ABSTRACT
As infrastructure, the sea’s history is inextricable from an economic one. Surrounded by this sea and scarce in its terrestrial area, the Singaporean anxiety of diminutive scale yields an architectural commoditisation of its oceanic frontier as hinterland. Its water-edge condition is complex—literally, an infrastructural complex of military, industry, maritime and reclamation works melded with public greens and coastal leisure. Underpinned by this seascape, SEA STATE (2004-present)—a multimedia, ongoing visual art project by artist and sailor Charles Lim—makes such infrastructure accessible and vulnerable. Through Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image, I argue that Lim’s SEA STATE constructs a dialectical image of the contemporary sea that challenges the sequential continuum from past to present. Rather, past and present are brought together conterminously in a single conceptual space. The muscular infrastructural objects of buoys, lighthouses, channels, and other techno-architectural marine interventions are thus inadvertently embedded within myths as legendary as vanishing islands, and within shared and personal histories as intimate as Lim’s own childhood in a small fishing village on the island’s eastern fringes of Changi beach.
