For all his life, artist Robert Zhao Renhui has almost always taken a keen interest in nature. As someone born and raised in the concrete jungle of Singapore that’s always touted itself as a garden city, Robert’s work explores the tension between those two ideals, and the complex relationship between nature and culture, and our shared co-existence. Despite never involving himself as the subject in any of his work, Robert’s art has always felt deeply personal, coming from a place of passion and interest, yet never fighting for any specific actions to be taken – just observation and uncovering of the ordinary that slips by us, perhaps prompting us to look a little closer, and be fascinated by all the phenomena that surrounds us.

Now, Robert is finally being given a chance to take his art further than ever before, as he prepares to present his new exhibition, Seeing Forest, representing Singapore at the Singapore Pavilion at the prestigious La Biennale di Venezia (Venice Art Biennale) this April. Curated by the Singapore Art Museum’s (SAM) Haeju Kim, Seeing Forest marks the next step of Robert’s artistic exploration of Singapore’s secondary forests — forests regrown from deforested land due to human intervention such as development and plantation — and the new ecosystems that have developed within it.

In prior projects, Robert Zhao worked on various iterations of this initial idea, including The Forest Institute at Gilman Barracks in 2022, a large-scale architectural art installation housing a research installation, and comprising the Forest Observation Room and the River Platform, devoted to research on the secondary forest surrounding the Gillman Barracks precinct. Elsewhere, Robert has even delved into performance installation work, with 2023’s Albizia at the Esplanade Theatre Studio, where years of videos and photography were woven into an immersive setting, and choreographed to showcase the surreal and evocative world of secondary forests.

With Seeing Forest, Robert takes these ideas further still, and puts them on a massive scale to match the Singapore Pavilion. Through this exhibition, we see how the island of Singapore has evolved to arrive at the present day, revealing some of the ways in which human urban design can shape the natural world itself, resulting in an ecosystem of migrant species that echoes the trajectories and makeup of the city’s human population. At the same time, Seeing Forest also highlights phenomena that are universally relatable to those living in any urban environment. Speaking to Robert, we found out more about his journey towards making Seeing Forest a reality, and his approach towards art and artmaking.

“I’ve been rejected several times in past iterations of the Biennale, and have been through the selection process since ten years ago. I’m at a very different stage in my life now compared to back then, with a wife and a five-year old kid, and I was debating whether I would take it up once I got shortlisted, as family is now a very important part of my life alongside my art,” says Robert. “I did consider it a lot, and I knew it would be very stressful, but also a great opportunity because rarely do I have so much time and resources to produce something of such a scale, which this work deserves.”

“I’ve been very grateful to have curator Haeju on board with me, because she’s so experienced with big shows and biennales, and has offered plenty of great advice and perspective. She’s always been my first choice, and her work surrounds making the show happen and managing it, which allows me to focus on the actual artmaking process itself,” he adds. “After this though, I might want to take a break for a while and just focus on collecting footage again, like documenting Gillman’s forests slated for development. I have such a personal connection to that forest, and I think I owe it to that forest to see it go down, having done so much work there.”

Even before his exploration of secondary forests, Robert’s work has always surrounded the natural world, often rooted in a semi-fictional organisation of his own making – the Institute of Critical Zoologists, which posited a group of people who aimed to develop a critical approach to the zoological gaze, or how humans view animals, within our ever-growing urban landscape. His work then has always existed as a means to highlight the resilience of nature and the various interactions that occur when such resilience overlaps with human life and society.

“Nature is a very strange thing. It simply exists, and doesn’t care if you like it or not. That’s why it’s so fascinating – there’s this inability to ever fully understand what’s happening or the full scale of nature, and you’ll always be drawn into the mystery,” says Robert. “Wasteland forests especially bring out that juxtaposition of civilisation, and we can look at it more meaningfully, and make sense of all the images and all that is happening around us within Seeing Forest. It goes beyond just a simple ‘capitalism sucks’, ‘nature is in danger’ narrative, and having sat on this work for so long, I hope that we’ll be able to put it in the right context and others will find resonance with it.”

On how foreigners might perceive the work, Robert elaborates on the feeling of helplessness that pervades the work, and the inevitability of relentless progress. “In documenting forests, I’ve already seen, in the span of my son’s five years of life, a forest cleared right in front of his eyes, and another in the process of being cleared. But the goal isn’t necessarily to stop it – it is simply to bear witness to it, to know that you were there when it happened,” says Robert. “I remember one of the forests – the Pang Sua Woodland, there was a schoolboy I noticed who was rushing towards it when I was there, and there was this strange sense of connection we had in that moment. A group of activists were campaigning for it to become a green corridor, and created a coffee table book documenting the land.It’s sad, but we knew there was nothing we really could do.”

“What I mean by that is that some lands were never meant to be preserved – a lot of secondary forests spring up because of neglect rather than intentionality. Tengah used to be like that too – a brick factory that became a wasteland and eventually, a secondary forest. It had 30 years of living a good life, and now it’s a housing estate,” he adds. “To me, in all our powerlessness, it is this documentation of all these stories of the land that I believe are most important, and that people should know about, even beyond the otters and hornbills and ‘marketable’ animals we love, all happening in our own backyards.”

On the process of collecting footage, Robert explains how so much of it boils down to luck, and being at the right place at the right time. “If I only started this project a year before the Biennale, I wouldn’t be able to do anything. Documentation is a long process, and so much of what I’m presenting comprises archival footage collected over years of observation,” says Robert. “Animals aren’t like actors – you can’t direct them to do anything, so you have to prepare yourself to catch nothing at all, or sometimes you do manage to get something really special – like eagles rubbing their face against a cooking pot. Maybe sometimes, once you watch for long enough, there are certain predictable patterns, like the swarm of parrots gathering at Choa Chu Kang at precisely 7pm everyday, but for the most part – completely up to chance.”

“I’m not an animal whisperer, just a kaypoh who hears about certain phenomena happening. But over the years, I like to think that interactions with friends and through observation, I’ve become more sensitive to the animals as well, and you realise how aware they become of you, recognising the way you walk and your scent, where they no longer attack you,” he adds. “And after two years of going into the forest, I’ve also been more clear-headed, and have less stress, even going alone at night. The reality is, the animals are sometimes a lot more resilient than us, and they find a way even when so much has changed – sometimes we need to learn to adapt and to accept change as it comes.”

Ultimately, Robert’s documentation is what drives the work, and forms the basis of all that he does, a vessel and a narrator in the great story of the drama in Singapore’s natural scene. It’s cliche but it’s true – if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? “I don’t think I chose to be a naturalist – it was more just something that was born out of my encounters, that itself ended up using me as a vessel to express myself; in a way, nature has always called out to me,” Robert concludes. “It’s really not so much about making a difference, but just answering that call. Often, my practice comes about when I hear about or friends tell me about interesting natural phenomena I can go observe and record, and through the process, it somehow becomes art. Nature is not my story, I am simply documenting it, to provide this narrative of the land. All I can do is pay attention to it, and hope others will care when I tell them.”

Photo Credit: Robert Zhao Renhui

Seeing Forest will be on display from 20th April to 24th November 2024 at the Singapore Pavilion, Level 2 of Arsenale – Sale d’Armi, Venice, Italy. In January 2025, the exhibition will return to Singapore, where it will be reimagined for a second iteration at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. More information available here