Review of ‘Two Who Remember the Sea’ in SB2025

Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Guo-Liang Tan’s collaboration

An installation has risen quietly within the grounds of Wessex Estate as part of Singapore Biennale 2025: pure intention. I take a brief trek through part of the Rail Corridor to meet Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Guo-Liang Tan’s Two Who Remember the Sea (2025). Amidst the foliage stand two masses of metal scaffolding. A sheet of silver fabric drapes across each post. Animated by solar-powered motors, the screens skirt across the frame at random, forming pleats or pulling taut. At times, they blow adrift on the wind or tangle up in the surrounding shrubbery.

Installation view of Apichatpong Weerasethakul & Guo-Liang Tan’s Two Who Remember the Sea (2025).  Commissioned by Singapore Art Museum for Singapore Biennale 2025: pure intention. Image courtesy of Rueangrith Suntisuk.

Taking it all in, there is a nascent ghostliness that seems to emanate from Two. The sudden appearance of the irrational monoliths feels as if done by supernatural hands, not unlike the conspiratorial crop circles of the 1980s. But most of all, their materials echo Apichatpong’s preoccupations with the spiritual. The cool metal posts recall the same steel-blue glint in which he renders the tropical jungle in his films Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) and Tropical Malady (2004): a tint that induces an uncharacteristic chill in the equatorial heat, equal parts otherworldly and foreboding. 

The accompanying artwork text corroborates these observations, proposing allusions to the greyscale illustrations in Thai artist Hem Vejakorn’s ghost story collection Phut Phi Pisat Thai. Here it is instead fabric that evokes spectral presences. Vejakorn’s depiction of a weightless, gauzy headscarf easily brings to mind the sheet ghost archetype, as Two’s flowing sheets do too. Often this translucency envelops the figure as well. In Vejakorn’s scenes, a sheer mosquito net casts a hazy filter over a bedside silhouette, a shrouded being appears see-through. Translucency implies incorporeality and Two likewise exhibits this spectral quality. Through his experimentations with charcoal pigment suspended in fluid, Tan paints shadowy washes and impressions, which are printed on the silver sheet. What results are slight, nebulous forms that are barely perceptible, emerging and vanishing at whim of the light, like capricious residues of ghostly fingerprints. 

Detail view of Apichatpong Weerasethakul & Guo-Liang Tan’s Two Who Remember the Sea (2025). Commissioned by Singapore Art Museum for Singapore Biennale 2025: pure intention. Image courtesy of Rueangrith Suntisuk.

But these interpretations, compelling as they are, feel too reliant on prior knowledge. In and of itself, Two feels uneventful. There is little visually to recognise on-site, and if the sheets are like curtains pulled back to uncover a hidden scene, no poetic volta or flourish comes despite sitting through its recommended viewing time of between 20 and 60 minutes. Experiencing Two could come across as a frustrating exercise in imagination. While its proposed ideas find some visual connections, its allusions shy from the satisfying weight of signification. When both form and content are scarce, how might meaning be derived? Could it be found instead from relation rather than subject, with past works, sites, and audiences?

Tracing these lines of thought, Two finds its affinities with both Apichatpong and Tan’s previous cinematic and installation works. Apichatpong’s A Conversation with the Sun (2022) installation projected images on a similarly engineered moving curtain mechanism. In his short Blue (2018), backdrops used in Thai folk theatre are repeatedly spooled and unspooled, cut with scenes of a woman at rest. His later installation Blue Encore (2023) in Chiang Rai merged both these works. Consisting of three curtains featuring local impressionist paintings, the screens oscillated back and forth on tracks. Two follows in this lineage of works.

We can point to Apichatpong’s sustained engagement with motion, both as a formal element and as a figurative way of thinking. Movement is not only antithetical to the stationary but also opposes the fixity of meaning. This fluidity finds parallels in Tan’s previous video work, coincidentally also titled Blue (I Cast A Spell On You) (2015). Tan’s Blue assembles captions over found footage of an instructional nautical knot-tying video. These captions, however, do not intuitively illustrate the moving images but create a manual poetry to be constructed by the viewer. At the same time, the video suggests tenuous links and slippages between text and image. Indeterminate and ambiguous, the work exhibits the same errantry of meaning as Apichatpong’s does. 

In short, Tan’s Blue stands as an apt motif of looking at Two through relation. Its twists and knots reflect the resonances between Apichatpong’s and Tan’s individual practices. Two and its predecessors, in their engagement with the idea of outdoor cinema screens, indicate both artists’ fascination with film. The compositional cinematic frame as well as the physical, supportive frame is evoked. Tan’s oeuvre also exhibits a preoccupation with frames. In his paintings from his Ghost Screen exhibition in 2017, translucent sheets of fabric stretched over frames revealed the typically hidden supports beneath. 

In both artists’ works, the frame is made conspicuous. In photographs, frames typically efface themselves to uphold an image, whether a moving or a painted one. Instead, the curtain pulls in Two reveals to the natural environment around it, drawing our attention away from the art object to its surroundings. Its vegetation and the weather become part of the artwork. 

The invisible hands of nature become visible, personified through the sun’s “contribution” in powering the installation, reporting for duty at daybreak and clocking off at dusk, and also through the motion of the wind on the fabric. The breeze sculpts sensuous volumes with the silver sheet like spectral bodies pressing against the fabric. The elements leave wear, sun-bleach and watermarks that indelibly transform the work. Two calls attention to the rich relations it has with its environment, and the viewer’s experience of it: the screech of birdcall, the sound of construction from across the estate, and its responsiveness to natural phenomena. It proffers that there is artfulness all around us as well. 

The initial tension posed by Two’s opacity needs not be read as an invitation to forgo meaning, but instead an opportunity to recoup it in other forms. The work also holds space for the audience to simply appreciate the delicacy of its subtle movements, material, and its colour, all without the need to be transparent and fully understood. If interpretations flatten art to singular meanings, Two hence proposes multiple, relational kinds of encounters: a formalist appreciation of art in tandem with indeterminate, interpretative ones. 

Two Who Remember the Sea is part of Singapore Biennale 2025: pure intention, which runs until 29 March 2026.