Robert Zhao Renhui: Seeing Forest Vol. 1

Robert Zhao Renhui: Seeing Forest, Volume 1 of 2 accompanies the artist’s eponymous exhibition at the Singapore Pavilion of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (20 April–24 November 2024), curated by Haeju Kim and organized by the Singapore Art Museum.

Robert Zhao Renhui, a Singaporean artist and founder of the Institute of Critical Zoologists (ICZ), is known for exploring the intersections of Asia’s natural, cultural, and colonial histories. His work investigates the evolutionary pressures urbanization and global transportation exert on nonhuman species. For the Singapore Pavilion, Seeing Forest focuses on a patch of secondary woodland at a former military camp in Singapore’s Alexandra Road district, a space both shaped by human history and reclaimed by myriad wild species. Through careful attunement to this habitat’s rhythms and improvisations, Zhao reimagines urbanization as a relational refuge of unexpected encounters.

Born out of a decade-long collaboration between Zhao and K. Verlag’s Anna-Sophie Springer, Etienne Turpin, and Wolfgang Hückel, this book combines conceptual sequences of Zhao’s photography with an assemblage of archival texts and essays by curator Haeju Kim, environmental historian Marcus Yee, and writer Jeffrey Kastner. The book's core “Reader” section juxtaposes texts from 1883 to the present, blending scientific inquiry, philosophical reflection, and storytelling to explore new ways of understanding urban ecologies. In a closing interview with ecologist Yong Ding Li, Zhao revisits his own pathway of working collaboratively across art and ecology.