Designed in the manner of a walking simulation, Mark Chua and Lam Li Shuen’s KELADI FIGMENTS (2025) places you in the first person. The premise is simple: On this island await three islanders, each carrying a fragmentary story. A man born a yam declares, “When the animals disappeared from the island, it was I who fed the people.”
The game insists that agency lies not in overcoming but in deciding how to spend your time before the fall.
To follow one character is to abandon the others. Speech comes in scrambled captions, asynchronously translated into cryptic fragments. Meanwhile, the giant statue stands on borrowed time, destined to collapse within five minutes, indicated by a countdown clock. Unlike other adventure games, which hinge on puzzles, meaningful choices and branching narratives, KELADI FIGMENTS pares such mechanics away, privileging orientation, immersion, and trying to make sense of a world. (...) Bound by the inevitability of the statue’s demise, exploration is marked by urgency, foreshadowed by an inescapable end. Replays may accrue, but the endings remain predetermined. The game insists that agency lies not in overcoming but in deciding how to spend your time before the fall.
KELADI FIGMENTS debuted at Lewin Terrace in Singapore’s Fort Canning Park as part of Chua and Lam’s solo exhibition, “Before and After the Unknown” (2025). Across multi-channel videos, 16 mm film, sculpture and gameplay, the show reworked fragments of history and fiction into a deconstructed mythology centred around the humble yam.
The show responded directly to the unveiling of a public statue of Sir Stamford Raffles in May 2024 – one of many monuments honouring the British colonial administrator credited as Singapore’s “founder”. Raffles remains an enduring emblem of how the nation’s commemorative culture continues to orbit colonial figures and rehearse the myth of a single founding event. Against this repetition, Chua and Lam turned instead to the island of Pulau Ubin.
Situated between the border of Singapore and Malaysia, the island was claimed by the British in 1825 to harvest rubber. In the 1840s, Chinese mining companies arrived to meet the colony’s demand for granite. In the 1850s, Malay communities moved there as a refuge against piracy. By the 1980s, rubber and quarrying industries had ceased, leaving the ground barren and the population dwindling from some 4,000 residents in the 1970s to fewer than 200. As one of Singapore’s last kampungs – traditional Malay village settlements made out of wooden houses and close-knit communities – Pulau Ubin carries the scars of such resource use. KELADI FIGMENTS is inspired by these sedimented histories, setting colonial nostalgia against the island marked by occupation.
On first encounter, KELADI FIGMENTS might seem to replicate the essentialist tropes of colonial ethnography. Yet by tying these illegible speech patterns to the mechanics of the game loop, the fantasy of the colonial origin story is interrupted and dismantled. With each cycle, the figures appear less as bearers of a single truth and more as witnesses of histories whose stories may never be fully heard. (...)
The logic of repetition extends into INHABITANTS (2025), a three-channel video that immerses viewers in scenes of scavenging, dwelling and ritual. The yam-born man appears again, lifting his staff to test the shore breeze; another figure wearing a basket-woven helmet bows in reverence; clay is repeatedly reshaped against a rock. Like the looping mechanics of KELADI FIGMENTS, they unsettle the authority of inherited scripts and instead appear as rehearsals, open to improvisation.
Life on Pulau Ubin has long been structured by unequal economies that extract resources as much as they sustain them. In this light, “Before and After the Unknown” shifts our preoccupation away from what inheritances the island might reveal and towards how humans inhabit spaces through uneven forms of dependence.
Representation itself, for Chua and Lam, is never neutral. A YAM AS I AM (2025), a two-channel silent video produced as handmade film loops, makes this explicit. Shot on 16 mm along the mangrove coast of Pulau Ubin, the footage was later subjected to tactile reworking. One loop was layered with printed fragments that stiffened the reel, leaving it rigid and serrated as it passed through the projector. The other was coated with yam starch that clouded the emulsion with streaks and residues, bending light into unpredictable distortions. These interventions build failure directly into the image.
Chua and Lam’s practice resists the obsession with technological advancement, spectacle and easy consumption.
The silence of the playback is broken by the sounds of the 16 mm projector. In this way, A YAM AS I AM extends its critique beyond film technology toward the larger systems of society that demand seamless, endless reproduction of the image. Against these expectations, Chua and Lam value moments of interruption and inaccuracy as potentialities for imagining otherwise.
Failure takes different forms across “Before and After the Unknown”, shifting from the game-world of KELADI FIGMENTS to film materiality in A YAM AS I AM, and finally into the thresholds of the body in YAM OVER BODY (2025). Screened within a 3D-printed yam sculpture, the film depicts yam paste being pressed onto skin, provoking a rash that is at once unbearable and strangely luminous. The yam acts directly on flesh, forcing an encounter that is neither voluntary nor comfortable. Relations spill and resist containment.
If YAM OVER BODY approaches permeable vulnerability through skin, YEAR WAX HEAR NO BULLSHIT (2024) channels it through the fragile infrastructures of projection. Collected over months and extracted live, earwax was pressed onto strips of 16 mm film already bearing transferred newspaper prints. Fed through a hand-built projector cobbled together from an assemblage of an IKEA bed tray, metal hinges, carabiners, and a camping torch, these wax-covered loops ran through an apparatus never meant for cinematic precision. Without sprockets or calibrated rollers, the film slipped and snagged occasionally, while the torch beam misaligned with the makeshift gate. The process revealed cinema’s fallibility in literal form.
Their expanded cinema becomes acts of world-making, where they work with what they already have.
Keeping these fragile machines alive becomes integral to Chua and Lam’s craft, sustained through improvisation, repetition and the generosity of shared expertise. Unlike Gene Youngblood’s vision of expanded cinema as technological utopia, their practice resists the obsession with technological advancement, spectacle and easy consumption. Defiantly, their expanded cinema becomes acts of world-making, where they work with what they already have.
Fragility here is systemic, bound to the conditions of art-making in Singapore where artistic resources are uneven, censorship persists and independent cultural spaces continue to vanish. Chua and Lam do not mourn these instabilities, they work through them. Breakdowns are not obstacles or impasses but recurring grounds for making-new.
Fragile loops – whether in cycles of gameplay or the reels of 16 mm film – are invitations to play again. Chua and Lam’s remaking expands cinema as an ongoing work-in-progress, reminding us that in a world obsessed with expansion, accumulating resources, and technological promise, creative artmaking begins by working with what already exists.
Jiaying Sim is a writer, teacher and founder of Singapore Film Database, a comprehensive digital resource on Singapore’s film ecosystem.
