ABSTRACT
Tracing the Last Tiger revisits the anecdotal encounters with freeroaming tigers at forested locations in a still undeveloped Singapore between 1923 and 1930. Three reports featuring The Cashin Tiger, The Bukit Timah Tiger, and The Choa Chu Kang Tiger were recorded. Located in the small but intense tropical secondary jungles of early twentieth-century Singapore, Tracing the Last Tiger offers a speculative spatial reconstruction of the contradictions surrounding the official, and unofficial, tiger sightings. The language of the drawing is a twist on the popular nineteenth-century colonial tiger paintings found today in major art galleries. In particular, it takes after a lithograph made in the 1880s titled Road Surveying Interrupted in Singapore. This print shows architecture’s proxy in the figure of George Drumgoole Coleman, Singapore’s Superintendent of Public Works, being ambushed by a tiger in the midst of surveying the jungle with his theodolite.
