By Chang Cheng Mun

That Singapore is physically small is an easy claim to make. What might be harder to fathom is that time in Singapore is also small. When I attempt to attest to Singapore's smallness, I tell friends that it takes an hour and a half to drive east to west across the island. According to 80km/h (2004), a film comprising half of Tan Pin Pin's installation, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (2025), I am wrong. In only 39 minutes, captured in a single take out of the passenger window, a car traverses the island on the Pan Island Expressway, from Changi Airport in the east to Tuas in the west.

When the car reaches Tuas, the film restarts, turning the expressway into a loop. In this way, Singapore rushes by, time collapsing unto itself in 39-minute chunks. To live in small, small Singapore is to live in this time loop. The view out the window in 80km/h does not look all that different from the present day. This is the Singaporean loop—there are a set of images that are familiar. You can only go down so much of the PIE before you start to recognise buildings. Like this, 39 minutes whizzes by.

I was alone for most of the time I spent with On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, which was commissioned for the 2025 Singapore Biennale. Wandering around Far East Plaza, a mall that has maybe seen better days, in a loop of my own in between getting a haircut and seeing the dentist, I chanced upon the piece in a darkened shop unit. Because the installation happened in an uncanny little box, it was easy to jump into the loop Tan presented. Inside, all light from the outside occluded by sheets of vinyl, two films played on parallel translucent screens, spilling onto each other and across the room. In the first of these films—footage from Tan's personal archives—Inuka, the Singapore Zoo's polar bear, swims in circles; in 80km/h, we traverse a road in a smooth, single take.

I must have spent more than 39 minutes in the installation, moving along the expressway. To stare out a passenger window—bus, car, taxi—is one way to process a lot of space in a short time. By the age of eight, I was riding the public bus alone after school, and I quickly got used to the various landmarks that let me know home was near. I learned the terrain between home and school. Later, in my teenage years, I bought a membership to the Singapore Zoo. When I was at my most stressed, I'd bring my textbooks on the bus with me and ride an hour to the zoo. I hoped to study on the long ride but instead, over the year, I familiarised myself with the bus route just by looking out of the window.

The footage of Inuka, too, was a familiar view. A child's first encounter with exhibition is likely the zoo. It was for me, and it remained so throughout my childhood. At the zoo, things are on display, but unlike most art these objects are alive. They respond in known ways. I went primarily to look at the little society of baboons the zoo held, but I remember Inuka, his exhibit always colder than everywhere else in the zoo, a relief even prior to the extreme heat of the late 2010s. I watched the baboons to understand their hierarchy. I watched Inuka and his mother Sheba, stuck in their pond, breathing tropical air they should never have been made to breathe, white fur tinged by the blue tiles of their pool. In Tan's installation this blue is cut, over and over, by the orange glow of a sunset and the deep green of trees. We are driving through a highway in the garden city, experiencing it from the comfort of the passenger seat, then Inuka's tank, then the unit in a mall. Both sides of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever are propositions for looking that build from known ways of seeing.

Here are two amorphous realities from the past: the Pan-Island Expressway circa 2004; Inuka circa, probably, 2012-2018, the six years between Sheba's death and his own. Yet the installation's staging implies a present: I was staring into a reality where Inuka was still alive, and I was staring out the window of a car into streets that looked almost the same as they do now. The recent, undated past layered onto the versions of Singapore I knew. Even with the recording, neither Tan, the artist, nor I, the viewer, could ever go back to the moment of seeing. This was a life already lived, and we were just looping back on it, swimming in the footage, drawn to eerie similarities. I was alone in the exhibit, experiencing my own private nostalgia.

Much has been said about the Singapore Biennale's strategy of scattering artworks across the city-state in the wake of the old Singapore Art Museum's continued renovation. Following a construction delay, SAM finally moved into Tanjong Pagar Distripark, a space smaller than its old premises, continuing to force the Singapore Biennale, which SAM organises, throughout the city, leading to uneven viewership numbers and critiques of its curatorial incoherence. The museum, and the biennale it organizes, are on their own loops, an art fair every two years meant to showcase new works and ideas trapped by the constraints of the imperative to redevelop, improve, move along on the loop. The image of the art fair remains, but the spaces for its existence must be reinvented all the time, creating new ways of seeing, new loops to know. The old SAM building has been under renovation for so long I know it in my image of Singapore as a set of construction hoardings. When I was younger and learning to look, having the Singapore Biennale housed in the same building, in conversation with each other, cultivated my ability to respond to artwork. Very soon I will forget what it was like to be in those galleries. But that part of my personal memory might never be fully papered over, for it was in those rooms that I learned how to be In The Museum, surrounded by High Art, another mode of seeing.

Wrenched from this context, I only had my own memory to sit with. Tan's installation was not site-specific, but it might as well have been. Far East Plaza, like the Pan-Island Expressway and Inuka's exhibit, peaked in the 2000s. A T-shirt the Tropical Futures Institute printed in 2024 memorialises the mall, a store directory from 2008 on the back. In the 1990s and 2000s, Far East Plaza was the site of much youth gathering, or so I think, for I came of age after that time, and the mall was, by my teenage years, a hub for off-brand beauty products, money changers, and Indonesian food. It doesn't matter, however. The mall is the ultimate loop on itself, reinforced by its uneasy layout, with endless corners to wander down. After all, I ended up coming off an escalator and into an art exhibit. A directory for shops labelled "FASHION/JEWELRY" printed on a T-shirt could be as remembered from your youth, or it could be a just familiar enough image that I can believe I lived it.

To have grown up in Singapore is to have learned to look at the world in an environment of repeating images. The loop—Inuka's tank, the expressway, the mall—changes every time—the polar bear gains an algal growth, new housing is built, the stores go from punk to dated—but not enough changes each time to really be of note. Inuka, undated, is on the PIE, dated to 2004 but looking not all that unfamiliar in 2026, in a shop in a mall that had its heyday in the 90s, part of an art fair left adrift by its lack of institutional home. Singapore is a city on an island in the tropics, which means it can be traversed on a single expressway and also that it is unfit for a polar bear. We assume it is the same, then all of a sudden 2026 feels different from 2008, and we are memorialising 2008 on a t-shirt. Nostalgia is impossible when we're all rushing along the same loops.

Or—nostalgia is reduced to private feeling. Hence the ultimate trick of the darkened shop unit: I was completely immersed in the experience. I could rue what used to be there, but I was still moving on the loop. On the next pass I'd have internalised that that's just what the loop looks like now, and maybe in a few loops I'd think, remember when that was there. A thought only I might have, because something else is there now. That next version of the loop exists and is always competing with the version of the loop I know in my head, and sometimes someone else puts their time loop on a T-shirt.

I could have been one person in the zoo or in the passenger seat, looking at Inuka, looking out the window at Singapore. But I was not. I will never see this world as it were again, even as I was seeing a version of it, right then. Perhaps the world outside had changed in these 39 or so minutes. Someone opened the door to the gallery and my immensely private moment broke; I had to go to the dentist and the mall streamed in from the outside. I was in the Far East Plaza of 2026, not 2008 nor 2004. I went back out into the mall and looped my way down to the street.

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