Lavender Chang
Floating Rays of a Wanderer
How do you capture a journey? Lavender Chang’s “Floating Rays of a Wanderer” traces the journey of strangers, attempting to sense their destinations, and mapping their travels on public transport.
Capturing images from a public bus plying its fixed route, the artist continuously records the various landscapes brought in front of the lens’ field of view, seen from the bus window.
The eventual photographs compress the journey’s duration into a singular frame, created as a prolonged exposure aboard public buses in Singapore. Beyond a record of the trip, the work also documents Singapore’s ever-changing landscape. Each image represents a unique journey of a bus ride that will not be able to be replicated.
You are invited to join Lavender on a rare decommissioned bus as she shares about her artistic process creating “Floating Rays of a Wanderer”, her relationship to bus journeys and the history of public buses in Singapore.
Reconsider your connection with time, memory and travel, as we experience how the bus becomes a giant camera capturing the changing landscapes of Singapore.
Artist Bio
Known for her time-based, process-driven works, Lavender Chang’s practice is a reflection of her sensitivity towards the subtle nuances of her surroundings. She focuses on these experiences and creates works which allow further contemplation and let the passage of time leave behind traces of her mortality. Chang has shown widely locally and regionally, and her works have been exhibited at Singapore Art Museum, National Museum of Singapore, Alliance Française de Singapour, FOST Gallery, The Arts House, Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, among others. Her debut feature film, Absent Smile, had its world premiere at the 2022 Singapore International Film Festival’s Panorama section, and she was commissioned by the Peranakan Museum to present Sheltered Dreams for their reopening. Her works have been exhibited in Indonesia, United States, Korea, United Arab Emirates, Malaysia and China. In 2011, she received the Gold Award at The Crowbar Awards and the Noise Singapore Prize.
Take part at home
Pay attention and discover your surroundings during your bus ride with a simple activity.
Take a picture from the window of a traffic junction that intrigues you, and mark down the location, time, date, and weather of that moment.
Set a one-year reminder on your calendar to revisit the same junction and take another image to compare how it has transformed over time.
Send us your photos, and it will be shared on this website as part of the artwork. Together, we’ll visit neighbourhoods that we usually won’t visit.