Gupta’s work draws on the visual culture around him, one that is saturated in an overabundance of images, forms, food and people—mirrored in his avalanche of plates, cups, pails and pots. But unlike his other sculptures made of shiny stainless-steel vessels, Cooking the World is made of used aluminium vessels that are inscribed with personal histories. They refer to the parallel realities in a globalised, consumerist society: surplus and affluence on one hand, dearth and deprivation on the other. The artist’s use of worn-out vessels monumentalises the lives of people who have been marginalised by life and history, while the delicate threads from which each pot hangs lend a sense of fragile temporality to this work. If a breeze were to pass through this gargantuan haloed sphere, one could imagine the smaller pots gently swaying, as though they were particles of stardust threatening to escape from this only-temporary assemblage of a world.

This site-specific work is at once a garden of artificial flora and a labyrinth of mirrors. Entering the installation, viewers find themselves inside a kaleidoscope, where the surrounding infinite mirror images create a feeling of the loss of subjectivity. Artificial plants, referencing classical Song Dynasty representations of particular flora, but coated in vibrant colours, assault the senses and blur the lines between the real and the artificial. In applying the colour schemes from maps he has examined to these artificial plants and classically-referenced ‘scholar rocks’ he has created, the artist defies the conventional systems of colour-coding in map-making, recasting the world with a renewed hope for the integration of richness and diversity and the resolution of conflicts. By evoking scepticism and uncertainty, his work raises doubt about the validity and accuracy of map-making; it creates a utopia while simultaneously disassembling it.

Singapore in the twenty-first century is a mélange of sights, smells and sounds of various Southeast Asian communities that have taken root here in recent years. The Thai community, for instance, congregates in Golden Mile Complex, while the Burmese diaspora is known to be concentrated in Peninsula Plaza; each ‘sonic territory’, as Zulkifle dubs them, boasts a unique soundscape all its own. SONICreflection is a sound sculpture: recordings from a number of these sonic territories are transmitted from multiple tweeters mounted on a wall lined with wok lids; pencil microphones are used to amplify the resultant cacophony, which assumes the form of layers of everyday, ambient clamour, ranging from snippets of dialogue to incidental noise. In exploring the micro-universes of Singapore’s cultural hodgepodge, Zulkifle’s work foregrounds the otherwise overlooked auditory character of each community and the space it inhabits.