Garden city’ (Lee). For A. Nidus, its asexual reproductive system causes it to multiply rapidly (plausibly much faster than humans) but excessive growth is precisely what makes it a weed,  invasive ‘plants that grow where they are not wanted’ and hence must be trimmed, weeded out, thrown away (Brickell 645). The fern is only defined as a weed in relation to the desires of the bureaucratic gardener who deems it a threat to spatial and social order. The implication is that “nature has flourished, but it has also been contained, disciplined, and manipulated to the point that conservation and state control have become one in the same'' (Barnard and Heng 283). In essence, queer plants are to be straightened out of sight, the streets made neat for most citizens. 

​

Analogously, queer-identifying local geographer Kamalini Ramdas exposes the state’s attempts to sideline LGBTQIA+ individuals to the margins of the city via ‘hegemonic narratives of family and community for heteronormative nation-building’. She discusses how laws and policies that are framed, created and maintained by the state revolve around the assumption that a heterosexual family is the basic unit of Singaporean society (1448). Overall, the “queerness” of plants and people share a history of state restriction and attempted obscuration; if weeds or LGBTQIA+ individuals are not visible, then they do not exist. 

​

Given this context, what possibilities of co-created contestation can arise from intertwined histories? How might silent plants speak on behalf of silenced people? By examining works from local artists in Singapore that revolve around flora, I consider botanical art a subtly tactful means of claiming queer visibility in a city that disciplines “inappropriate” sex and “unwanted” stalks. Within a city-state which disavows outright resistance by LGBTQIA+, botanical artworks leverage on their thematic ambivalence, clinging onto seemingly unremarkable leaves, branches or vines within the visual language of the work to discreetly articulate a ‘queer utopia’, a horizon to aspire towards (Muñoz 1). In response, other artworks can serve to acknowledge the lived experiences of queer individuals who have been marginalised. In doing so, these artists assert their resilience and renegotiate the limits of societal acceptance, thereby insisting on ‘the possibility of another world’ that advocates against queer discrimination (Muñoz 1).

​

Before examining these artworks, it should be noted that botanical art in Singapore is historically rooted in scientific documentation. At the outset of British colonisation in 1819, British elites such as the First Resident of Singapore, Sir William Farquhar, commissioned extremely detailed and accurate illustrations of local flora so as to identify, analyse, and classify these unfamiliar plants in their records (Dozier et al. 19). The colonial logic of classification and taxonomy as an epistemological approach places plants under systemic domination as they are eurocentrically drawn, dissected and defined—nature is treated as a passive entity that can and ought to be categorised by humans. Such anthropocentric exploitation also extends beyond their treatment of plants to indigenous residents in Singapore who were racially categorised and segregated under a European governing elite (Rocha 97-98). Anthropocentrism, as a key rhetoric behind these botanical and racial colonialist projects, thus affirms a shared history of domination of the ruling elites over plants and other people.

​

In this essay, I posit a redefined notion of botanical art that leans into the creative, abstract, otherworldly presentations of plants. Botanical art as a revised term decentralises the colonist by regarding plants not as objects or mere artistic media to be utilised by humans, but instead as germinative co-partners with humans. Plants, beyond existing in their own ontological right, are valued counterparts for their potential to create thematic ambivalence in art. When plants are integrated with human bodies in an artwork, they resist easy categorisation by viewers, allowing them to host queer activist ideologies in the analysis of such botanical artworks. Taking on a complex visual language, plants subtly mediate the voices of marginalised LGBTQIA+ individuals. Thus, this redefined concept of botanical art broadly seeks to destabilise the dominance of colonial anthropocentrism which historically limited botanical art to rigid, technical drawings of plants and instead valorise artistic representations of plants for their empowering and expressive capabilities.

​

In this way, my essay aligns with Cuban American theorist José Esteban Muñoz who also sought to redefine terms to enable certain marginalised communities, in particular, queer individuals. In his book Cruising Utopia, Muñoz pushed against a widespread anti-future rhetoric of queer theory[1]. Anti-futurism urged queer individuals to reject the idea of a heteronormative future which prioritised constant reproduction and excluded those who did not conform. Instead, anti-futurist rhetoric encouraged queer individuals to embrace the present, in order to find jouissance within the breakdown of stable identities and a singular way of living as opposed to reaching out towards the future for hope. However, in response to this rhetoric, Muñoz pointed out that anti-futurism only applied to white queer individuals, who had the luxury to reject the future as their whiteness still guaranteed them a future in American society. He argued that queer youth of colour on the other hand, as victims of racial violence and classist structural disparity, had to carve out their own futures. Hence, Muñoz redefined queerness as a utopian practice that allowed unrepresented non-white queer people to ‘see and feel’ potential queer-of-colour futures ‘beyond the quagmire of the present’ (1). Simply put, aside from seeing queerness as a static sexual identity, one could also articulate queerness as a way of striving towards an ideal vision of the future when the present world, one’s quagmire, seemed undesirably hostile. This process involved constantly imagining a perfect world—a utopia—even if it were never fully attained; desiring in this way allowed queer individuals to sense beyond the current state of affairs by insisting on a possibility for another, queer-embracing world.

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

Fig.2: “Fairy Conclave” by Marla Bendini, 2021.


Beyond the socio-historical context of late 2000s North America, botanical art like Marla Bendini’s Fairy Conclave (2021)[2]  localises Muñoz’s definition of Queerness to Singapore, by discreetly articulating a utopia for marginalised Singaporean LGBTQIA+ to insist on through her seemingly static, sublime grassland painting.  Unmoving, elongated brushstrokes that render each blade of grass beget a certain kinetic movement, such that gazing into Bendini’s work allows one to partake in a conclave that discreetly interrupts the very notions of a static, predefined heteronormative future. Bendini takes us beyond the garden city into the grasslands where plants and queer bodies are not subjected to orderliness as dictated by the state gardener. Amidst lush boundlessness, how might we glimpse utopia? An iridescent cloud of hovering wisps and fairies first lure us in, making their presence known amidst the green plains—too small to make out their corporeal forms, but nonetheless existent and present. By summoning these mythical beings, Bendini plausibly encourages us to consider an alternative world that operates on the basis of otherworldly logic, liberated from human constructs like gender or sexuality. The fairies, rendered in a fuzzy and atypical manner, lose their conventional winged-anthropoid form to challenge viewers to expand their imaginations so they might fully access this mythical world—such an exacting appeal points to these wisps as palpably unbounded by human realities and conceptions, in which these beings might live in equality without hierarchies.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Fig.3: “The Charmed Circle” by Gayle Rubin, 1984.

​

The whimsical sphere that delineates this fantastical realm is loosely reminiscent of Gayle Rubin’s diagram of the Charmed Circle wherein heterosexual sex is valorised within an inner-most ‘good and natural’ circle while queer s exual activities are condemned to the outer limits of an implied sex hierarchy (152). This discrimination does not merely exist in theory—the relegation of homosexual displays of affection to the private sphere demonstrates the state’s long-drawn unwillingness to repeal section 377A of the penal code that criminalises sex between two consenting men, allowing homophobia in Singapore to be legitimised (Ramdas 1450). However, stepping into Bendini’s grassy utopia, the politics of sex is unravelled in a fairy circle devoid of any concentric form of hierarchy. Through its ethereal subjects and the space of the untouched flat plains, Fairy Conclave (2021) flattens imbalanced power dynamics between the state and queer people while symbolically illustrating utopian characteristics of perfect inclusiveness and equality that queer people and other viewers might resonate with and desire for Singapore’s future.

​

Yet, even as Bendini renders a utopian world, the inclusion of a horizon in the artwork reveals her careful awareness not to treat utopia as a fixed place one can or should arrive at. Rather, the endless field of Fairy Conclave (2021) visualises Muñoz’s argument for us, that queerness should be approached as a constantly unfolding horizon of possibilities (21). While the horizon of Bendini’s plains ends at the margins of the canvas, the work also imagines and gestures towards a space beyond the horizon, a domain imbued with possibility and potentiality, implying that the expansive grasslands have no endpoint. Beyond the horizon lies utopia, the destination we cannot see but must continuously seek despite knowing we can never reach it. Munoz’s theory, too, maintains that the significance of the horizon, as an elongation of time and space, is profound as resisting the state’s dictates requires a continuous doing ‘in and for the future’ as queer individuals progress towards their vision (26). Overall, the visual qualities of Fairy Conclave (2021) conform with Muñoz’s genesis of utopia as not an ‘abstract’ idea—a naive and escapist pining, but rather a ‘concrete’ utopia grounded in real historical struggles which form the basis of collective action and doing (3). As such, Fairy Conclave (2021) proves that botanical art possesses the galvanising potential to nudge its viewers to shift from abstract, passive longing to actualising their desired futures for queer visibility through continuous action.

​

What does it really mean to be indefinitely moving towards a queer utopic future? From one perspective, thinking with French philosopher Roland Barthes who says that ‘the mark of the utopian is the quotidian’, moving closer to a utopian future can then be understood in relation to the now, or the everyday (17). One can thus “do” towards utopia by attending to our present ‘quagmire’ (Muñoz 1). The works that this essay will examine next, make strides by framing utopian visions of local LGBTQIA+ in relation to highlighted mundanities of everyday life, almost as if these works were created in direct response to Bendini’s push for concrete action. Specifically, the botanical artworks of Khairullah Rahim and Moses Tan shed light on queer peoples’ everyday lived experiences in private and public domains, reclaiming visibility for them as a definitive act of progress.

​

In Twinkling Fortress (2021), a collaborative installation-photography project, headpieces created by multimedia artist Rahim are worn by drag queen Lunar Lucah, who is then photographed against a bare wall of a nondescript bedroom (Quek, para. 3). Traces of the domestic are discovered as we begin to make out household objects enmeshed within Rahim’s uncanny assemblage: septic corrugated plastic pipes might resemble those in our toilets or sinks, while draping tassels, Orchids and Pilea Peperomioides (or Chinese money plant) vines, decorate the headpiece as if they were placed in our homes.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Fig.4: A headpiece from “Twinkling Fortress” by Khairullah Rahim, 2021.

​

By co-opting interior features and flora, Twinkling Fortress (2021) uses the wearable headpiece to symbolically represent the home as an everyday environment that queer individuals grapple with, being subjects of intense surveillance or dismissal. The ends of their struggles are not fixed, and queer individuals might find themselves in positions of empowerment or disempowerment. In line with the latter state, the domineering headpiece and choreographed position of Lucah hints at home being a potentially hostile space that reduces queer visibility. Looking at the above picture, our eyes are first arrested by the large, vibrant yellow headpiece contrasted against the white wall, overshadowing Lucah’s visage. Visually, Lucah’s presence is not merely diminished by the cast shadow, but also anonymised—her body is turned away from viewers, facing the wall, almost as if she was punished or put in timeout. Given this interpretation, Lucah’s anonymity acts as a vessel in which queer audiences can possibly find themselves resonating with her position of disempowerment. As the work represents Singaporean LGBTQIA+ at large and draws attention to the community’s current invisibility, the end-effect of moving towards utopia—founded upon the work’s attention to the present—is the revelation that punishment and obfuscation faced by LGBTQIA+ individuals are real and shared experiences.

​

Looking more closely at the work, Lucah is subjected to the viewer’s gaze, one which watches over her like a family member, bare in her unclothed vulnerability. The oppressive eye of the viewer on the viewed subject suggests that one’s home can be a site of hostility for queer individuals as a result of oppressive forces, continuously levied upon them even within the domestic sphere. I use anthropologist Arthur Kleinman’s notion of ‘everyday violence’ to characterise such hostility (238). Words written in Malay overlay the picture and are taken from conversations on WhatsApp between the artists and their family members. Seemingly “innocent, arbitrary and enigmatic”, these words “are in fact encoded” and laden with meaning (Quek, para. 3). Words like ‘lembut’ meaning soft/weak and ‘solat’ meaning prayer echoes thematic vignettes of verbal abuse and religious trauma faced by queer individuals; ‘ibu’ and ‘ayah’ invoke mother and father as possible perpetrators of such violence and impossible models of idealised gendered figures. The numerous, haphazardly written phrases might suggest that oppression pervades speech regardless of context, echoing Kleinman’s concept of violence as structurally embedded and reproduced within the mundanity of everyday social settings. Furthermore, the viewers’ prolonged act of interpretive speculation about the artwork reveals how queer oppression is insidious as it is not immediately obvious. We can only approximate the signs of abuse through visual clues, reflecting the hidden and elusive quality of everyday violence (Kleinman 239). Thus, Twinkling Fortress (2021) as a piece of botanical art, artistically and subtly represents the everyday violence that queer individuals might experience. It questions assumptions of stability and care within the home, when queer individuals interact with their family in this intimately private space.

​

Besides the private realm, everyday violence can also be observed in the public sphere. Local artist Moses Tan’s Served with a Side of Cheek, or Cheek (2022) examines the hostility of the public realm wherein LGBTQIA+ individuals are antagonised and othered through the intersection of plants and queer individuals. In the basement of Excelsior Shopping Centre, a relatively dead mall located in the city centre, Tan “cultivates” a contained ecology of fleshy, abstracted plant-like configurations. Tan shares in an interview that he was inspired by the concept of queer inhumanisms, a theory which explores what it means to treat the human being as just one of many components in queer assemblages (Chong). In essence, human and non-human categories ‘rub on, and against, each other, generating friction and leakage’ to constitute queer subjects (Luciano and Chen 186). Using nude modelling clay to embody this concept, Tan moulds skin-like polymer into sprouting anthuriums and cacti—with stalks concealing sex and gender, and smooth skin counteracting the rough barks of plants—both marking textured, living bodies. Indeed, Tan epitomises the notion of intertwined queer relations when he destabilises the discrete, conventional meanings of plants and human bodies, sculpturally rendering them as unstable forms that physically meld into each other.

​

In staging a kind of oddity wherein these budding, burgeoning forms seem to germinate, age, grow or mature together in this enclosed community, curious passers-by in the mall are forced to gaze and speculate to consider provocatively queer connections between flesh and sprout, human and nonhuman. Beyond the spectacle, a sense of otherness is reinforced by a separation between the viewer and queer plant-human forms which are held captive behind a glass menagerie, and by extension, relegated to the margins of a dingy shopping mall within the larger cityscape.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Fig.5: “Served with a Side of Cheek” by Moses Tan, 2022. 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Fig.6: Exhibit view of “Served with a Side of Cheek” by Moses Tan, 2022.

​

Arguably, the work takes on a more radical stance than Twinkling Fortress (2021): while the notion of speculation in Rahim and Lucah’s art is an interpretive work which helps to uncover existing hostilities against queer people, Cheek (2022) posits that the act of speculating is antagonistic in itself as it reproduces a subaltern other. As such, all viewers are made complicit in the othering of queer subjects; in the process of looking at these plant-body sculptures that transcend boundaries both conceptually and spatially, viewers are inevitably repulsed and then made to reflect on their reactions. Following this visceral reaction as a tangible sign of thematic ambivalence at work, the act of looking presents an opportunity for viewers to recognise their prejudices towards LGBTQIA+ individuals and possibly foster empathy and understanding. Thus, Cheek (2022) expands the notion of everyday violence on queer individuals to include the public realm.

​

The examination of Twinkling Fortress (2021) and Cheek (2022) together shows that botanical artworks can be imbued with affective subtexts that uncover the hostilities experienced by LGBTQIA+ individuals. These subtexts operate through the works’ thematic ambivalence;the creative and, at times,strange melding of plants and bodies produce and arouse just enough ambiguity and curiosity such that the works shed light on how both kin and strangers in the city can act as agents of the state when inflicting everyday violence on queer individuals. Furthermore, the boundaries of private and public spaces are blurred as queer individuals deal with violence that operates on multiple verbal, visual and social levels. By using the daily, shared spaces of the home and shopping mall, the two works not only attend to everyday experiences as a site of the mundane, but also manage to creatively and subversively use such spaces to reveal a past and present history of Singaporean queer identity as obscured, othered and contained, reflecting the ‘quagmire’ that Muñoz conceptualises (1).

​

Yet, Muñoz’s generalisation of the present as a ‘quagmire’ overlooks the possibility for the mundane to be a site of empowerment and collective flourishing (1). Drawing on anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose’s concept of Shimmer that regards absence as potential and not lack (55), even as Twinkling Fortress (2021) and Cheek (2022) highlight the current state of queer invisibility due to oppression, the works also display invisibility as a strategic choice rather than merely being representative of a prescribed state of “absence” whereby queer individuals are deliberately ignored and made to feel unseen. In other words, echoing Edwin Jurriens who theorised cultural activism and participatory art, Rahim and Tans’ works are “not to be narrowly interpreted as a heuristic device” of a moping queer movement (132). Instead, the works eruditely engage with socio-historical realities of queer “absence” in Singapore, refashioning “absence” as a site where visibility can potentially be reclaimed. Interpreting Twinkling Fortress (2021) in a different light, instead of hiding the wearer’s queerness, the headpiece can be seen as allowing the queer subject (represented by Lunar Lucah) to escape the oppressive eye of viewers. In fact, the flamboyant, campy headpiece grants queer individuals a certain hypervisibility amidst bleakness as symbolised by the bare wall, all while protecting critical facets of her identity. Attending to the non-human subject, the headpiece incorporates hermaphroditic orchids and self-reproducing asexual Chinese money plants, giving visibility to plants as another punished group within the garden city-state. In establishing a bond between queer minoritarian subjects, the work highlights an ironic observation: what the state tries to obfuscate—that is, queer subjects—is precisely what has enabled the city to flourish. Notably, queer flora is used to embellish roadsides, national gardens and serve as national symbols[3], exposing how the state discounts the queer nature of their iconised plant subjects. Similarly, while Cheek (2022) exposes queer subjects to othering through viewers’ speculation, the work also gestures at the viewer’s ignorance towards the complex interconnected relationships amongst queer individuals, represented by anthuriums which the artist himself describes as ‘propagating through their roots, serving as allegories for growth and the passing of knowledge’ (Tan). This state of collective flourishing, which alludes to the resistive agency of queer individuals, is also visually reinforced by the spiky defensive form of Tan’s fleshy cacti, which suggest how queer people can act agentically, such as through community-based activism to reclaim their place in the city (Ramdas 1449).

​

Overall, branching out from the ideals of utopia as rooted in Bendini’s Fairy Conclave (2019), queer visibility is reclaimed through the thematic ambivalence of Twinkling Fortress (2021) and Cheek (2022). This thematic ambivalence, via the creative intertwining of plants and bodies, has shed light on the past and present histories of oppression, and also demonstrated how queer individuals have resiliently resisted such persecution. On a broader note, to bridge different temporalities, I fuse Muñoz and Rose’s concepts to propose that the efficacy of botanical art in reclaiming queer visibility is not only found in demands for an alternative utopian future as outlined by Muñoz—but it also lies in interrogating the immediate and past histories of LGBTQIA+ as aptly expressed by Rose’s Shimmer that concerns itself with ‘ancestral power of life’ which flows into the present (52). This dialectical model whereby the past, present and future of LGBTQIA+––the pains and joys of the past, guiding queer individuals in the present, and those yet to come––inflect upon each other, offering a powerfully strategic and dynamic mode of contesting queer visibility through botanical art.
 

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Sade, Loyola, Fourier. Monte Avila Editores, 1977.

Brickell, Christopher. The Royal Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Gardening. Dorling Kindersley, 2012.

Chong, Daniel. Moses Tan - Bad Imitation, 2022, https://badimitation.com/Moses-Tan.

Farquhar, William, et al. Natural History Drawings: The Complete William Farquhar Collection: Malay Peninsula, 1803-1818. Edited by Laura Dozier, Editions Didier Millet, 2010.

Jurriens, E. “Art, image and environment: Revisualizing Bali in the plastiliticum.” Continuum, vol. 33, no. 1, 2018, pp. 119–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2018.1547363.

Lee, Kwan Yew. S'pore to Become Beautiful, Clean City within Three Years, 12 May 1967, pp. 4–4. Newspaper.sg, https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/straitstimes19670512-1.2.20. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.

Luciano, Dana, and Mel Y. Chen. “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 21, no. 2-3, 2015, pp. 183–207. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2843215.

Quek, Caryn. “Southeast Asia Queer Cultural Festival 2021: Featuring Khairullah Rahim: Yavuz Gallery.” Yavuz Gallery Represents Established and Emerging Contemporary Artists from the Asia-Pacific Region, with Spaces in Singapore and Sydney., Yavuz Gallery, 16 Feb. 2021, https://yavuzgallery.com/southeast-asia-queer-cultural-festival-2021-featuring-khairullah-rahim/.

Ramdas, Kamalini. “Negotiating LGBTQ Rights in Singapore: The Margin as a Place of Refusal.” Urban Studies, vol. 58, no. 7, 19 Nov. 2020, pp. 1448–1462. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098020962936.

Rocha, Zarine L. “Multiplicity within Singularity: Racial Categorization and Recognizing “Mixed Race” in Singapore.” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, vol. 30, no. 3, 2011, pp. 95–131. https://doi.org/10.1177/186810341103000304.

Rose, Deborah Bird, et al. “Shimmer: When All You Love Is Being Trashed.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2017, pp. G51–G63.

Tan, Moses. “Served with a Side of Cheek.” Mosestan, 2022, https://www.mosestanqy.com/servedwithasideofcheek.

​

Endnotes

[1] Muñoz was responding to the distinguished work of another queer theorist, Lee Edelman's No Future which critiqued societal discourses on the future in 2009.

​

[2] Marla Bendini is a Singaporean, trans-identifying artist. Fairy Conclave (2021) was the introductory piece of her solo exhibition similarly entitled “Fairy Conclave”. Bendini’s show, held in Cuturi Gallery Singapore during her residency there, showcased a series of oil paintings that reinterpreted popular objects and figures from fable and folklore in relation to themes about the mutability and fluidity of bodies and identities.

​

[3] The orchid, Papilionanthe Miss Joaquim, is Singapore’s national flower. This orchid, like almost every other, can be considered queer due to its hermaphroditic or bisexual characteristics - containing both male and female reproductive organs that allow them to self-pollinate. Another hermaphroditic plant, the lotus, literally shaped Singapore’s skyline as it inspired the architectural design of Singapore ArtScience Museum, an iconic landmark located in the heart of Marina Bay.

Dylan 1.jpg

​

bottom of page