Green Zeng's monograph 'Notes for the Future' surveys decade of politically engaged Singaporean art

Singaporean artist-filmmaker Green Zeng has released a self-published monograph titled 'Notes for the Future, Green Zeng: A Review 2010–2020' that documents seven bodies of work created over a decade. The book examines how histories are constructed and interpreted through various media. Early works include 'Malayan Exchange, Studies of Notes of the Future' (2011), featuring fictional banknotes with political exiles' portraits. Later video projects like the 'Television Confessions' series (2018) investigate televised confessions by political detainees from the 1960s to 1980s. Another significant work, 'Shifting Dioramas' (2016), presents photographs of National Day billboards displaying politicians' faces overlaid with constituency boundary lines. The publication includes essays by academics, critics, artists, and friends, many reprinted from catalogues to provide political context for international readers. Artist Gilles Massot contributes a text comparing the gerrymandered zones in Zeng's work to Situationist dérives. Zeng describes the book as both a conclusion to one chapter and a step toward new challenges. The monograph demonstrates how art in Singapore offers more open-ended political commentary compared to state-regulated mass media, presenting alternative narratives to official histories through still images, prints, videos, and films.