“If you can dream a better world you can make a better world or perhaps travel between them”

This work features laboriously and painstakingly hand-cut paper and laser-cut metal sculptures that translate the continually expanding urban physical landscape and terrain of Singapore into abstract visual and sonic contemporary expressions. Presented as an imagined island sculpture together with three ‘music boxes’, the artwork incorporates ‘data points’ that are composed of impressions made on physical features such as pavements, paths, walkways and roads. Through the scoring, carving and notching of the paper and metal, it re-encodes the information from our built and natural environment, while also mirroring the actions made by natural weathering and human intervention that imprinted these marks onto the various surfaces. Tan’s artwork is thus a poetic recording – in sound and sculptural form – of the passing of time through the mapping of the physical features that make up our transient landscape.