Tracing water, energy and displacement across Southeast Asia through situated fieldwork

At the heart of Singapore Biennale 2025: pure intention—one of Singapore’s SG60 Signature Events—art unfolds across the city as a way of sensing, reflecting, and reconnecting with place. Transforming everyday environments into platforms for contemporary art, SB2025 invites audiences to encounter Singapore through immersive, site-responsive works shaped by histories, rituals, and lived realities. Within this expansive framework, field-0—the collaborative practice of Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan—offers a quietly powerful meditation on infrastructure, energy, and displacement, revealing how distant landscapes and communities are intimately entangled with the city’s iconic images of progress.

Rooted in their shared heritage in China and shaped by transnational lives across Asia, Europe, and beyond, Cheng and Zhan work at the intersection of architecture, anthropology, art, and filmmaking. Their practice follows what they call “drifting bodies”—sand, water, labour, and people—using long-term fieldwork and sensorial methods to trace planetary interconnectedness while remaining grounded in specific communities. For SB2025, field-0 presents Drifting Bodies (2025), a four-channel video installation and sound work that links the spectacular indoor waterfall of Jewel Changi Airport to Thailand’s Vajiralongkorn Reservoir, part of a shared transnational hydroelectric power grid. What appears as a symbol of abundance and technological mastery in Singapore is revealed to be inseparable from landscapes of extraction, ecological transformation, and indigenous displacement elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Guided by the Biennale’s theme of pure intention, field-0’s contribution asks what it means to look beyond surface beauty and national boundaries, and to attend instead to the invisible infrastructures that sustain contemporary life. Water emerges as both life-giving and disruptive: a connector of distant lands, a medium of power, and a site of uneven consequences. In this CNTRFLD.ART conversation, Cheng and Zhan reflect on heritage, migration, collaboration, and care—sharing how their research-driven practice seeks not only to reveal hidden relations, but also to open space for responsibility, reciprocity, and small acts of repair that extend beyond the exhibition itself.

“By drifting with the currents of people, sediment, and power, we hold the belief that planetary interconnectedness is not an abstraction, but something that can be sensed, embodied, and lived.”— field-0

CNTRFLD. Pure Intention at SB2025
SB2025’s theme, pure intention, asks audiences to explore the city through art that reflects its histories, rituals, and lived experiences. In Drifting Bodies, you trace connections between energy networks and affected communities. How did the theme influence your approach, and what do you hope audiences take away from experiencing it?

field-0. The work presented at the Singapore Biennale is part of our ongoing project, Tracing Sand. Since 2023, we have been following sand and water across Southeast Asia along the Mekong River Basin—from its headwaters in China through Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and by extension to Singapore via resource extraction.

‘Drifting Bodies’, first shown in our solo exhibition commissioned by Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York last year, is a four-channel immersive video installation that connects two distinct bodies of water: the Jewel Rain Vortex at Singapore’s Changi Airport on reclaimed land and the Vajiralongkorn Dam in Thailand in a flooded mountainous landscape, home to the indigenous Karen Hill Tribe. The electricity generated from the reservoir flows into a transnational power grid that Singapore, and by extension the Jewel in Singapore, thus linking the interdependence between two sites. By placing the waterfall projection at the front of the space, we ask visitors to confront this iconic image, and to literally break the waterfall by walking through the screens, to enter the hidden world and the lived realities behind it. This work is intended to surface the invisible infrastructures and the understory of the energy-intensive way of life, translating our field research into embodied, spatial experiences.

Singapore is also part of Southeast Asia’s transnational power grid, so as part of our work presented at the Biennale, we also initiated a Water Campaign”. Members of the public are invited to support the campaign, which aims to raise funds to install a rainwater harvesting and filtration system for indigenous children living in the Vajiralongkorn Dam Reservoir. Ironically, though surrounded by water, they lack access to clean drinking water. More details of the campaign can be found at: https://field-0.xyz/reservoir-project

This effort, at its heart, is about working with water — connecting depths and skies and carrying a small trace of hope through the rain. In the spirit of the Biennale’s theme, Pure Intention, we hope the work resonates with local audiences and perhaps inspires a small but real act of care beyond the exhibition into tangible action.

CNTRFLD. Following Drifting Bodies
Your practice follows “drifting bodies”—sand, water, or people. How does tracing these flows shape your research and art making, and what does it reveal that other methods might not?

field-0. Tracing what we call “drifting bodies”—sand, water, people—is both our method and our way of thinking. Grounded in fieldwork, our collaborative practice uses situated, sensorial approaches to explore planetary interconnectedness while staying rooted in specific communities. Following these flows allow us to move beyond isolated sites or events and attune to all kinds of relations in motion: material processes, planetary scales, intergenerational time, and the many forms of life entangled within them.

This sounds abstract — let’s talk it through our work. Our encounter with the Karen community in the Vajiralongkorn Dam Reservoir emerged unexpectedly. While tracing sand supply chains, we visited a Thai Forest Tradition temple where our collaborators PuPla Kaewprasert practise. We had long conversations with the abbot, and he spoke about a floating community he had encountered during a pilgrimage—raft homes drifting with seasonal water levels. When the dam was built in the 1980s, mountaintops became islands and Karen families were displaced from forest to water. So, we followed the abbot’s account and went to the reservoir. What we experienced there gifts us a whole new perspective.

Life on open rafts produces an intensely embodied way of knowing. Sound becomes a primary orientation tool: the rhythms of boats, birds, wind, rain, and fish guide perception and attune the body to its surroundings. This experience stands in sharp contrast to the Rain Vortex at Jewel Changi Airport—a monumental indoor waterfall that is visually spectacular yet eerily silent at basement levels, where water is sealed inside a transparent tube. Though this indoor waterfall circulates globally as an iconic image, its absence of sound, mist, and roar goes largely unnoticed.

This sensory contrast becomes the underlying structure of Drifting Bodies: a silenced projection of the Rain Vortex paired with a three-channel reservoir video led by a spatialised soundscape. Through this juxtaposition, we foreground how extractive systems are sensed, lived, and endured. Our practice is fundamentally relational. Through extensive fieldwork we trace relations, and when permitted, enter into them with care. When possibilities for change emerge—as with the Water Campaign, which seeks to reconnect Singapore with the displaced Karen community in Thailand—we try to take small, concrete steps toward repair within the extractive relations our work has surfaced.

CNTRFLD. Childhood and Influences
Looking back, how did your upbringing shape the paths that led you to architecture, anthropology, and filmmaking? Were there formative experiences that shaped the way you see the world?

CZ. Our upbringing in China was a period of rapid urbanisation and economic boom from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, when the narrative of globalisation was still prevailing. My early career as an architect benefited from this moment. I worked within international teams designing iconic projects in Shanghai, and later in Singapore and the US. Over time, however, I became increasingly disillusioned with the relentless production of architectural icons for places and people I never got a chance to connect with. That distance—between making and living, between image and reality—became deeply disorienting. Eventually, I quit my job and made a major career shift, turning toward anthropology and filmmaking as ways to re-engage with lived experience.

JCC. My background was primarily academic. Before leaving, I worked full-time as a university researcher, but I struggled with the institutional frameworks that determine what counts as valuable— or, more bluntly, what is fundable. Research was driven by rigid objectives and productivity metrics aligned with funding bodies’ value systems. I wanted to work differently to at least try to develop a practice on my own terms. In the middle of the pandemic, I quit my job and began collaborating with Chen.

Our first project together is ‘Ripple Ripple Rippling’, working with a village on the outskirts of Wuhan, our shared hometown. The villagers are part of China’s 300 million rural migrant workers. We wanted to spend time with them and understand how they make worlds. Working independently allowed us to experiment beyond institutional constraints. After years of relationship-building, we introduced filmmaking into our daily fieldwork, not simply as documentation, but as a way to engage villagers’ imaginaries. In 2023, we organised a screen-back event at the village’s abandoned commune hall. Through immersive spatial projection, we showed the community images of their everyday lives alongside scenes we had improvised together. The entire village gathered, transforming the former political site into a theatre of the everyday. This process later became the short experimental film ‘The Hall’.

CNTRFLD. Identity and Heritage
Your work engages with place, belonging, and displacement. How has your heritage shaped your understanding of identity, and how does this perspective inform your projects?

field-0. Our keywords would be movement or migration and what is often rendered invisible.

CZ. I grew up within a family history of migration in China. My maternal grandparents went through the turbulence of the Chinese Civil War from Guizhou to Wuhan, where I was born. Later, I moved to Shenzhen and, at nineteen, to London on my own. Even till today, I struggle to answer the seemingly simple question, “Where are you from?” This experience shapes my understanding of identity as something shifting rather than fixed, and it fuels my curiosity about movement, flows, and displacement that run through our projects.

JCC. As Chen mentioned, our upbringing coincided with China’s rapid urbanisation. Behind this transformation are millions of rural migrant workers leaving their homes and families to build and serve cities. At some point, it struck me that the first twenty years of my life in Wuhan benefited tremendously from their labour, yet I knew almost nothing about who they were or how they lived.

That realisation led me to use my PhD research to get to know migrant workers more closely, and this is the foundation for Ripple Ripple Rippling. From Ripple Ripple Rippling to Tracing Sand, we expand our inquiry from within China to a wider Southeast Asian context, following material and labour flows across borders. Working anthropologically through participant observation has been central to both projects. It demands self transformation—unlearning assumptions, making the familiar strange, and learning from other communities. This ongoing process continues to shape not only our methods, but our sense of identity itself.

CNTRFLD. Home and Base
Where do you live and work now, and why? How do you define “home,” especially given your transnational practice?

field-0. The past 2 to 3 years have been a period of intense fieldwork. Rarely staying more than three weeks in one place, we have come to internalise the fieldwork as a way of life. Perhaps, by drifting with the currents of people, sediment, and power, we have joined their flow — holding the belief that planetary interconnectedness is not an abstraction, but something that can be sensed, embodied and lived. It’s difficult to define where home is. Practically speaking, when not travelling, we are mostly based in London, as Cyan continues to teach part-time at the Royal College of Art.

CNTRFLD. Creative Support and Networks
Having worked in China, the UK, and beyond, what differences and similarities have you seen in the support available for creative practices? How have these environments influenced your work?

field-0. At present, there are many open calls available for artists across the globe. Hence, we are not bound by support from any particular country or region. We want to thank all the institutions that have supported our work in the past few years: Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright prize, the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s CCA-Mellon Multidisciplinary Research Programme, Graham Foundation, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Architectural Association and Singapore Art Museum. Particularly, the Wheelwright prize has provided substantial research funding that gives us time and space to explore our chosen subject independently, without being constrained by any institutional framework or outcome requirements.

CNTRFLD. Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration
Your projects involve choreographers, sound artists, and local communities. How do these collaborations shape your work, and what do you value most in working across disciplines?

field-0. Collaboration is fundamental to our practice. Working across disciplines means staying open—letting intuition and the needs of the project determine forms, media, and modes of engagement. These decisions are rarely made alone; they emerge through close exchange with our collaborators.

In our fieldwork in Thailand and Laos with PuPla Kaewprasert, practitioners of Forestism is rooted in Thai Forest Tradition Buddhism, we learned to engage through breathing, seeing, listening, sitting, sweeping, and walking. The fully situated body became a medium, shaping our four-channel video work Drifting Bodies, presented at the Singapore Biennale.

Our collaboration with sound artist Shuoxin Tan emerged from a moment of sensory encounter in the deep mountains of Laos. Standing beneath high-voltage transmission towers, we perceived electricity as vibration—a low hum entangled with birdsong and wind. To relay this embodied experience of an invisible and abstract system, we felt a strong need to embed sound into our exhibitions in New York and Singapore. Shuoxin helped us create the spatialised soundscape for Drifting Bodies and develop The Humming of the Power Grid—an aluminium instrument generating a live feedback loop responsive to the gallery environment and electrical currents.

In Ripple Ripple Rippling, collaboration with choreographer Mengfan Wang opened new ways of engaging villagers beyond language. Her warm, sensitive yet direct approach connected with elderly women living alone, where movement and improvisation became forms of care and communication. These encounters later unfolded as a three-hour durational performance on Bedford Square in central London, where contemplative movement slowed time and drew passersby into a collective choreography. What we value most is how collaboration unsettles our assumptions and opens new ways of sensing and knowing—allowing the work to grow beyond our own disciplinary limits, from interdisciplinary to transdisciplinary.

CNTRFLD. Human and Non-Human Forces
Much of your work explores how infrastructure, energy, and ecology affect communities. How do you navigate the interplay between human and non-human forces, and what guides these explorations?

field-0. Our exploration begins with materials rather than abstractions. Sand became our entry point after a moment of rupture.

JCC. I once stood in the demolition dust of a building I had designed, breathing in its dissolution. That moment prompted a question—what does it mean to assemble the built environment from materials drawn from distant lands, only to watch them disperse?

Sand is elemental to contemporary life. It underpins concrete, glass, asphalt, solar panels, and silicon chips, while circulating with water through rivers, deltas, and coasts that sustain ecologies and livelihoods. When these flows are disrupted—by dams, dredging, reclamation, or extraction—rivers starve and landscapes unravel.

We follow sand as a non-human guide to understand the coming-into-being of iconic sites: their material form, the energy that sustains them, and the ways they enter socio-cultural imaginaries. Along its journey, sand leads us to people whose lives are entangled with these flows: workers who excavate the earth before it becomes “resource”; barge families who navigate tidal currents to transport sand; families who cross the Mekong—despite its designation as a national border—to maintain kinship; shifting sandy islands that drift hundreds of metres and become temporary agricultural land; villagers at the edge of the Mekong Delta planting mangroves to counter erosion; dam operators who take pride in powering cities; and displaced communities whose lives now follow the rhythms of regulated water.

By tracing sand through fieldwork, we surface relations obscured by geographical distance and political narratives. This way of working grounds our research in tangible, sensorial experience, revealing how human and non-human forces are deeply entangled—locally and across territories—through specific bodies, materials, and places rather than abstract systems.

CNTRFLD. Current and Future Projects
Are there current or upcoming projects that excite you? How are you experimenting or taking your practice in new directions?

field-0. We will continue raising funds through our Water Campaign, working with the Karen community in Thailand’s Vajiralongkorn Dam Reservoir to improve their access to safe drinking water. At the same time, we hope to return to what lies beneath the surface—the submerged homeland and the memories held underwater. This exploration may surface as a film, or as a constellation of multi-sensory field notes: moving images, sound, maps, photographs, and textual fragments.

Meanwhile, we are following another material trajectory: glass. Our starting point is the glass panels that form the massive dome structure enclosing the indoor waterfall at Jewel Changi Airport in Singapore. We trace the life of these panels—from silica sand melted into float glass, through automated processes that create high-performance skins, to their eventual recycling. These processes reveal supply chains stretching across China, Southeast Asia, and the United States. As glass production is highly energy-intensive, the making of Jewel’s dome is directly tied to electricity generated by hydropower plants upstream on the Mekong River. In this way, sand, water, energy, and iconic architecture fold back into one another across expanded territories.

In parallel, we are working with the Canadian Centre for Architecture on a book that gathers our Tracing Sand fieldwork, reflecting on how research might find its way back to land and communities as a form of return. We are also contemplating another book, one that holds Ripple Ripple Rippling. We approach it not as documentation of the past ten-year process, but as a field in itself—a space where images and texts drift, collide, and resonate, without settling into a single, linear narrative.

CNTRFLD. Advice for Emerging Practitioners
For those interested in interdisciplinary, field-driven work, what guidance or inspiration would you offer? Are there ways of seeing or engaging that you’ve found essential?

field-0. Everyone has their own way, really. And there is no set path. Below are just a few things we find helpful. Perhaps begin by learning how to be fully present. Step into the world with your whole body—walk, touch, listen, and attend to the ground beneath your feet. Try to free yourself, at least initially, from predefined objectives or expectations; allow the field to speak before you decide what it means.

Openness is essential. Travel lightly: take a one-way ticket, stay for one night, and leave space for detours, delays, and chance encounters. Some of the most vital insights arrive only when plans loosen and you allow yourself to be carried by what unfolds.
And be slow. Let time stretch so relationships and understanding can take root. Allow intentions to emerge rather than forcing outcomes. Slowness also means being brave enough to say no to deadlines, pressures, or frameworks that pull you away from what the work truly requires.

field-0
JCC - Jingru (Cyan) Cheng
CZ - Chen Zhan

About the artists.

field-0 [Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan] trials situated, sensorial approaches to dissecting planetary interconnectedness, while grounding our work in communities. Through fieldwork, following drifting bodies—be they sand, water or migrant workers, the practice attunes to material flows, planetary scales, intergenerational time, and the many forms of life entangled in these processes. Field practice, for us, is relation-oriented: drawing out relations, entering into them with care, and driving change towards repair and reciprocity.

Initiated by Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan, field-0 operates at the intersection of architecture, anthropology, art, and filmmaking. Their recent exhibitions include the solo shows HOW MUCH WATTAGE IS ONE HANDBREADTH OF WATER at Storefront for Art and Architecture (New York, 2025) and RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING at the Architectural Association (London, 2024), as well as participation in the 2025 Singapore Biennale. Their film work received the Architecture Short Film Award at the Milano Design Film Festival (2024) and the Best Short Film at the Venice Architecture Film Festival (2023).

Cyan was awarded the Harvard GSD’s 2023 Wheelwright Prize for TRACING SAND and received two commendations from the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) President’s Awards for Research in 2020 and 2018. Her work has been exhibited as part of Critical Zones at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2020–22), Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2019) and Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), among others. She currently teaches at the Royal College of Art in London.

Chen is an artist, independent filmmaker, anthropologist and UK-registered architect. She previously worked at Heatherwick Studio in London on high-profile international projects, including the Changi Airport Terminal 5 in Singapore, Google Gradient Canopy Headquarters in California, Bund Finance Centre in Shanghai, and Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre in Leeds, UK

About Singapore Biennale.

Singapore Biennale 2025: Pure Intention transforms the city into a platform for contemporary art through over 100 immersive, site-responsive artworks and public programmes across five key locations. Organised by Singapore Art Museum (SAM) as an SG60 Signature Event, the Biennale invites new ways of seeing Singapore’s evolving social, cultural, and urban identity. On view until 29 March 2026 at SAM, Tanjong Pagar Distripark.