Sand Reserve Museum

Jia Le Ling, Interdisciplinary Sculpture, 2021

Jia Le Ling is a Singaporean artist who is currently invested in the nuances of being a Singaporean. The research part of his art practice has always been the playful experimentation of tangible materials like wood, clay and thread. His works reflect how this material understanding informs the work’s concept.

Project Overview

Since 1965, Singapore has been reclaiming land, increasing its area by almost 25%. This ongoing endeavor proved to be paradoxical as it occupies large areas of existing land to store sand for more land to be made. Storing sand also creates enormous sand “mountains” that are incongruous to, yet surreal in Singapore’s landscape. Jia Le Ling’s Sand Reserve Museum envisions another purpose for Singapore’s highly restricted sand reserves. Utilizing 3D modelling software, this project is a scale model of a speculative museum that transforms the sand reserve into a viewing gallery for the public, showcasing man-made sand mountains as beautiful works of nature.

Process

Background research was an integral part of this process of making as land reclamation is a vast and multifaceted topic. This research was done through the vigorous scouring of online articles with Google and its subsidiary platforms like Google Maps and Google Scholar. Over time, this information collected becomes the material that inspires the idea for this project. The making of this physical work utilizes heavily on 3D modelling software, Rhino and 3D printers so much so it certainly improved artist’s personal understanding of the technologies involved. Another skill acquired was the refining of printed objects and making a scaled model.