[Exhibition Review] Where is the Labourer?: Invisible Labour in ‘Construction in Every Corner’ (2025)

Co-written by Stephanie Jaina Chia and Yu Ke Dong. First published by NTU Museum. Runner-up in From Construction to Criqitue: Art Writing Competition.

Construction in Every Corner banner hung outside NIE Art Gallery.

Drawing near the National Institute of Education (NIE) building, we are thrown immediately into a hive of construction activity: deafening drilling, jagged edges of green corrugated hoarding carving out new routes on the pedestrian walkway, the shouts of workers perched on scaffolding. It is a blistering afternoon, and as we make our unshaded way toward NIE’s cube-shaped gallery building, we wonder how the labourers toiling away on the construction site are able to survive, much less work, in this heat.

Construction in Every Corner (2025) is an ongoing exhibition organized by the NTU Museum, hosted at NIE’s Art Gallery. The show, as hinted at by its rather catchy name, investigates the type of building most commonly found in Singapore’s cityscape: the one being built. In its catalogue’s introductory paragraph, the exhibition explains that its artists were invited to “reflect on the seeming perpetual nature of construction”, the debate between “City [revewal’s] [...] advocates [and] detractors”, and ultimately question whether the horrors of construction – “noise, dust, detours, and bulky machinery” – are truly a “necessary inconvenience” in the name of development. 

The exhibition is small in scale, presenting three works produced by four returning NTU alumni. Unfortunately, it is even smaller in its curatorial scope: for an exhibition about urban construction and all its material effects, its range of mediums is remarkably un-tactile, primarily featuring immaterial mediums such as photography, video, and virtual reality. There are the occasional nods to the physicality of its theme scattered throughout the gallery – the odd sandbag, wooden beam, or green construction hoarding – but these read like afterthoughts, merely rustic decorations beside shiny digital works in high-definition. Moreover, the exhibition indulges in almost exclusively academic, philosophical ideas surrounding perpetual construction, tossing up buzzwords like “ecology”, ”visibility”, “anthropocenic”, “urban psyche”, and “liminal zone”. While there is nothing inherently wrong in grounding the works in art theory, the exhibition’s thematic exploration conspicuously omits construction’s most central figure: the migrant worker. 

‘Wastelands’ by Debbie Ding.

That being said, the works by themselves are not without merit. In a room by itself, we encounter the ambitious multimedia project ‘Wastelands’ by Debbie Ding, centered around an interactive computer game where visitors can explore a never-ending grass field, sparsely populated with enigmatic relics of a human society long since obliterated. Sorting through soccer balls, nuclear hazard signs and an anonymous Ph.D thesis, we are reminded of a work of a similar title: T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’. In it, Eliot writes: “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water”. In Ding’s post-apocalyptic wasteland, silence lies heavy on the mind, the human body unnervingly absent in a landscape still littered with signs of human civilization. Roaming the lush desert, we reflect on the hubris of mankind, endlessly constructing monuments of progress in an attempt to thwart the entropy of time. Another poem comes to mind, this time by Percy Shelley: “My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings / Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Progressing onto the adjoining room, we discover the exhibition’s two other works: Sarah and Matthias Choo’s ‘A Walk in the Park’, and Marvin Tang’s ‘Further Reading’. The latter consolidates photographs of half-built infrastructure into a library of construction signifiers: concrete towers, fluorescent lights, traffic signs, etc. Placed alongside large-scale digital prints of the forest, the work attempts to expose the state’s habit of literally plastering nature-as-simulacra over its endless construction efforts. Yet, this aspect of Tang’s work merely holds a mirror to a reality most Singaporeans consider to be mundane, matter-of-fact. Nearby, Tang has built a wall made of green construction hoarding material, on which he has embedded tiny screens playing hyper-lapse loops of even tinier construction projects, workers scurrying like ants over toy-like concrete structures. Tang intersperses these screens with recordings of snails crawling, ever-so-slowly, over a seamless surface. The artist juxtaposes two measures of time: frenetic and leisurely, human and animal. However, the message ultimately remains elusive: does he intend to portray human progress as mindlessly swift, or emphasize its short lifespan amidst deep time?

‘Further Reading’ by Marvin Tang.

‘A Walk in the Park’ by Sarah and Matthias Choo.

Feeling somewhat puzzled by the previous work, we find ourselves re-energized by the Choo siblings’ video sculpture ‘A Walk in the Park’. Consisting of interconnecting LED screens, the work resembles a miniature cityscape of moving images, each screen depicting intimate moments of solitude captured by the duo at East Coast Park. We watch as lone strangers lounge in public playgrounds or gaze out into the shoreline in a state of silent ennui, documented in a strikingly elegiac style which subtly references the filmic work of Wong Kar Wai. These massive screens, some placed facing upwards on floors and pedestals, others constructed in squat T-shapes or arching U-shapes, evoke familiar shapes of objects found at a construction site, yet inject a deeply human presence into the work. In so doing, the work sheds light on growing urban isolation and alienation experienced by the denizens of a city increasingly marked by aggressive construction and expansion.

Throughout the exhibition, however, the foreign labourer continues to be absent. It is certainly not found in Ding’s post-apocalyptic landscape, and in Tang’s ‘Further Readings’, workers are reduced to ant-like specks, sped up in a frenzied spectacle of human labour. In the Choos’ works, the human body is centered; yet, these are bodies at rest, as opposed to the labouring bodies of foreign workers who single-handedly fuel Singapore’s thirst for urban expansion. This omission reflects a missed opportunity to explore a different angle of critical exploration of Singapore’s urbanization, one that allows for artists to expose conspicuous absences in state and social narratives surrounding nation-building, and the myth of the exceptional city-state. 

The view outside NIE Gallery.

“Noise, dust, detours, and bulky machinery”, the exhibition catalogue states, are the painful conditions we are made to endure for a prettier, more convenient urban experience. Yet Construction in Every Corner fails to consider the people who must work for years in these dust-filled sites, unprotected by noise barriers or our nation’s manpower laws. Rather than revive well-trodden discourse surrounding urban alienation or man-versus-nature binaries, the exhibition would have certainly been more powerful and provocative if it had chosen, from the outset, to examine the implications of removing foreign labour from national narratives.

Exiting the blissful air-conditioned cool of the gallery and re-entering the afternoon blaze, we chance upon a group of four migrant workers gathered in the shade of their truck in the carpark. Sitting cross-legged on the concrete pavement, they eat their lunches out of styrofoam containers. As we approach and begin to cross onto the grass to walk around their gathering, one of the workers stands up to let us through. 

“No, no, please sit, it’s okay,” we hurry to say, but he has already nudged his colleagues in their backs to alert them and now, they are all standing up, shifting their weary bodies aside to make way for us on the pavement. Mumbling our thanks, we hurry through, the phrase “necessary inconveniences” ringing in our heads as the workers are left behind us, out of sight, in the searing heat.