Tang Da Wu has been a prominent and tireless presence in the development of Singapore’s contemporary art scene since the 1970s. Over his five-decade-long career, he has moved between painting, drawing, installation, and performance. He studied sculpture at Birmingham Polytechnic and Central Saint Martins, eventually receiving an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 1985. In 1988 he founded The Artists Village, a collective promoting experimental art, originally at an artists’ colony on a farm—the first organization of its kind in Singapore. In his work he explores social and environmental concerns, including deforestation, extinction, and urban transformation. Tang has taught at Singapore’s National Institute of Education for the past twenty-plus years.

In his work Tang draws upon local mythologies and art history to explore societal issues. His featured large-scale installation alludes to the idea of the wagon as a messenger and vehicle of progress. Six large scrolls of paper hang loosely from the ceiling; their eerie blankness hints at a warning from the sky. The metal cart is deconstructed in space and time, consisting of three parts: one pair of large wheels and two pairs of smaller ones, each set seeming to be moving at different speeds. The bureaucratically intoned title On Tuesday the Delivery Vehicle Number is ER II, and on Monday is BG I (2022) suggests a certain absurdity to governing processes and administrative minutiae, even as it poetically inverts the order of the days. Scattered around, glass structures reflect the audience into the sculpture, implicating them as part of the collective body.

The artist’s play on usual arrangements and objects highlights a sense of confusion in a society undergoing rapid change. Since its independence in 1965, Singapore has been expanding continuously. Rehousing programs have dismantled entire communities. Here, the transformations of globalization have been exceptionally rapid and, for many, devastating. As Tang warns in many of his works, human activity is destroying the planet we inhabit; the wheels of cause and effect have been set in motion, moving us not toward a brighter future but, in fact, death.