Teng Yen HuiI’ve written and rewritten this introduction many times, as if trying to find the right door into something that has no fixed beginning. In the end, it’s hard to speak of grief without first speaking of the ones we grieve. And so to write about grief, then, is to write about love — and the unbearable weight of its absence. The very first piece of writing I did in 2023 wasn’t a curatorial text of any sort. Rather, it was a eulogy, written in the fog of disbelief, for a dear friend who passed away suddenly from heart failure just months before his 50th birthday. It was a Monday night when his family called with the news, and even now, I can recall the exact moment the world seemed to tilt. Grief, when it arrives like that, does not knock. It simply enters. I had known grief before — losing pets, grandparents, distant kin — but nothing prepared me for the hollowing that followed his unexpected departure. Days moved forward but time no longer felt familiar. I was left circling conversations we never finished, ideas we never got round to, things I never had the chance to say. So when Janice Kim, an independent curator from Korea, reached out about a month later with an idea for an exhibition on death, I said yes immediately. I suppose it felt like a way to tend to something that had already taken root within me. But beyond that, it also felt like a chance to create a space where others, too, could bring their own losses, sit with them, and perhaps, in that gathering, find something resembling understanding — or simply company. When the World Stops Turning brought together the perspectives of 15 artists — 7 from Korea and 8 from Singapore — to explore the terrains of death and grief. The exhibition was first presented at starch in Singapore (18 Oct - 11 Nov 2024) before traveling to Frame Seongsu in Seoul (20 Nov - 15 Dec 2024). While its title gestured to the stillness experienced during the pandemic (when the idea for this project first emerged), it served more broadly as a metaphor for the profound sorrow that can often disable us in times of tragedy and loss. Death is a shared human experience, yet the ways we encounter and carry it are deeply personal. Death transcends borders and beliefs, offering a point of connection across distance. This exhibition invited artists to reflect on death’s imprint on both personal and collective levels, tracing intimate narratives of loss while probing the broader societal and political dimensions surrounding it. In doing so, the works revisited themes of human dignity, inequality, and marginalisation, addressing the wounds carried by both the departed and the living. The words in the essay that follows have needed coaxing. They come from days of silence, from tears shared and unshared (shed and unshed?), from moments of aching clarity and others blurred by exhaustion. Grief has lingered in the quiet corners of our days. And this piece of writing is an attempt to stay with it — not to resolve it, but to trace its shape. To ask: how do we hold those we love before time runs out? How do we carry the weight that death leaves behind? And what might art offer us — not just as balm, but as mirror, companion, and witness? This essay was penned for the wonderful artists and friends who trusted Janice and I to hold their stories, their hearts, and their hands: Cho Eunhee, Ezzam Rahman, Jang Minseung, Kim Kang, Kim Shinil, Mary Bernadette Lee, Lee Young Rim, Rachma Lim, Loh Xiang Yun, Calvin Pang, Park Hyungjin, Yen Phang, Seol Euna, Moses Tan, and Zarina Muhammad. It was also written with love for Tim, Cheryl, and Pierre, and for everyone who continues to love them. And for anyone who holds grief — quietly, heavily, or with tenderness: these words are for you, too.
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Is it strange to think that the sea holds grief in ways that the land never could? On the shore, the ground beneath your feet feels solid and reassuring. The sea, however, offers no such comfort. It shifts and it pulls as if to remind us that certainty itself is a fiction. It holds its secrets in its depths, refusing to answer even the simplest of questions: where does it begin, and where does it end? Grief, too, resists certainties. Alain de Botton once reflected: “mourning takes us away from the solid ground of the everyday into something vast and unpredictable.” The sea’s rhythm — its ebb and flow — mirrors grief’s cyclical nature, receding only to return, sometimes gentle, other times overwhelming. Like the sea, grief draws us into unfamiliar and often uncomfortable spaces. Places where we can neither map its boundaries nor determine its course. Yet I have come to believe that perhaps the sea has always known how to shoulder loss. It absorbs everything — our memories, our sorrows, the pieces of ourselves we can no longer bear – and holds it all just beneath the surface. Perhaps this is why we return to it time and again. Not to find answers, but to feel, if only for a moment, that in the vastness of what we have lost, we are not alone.
The sea has always carried the weight of human grief, yet its surface betrays none of it. Through Minseung’s lens, we approach its visage and are drawn to its shifting, breathing surface as sunlight gleams across the water. On first look, it is a scene that seems to soothe and invite reflection. Yet, beneath this calm lies a heaviness that is felt rather than seen, as though the water itself remembers what it has borne. In Snow We Saw, the sea’s silence speaks louder than words. It bears witness to the Sewol Ferry disaster of 2014, a tragedy that claimed over 400 lives, many of them children. But Minseung’s lens does not seek to explain or resolve; it lets the sea speak its own language. Its waves, endless in their rise and fall, seem to become gestures of mourning. What the sea carries cannot be named. It persists. The silence of Minseung’s sea meets the voice of the living in Kim Kang’s performance of When The Day Comes. Borrowing its title from a 1983 poem, the song was once a rallying cry for political change in 1980s South Korea, carrying the grief and hopes of those who resisted oppression, including Kim herself. Forty years later as her voice returns, the song resonates with the weight of more recent tragedies — the Sewol Ferry disaster, the Itaewon tragedy of 2023 — each a stark reminder of lives lost and futures stolen. Its lyrics, simple yet profound, echo through time: When the day comes, when the day comes… my brief youth would not have been in vain. The song is not merely a lament but a refusal to let loss be forgotten, to let the silence become erasure. The song is a demand for memory. Both works speak to the ways we mourn. One, through the steady persistence of the sea’s rhythm. The other, through the defiance of a voice that sings in spite of loss. Together they remind us that grief lingers — not necessarily as a burden, but as a force. It resists forgetting and compels us to look, to remember, to act. The sea absorbs what we cannot hold. And yet, it does not forget.
Several days after the exhibition in Singapore opened, we discovered that a corner of Calvin’s work had been accidentally disturbed. What was once a meticulously constructed QR code made from sea salt had become no longer readable. Yet, this was not a failure but an inevitability embedded in the work’s very creation. Calvin’s choice of an ephemeral material was an invitation to viewers to confront the fragility of all things. The act of making evoked the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of sand mandalas, where intricate designs are painstakingly formed only to be ritually dismantled, emphasising the impermanence woven into existence itself. In Calvin’s work, as with the mandalas, the act of making becomes the meaning itself. I am finally going home that is the thought I will have should my body start to fail It is written that the grass withers and the flowers fall but Your word will endure even when the world stops turning I may be ashes scattered in the sea but I know I am home (when my world stops turning) [1] While the use of sea salt ties Calvin’s work to his current place of residence in Bali, it also connects to a larger meditation on return. Salt, born of the sea, may one day find its way back, much as we too are bound to return to the elements from which we came. This sense of elemental continuity reverberates in Zarina’s words: “We arrive enshrouded in blood and fluids and return to flames or dirt, after being marked once again by water.” These words summon the knowledge embedded in countless cosmogonies: water as origin, water as end. Across cultures and centuries, water carries us, severs us, delivers us to what lies beyond. It connects the physical to the spiritual, the living to the dead, the known to the unknowable. The elements endure what we cannot: they bear memory, loss, and the hope that what is submerged will rise again. Water, ever in motion, offers no permanence — only the quiet promise of return.
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish I had let myself be happier.
From The Top Five Regrets of the Dying Bronnie Ware, 2011 Such feelings belong to us all, but how often do we acknowledge them, release them, and make space for the new in our lives?
Four telephones punctuate the stillness of the room, their ringing insistent, beckoning you to respond. You follow the flickering light and pick up a handset as it hums with the promise of connection. A voice — human, fragile — emerges from the static. At first there is surprise, a recognition of the unexpected intimacy in this fleeting encounter. But soon the moment deepens. Each phone call becomes a brief crossing into someone else’s life, brimming with the confessions, regrets, reflections or stories of someone unknown. You cannot predict the sound of the voice on the other end or the words that will be offered, nor can you control the silence that follows when the call ends. But for those brief moments you are a part of it, just as the voices, once heard, will eventually become a part of you. Nearby, a phone booth waits silently, inviting you to leave your unspoken words for someone you missed the chance to address. Where then do these words go? Euna has carried these expressions of longing, loss, and love and set them free in remote places to be swallowed by the land and sky. In 2019, voices gathered in the first year of the project were released into the winds of Ushuaia. In 2022, 95,000 voices were scattered into the vastness of the Sahara Desert. The voices collected from our exhibition this year will eventually be set free in the expansive landscapes of Iceland. The phone booth offers something beyond catharsis: a liberation of memory and speech, and a chance for words withheld to find their place in the world. Over the last five years, more than 120,000 calls have been recorded. Even when the installation is not on display, the work continues in an unexpected way. The phone number remains active, offering anyone the chance to unburden themselves and speak the words they could never bring themselves to say. In all the voices gathered, we were told that two words recur more than any other. The first is “love”. The second is “mother”. Two words repeated more than any others, like echoes of something universal, something eternal. It is these same two words that linger in my mind as I think of Ezzam’s works. The way that they, intimate in their quietude, seem to the hold the entirety of those very words. In the video documenting his years as a caregiver, Ezzam lays bare the mundane realities of tending to someone who once cared for you. The tenderness in those moments is not in their beauty but in their truth. There is no glorification, no romanticisation of the tasks. The work shows, in the most unflinching way, the gradual fading of a body and the emotional labour that sustains it. Through his lens, we are reminded that love does not always come in grand gestures or moments of triumph. Sometimes, it is quietly folded into the routines of everyday life — the unacknowledged labour of care, the small sacrifices made, the moments of tenderness that might otherwise go unnoticed. These are the very moments that define us. That bind us to each other and shape the way we live and love.
If you died today, what would you most regret not being to tell [and] to whom? The question, printed on a cheerfully pink slip of paper, seemed deceptively harmless in its brightness. Yet when I pulled it from a bowl during a studio visit with Euna in Seoul last October, it felt as though the air in the room had shifted. It was one of many questions that Euna had prepared as conversation starters, each a quiet provocation, a doorway into the recesses of the unsaid. We sat in a circle, taking turns to draw them out, contemplating the gravity of each before speaking our words out loud. Let’s just say that a lot of tissue was being passed around that afternoon. This same inquiry, steeped in the difficulty of farewells, lies at the heart of Yen Phang’s work. It draws inspiration from a 1586 letter written by a grieving widow in Andong, South Korea, addressed to her deceased husband. The letter, discovered only in 1998, is a fragile testament to love and loss that has echoed over centuries. Yen’s work begins where the widow’s letter leaves off: imagining the words we might never say or might say too late. How often do we get to choose when we say goodbye? The truth is, rarely, if ever. Goodbyes often arrive unbidden, unannounced, stealing into our lives like a thief in the night. A sudden departure. A phone call in the early hours. The quiet erosion of connection over years. The goodbyes we yearn to give, deliberate and measured, are often a luxury denied. And in the rare moments we do get to choose, they come laden with both grace and unbearable weight. The final touch, the last word — how does one distill the vastness of a life, a relationship, into a single gesture? The questions linger long after the moment has passed: Did we say enough? Did we leave enough behind? Yen’s work is a reckoning with this absence of certainty. In a series of letters, he drafts imagined farewells to the ones closest to him. Some letters are written only once, as if the simple act of putting pen to paper could close a chapter. Others are revised endlessly — buried in fresh soil beneath banana trees, unearthed, then rewritten again. The paper, marked by its journey through soil, rain and ink, becomes a map of memory, each version bearing witness to his striving towards the elusive “right” words. This act of processing farewell is not merely about confronting death’s finality; it is also a quiet invitation to let mortality seep into the realm of the living, to allow it to sharpen our attentiveness to what we hold dear. Sorting these letters parallels the endeavour of arranging one’s thoughts and affairs, a task both mundane and profound. It’s hard to imagine that a material as fragile as paper can hold such weight, and yet it does. When I think back to the exchange in Euna’s studio, I realise that it wasn’t just about the words we shared, but about the moments we allowed ourselves to be fully seen — the quiet openings we offered one another. Yen’s letters, too, extend the same vulnerability. They are intimate conversations not just with the past but also with the here-and-now. They invite us to sit with the ache of loss, and in that sitting, discover the quiet comfort of memory. Perhaps the art of life, then, is not to master the goodbye but to live within its shadow — to recognise, with every breath, the weight and grace of beginning again.
Moses and Hyungjin speak to the same quiet yet overwhelming condition: the experience of waiting. Waiting not as a passive lapse of time but as a state of being — rooted in the certainty of what must come yet permeated by the uncertainty of the when and how. Both works confront this paradox, drawing out its textures in vastly different ways. Yet both arrive at a shared reckoning with the forces that shape our lives, forces that so often lie beyond our control. Moses’ work contends with the fragile realities of queer love in a society that refuses to see it as equal. It reflects on the marriage vow “in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part” — words that carry the promise of permanence yet hang hollow in a country where same-sex unions are not acknowledged, and where decisions of life and death might be relinquished to biological kin. The winding, seemingly unnecessary arrangement of extension cords that he’s fashioned imagines this fraught journey, evoking a hospital scene. Yet more than that, they sketch the contours of a system that denies autonomy in life’s most intimate and vulnerable moments. The work is a confrontation with time — time spent waiting for recognition, waiting for a future where love is no longer questioned but assumed. Hyungjin’s works address another kind of waiting: the endless, repetitive days of the pandemic when time itself lost its structure. Each circle drawn and each erasure marked became a way of recording life’s fragility, a ritual of control in a moment when the world had seemingly lost all semblance of it. The accumulation of eraser dust, carefully collected in glass jars, is more than just residue — it is memory made material. It holds within it the heaviness of a year and eight months spent under the shadow of the unknown. If Moses’ waiting is marked by a yearning for a future, Hyungjin’s was bound to the fragile present. For Moses, waiting is imposed by the laws and histories that insist some loves are worth more than others. For Hyungjin, it is the slow, relentless accumulation of days, thick with the unease of a world paused. Both of them remind us that waiting is not nothing — it is everything we do when life demands that we endure.
Shinil begins with a photograph of waste. A seemingly trivial image that, under his manipulation, dissolves into abstraction. The objects disappear, stretching and distorting until only colour remains, untethered from its origins. In this act of dissolution, he reflects on what may follow death: a realm where form, reason, and consciousness begin to fade. The disappearance of the concrete opens the door to a new kind of form, one that arises from the remnants of what once was. Through this transformation, he gestures towards the ineffable, towards the possibilities that exist beyond the limits of the tangible. Youngrim, in her own search for meaning, poses a question steeped in both curiosity and doubt: can the essence of grief be calculated, distilled into universal patterns of colour and form? She turns to artificial intelligence, trained on centuries of human expression, to generate images of death. The results however are unsettling: eerily distant, lacking in empathy, and exposes a deep void at the heart of the machine’s attempts. In the very failure of AI, Youngrim finds her answer. It is not enough to have patterns or data; the human experience of grief requires a depth that machines simply cannot provide. Xiang Yun, similarly drawn to the interplay of form and colour, charts the seven stages of grief with a delicate and deliberate hand. Her handkerchiefs capture the shifting hues between loss and healing, suggesting that something tender may yet be found within its folds. Rachma, by contrast, speaks through the language of music, where sound and emotion intertwine. Eunhee, meanwhile, maps the grief of both individual loss and planetary devastation. Her work translates memory and mortality into sound, creating a score that echoes the rhythm of life itself. It could be said that grief, an emotion often too complex for words, may find its resonance in colours, sound and touch, each becoming a language unto itself. In these works, we are invited to experience it in new and profound ways.
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt of late, it is that time does not erase grief. Rather, it teaches us to carry it differently, to hold its weight with tenderness and understanding. Over the course of a year, Mary’s grief found form in quiet, deliberate acts: spending time by the sea, gathering shells, drawing them, grinding them into powder, and folding that powder into clay. Some of the clay was made into pots, functional and unassuming. But the pieces that drew me in most were the Mary-shaped ones — clay that she moulded along parts of her body, cradling her shoulders or tracing the curve of an arm. The forms were fragile yet resolute, resembling pieces of armour, as though she sought to shield herself with the very material of her grief. Yet they were also like an embrace, as if the clay remembered the contours of her body and held her in return. Like the shells which found renewed purpose in Mary’s hands, grief too changes over time, never disappearing but transforming, finding new ways to be carried. Mary’s ceramics are more than mere objects; they are the very time it takes: the time to fall apart, to gather, to build. Through these fragile forms, she offers a way to hold the unholdable, to understand that what is left — though different — is still, always, enough.
More exhibition images can be found here. All photographs shot through the loving lens of Alvin Ho.
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