We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
Donna Ong / Singapore b.1978 / Robert Zhao Renhui / Singapore b.1983 / My forest is not your garden (detail) / 2015–18 / Mixed media installation / Installed dimensions variable / © The artists / Courtesy: The artists, FOST Gallery, Singapore, and ShanghART Gallery / Photograph: Natasha Harth
Donna Ong & Robert Zhao RenhuiMy forest is not your garden 2015–2018
Not Currently on Display
My forest is not your garden 2015–18 is a collaborative work by Singaporean artists Donna Ong and Robert Zhao Renhui. The work is a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ and takes a critical look at our attitudes towards the natural world of the tropics. The installation combines Ong’s arrangements of artificial flora and tropical exotica on antique-style tables (From the tropics with love 2016) with Zhao’s display that explores Singapore’s natural history through documentation, both authentic and fabricated (The Nature Museum 2017).
Ong has arranged artificial plants and animal sculptures on antique tables, which look like a forest or a jungle inside the Gallery. Zhao has created a museum-style display that explores Singapore’s natural history through documents, photographs, objects and books, both real and imagined. Both artists’ projects started from researching the ways the tropical rainforest has been represented in magazines and books, and how these images have influenced our interactions with the natural world.
For APT9, Robert Zhao Renhui has collaborated with Donna Ong. Growing up in the city of Singapore, Ong was fascinated with the wild landscapes she finally encountered when travelling as an adult, and how these compared with the impressions of nature she had formed from images from books and magazines. Since 2008, Zhao has been working under the creative framework of the Institute of Critical Zoologists, whose mission is to ‘advance unconventional, even radical, means of understanding human and animal relations’.