Robert Zhao Renhui has been observing Singapore’s “secondary forests,” areas that were once destroyed by development and have since been reclaimed by nature, since 2017. Seeing Forest, first presented at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 and reconfigured here for Aichi Triennale 2025, is the culmination of his long-term engagement with these ecologies.
At the heart of the installation is the video The Owl, The Travellers, and The Cement Drain. Combining zoom-lens footage captured from his apartment with extended recordings of wildlife from motion-sensor cameras installed in Singapore’s secondary forests, Zhao juxtaposes the quiet rhythms of the natural world with traces of human intervention. Within the video, we encounter trees and animals, remnants of colonial infrastructure, birds drinking from concrete drains, and the surreal narratives of two travelers wandering through the forest. Responding to this video is a sculptural video installation that incorporates objects Zhao discovered while exploring the forests, such as old bottles and debris left by Japanese soldiers, suggesting the entanglement of human presence with the history of nature.
By making visible the secondary forest—a place where nature and man-made objects, invasive and native species, and past and present intersect—Zhao proposes a path for humans and nature to coexist by transforming each other. Through his patient observation of a natural world that can never be fully comprehended, Seeing Forest invites us to contemplate nature’s resilience and the multiple layers of time that reside within it.