Singaporean artist Isabella Ong has been in residence at Rimbun Dahan for two months, from June to July 2025.
About the Artist
Isabella Ong (b. 1992) is a Singapore-based artist whose work explores the relationship between data, form and environment. Working across installation, code and text, she examines how ecological, cultural and technical systems are structured and represented. Her practice engages with material processes alongside physical computation and generative methods, translating natural phenomena into spatial and visual languages.
She received her MArch in Design for Performance & Interaction from The Bartlett, UCL, and a BA (Hons) in Architecture from the National University of Singapore. She was an artist-in-residence at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy (2023) and currently teaches at NUS Department of Architecture and NAFA’s Design Practice programme. Her practice is shaped by ongoing collaborations across disciplines and communities.
www.isabellaong.net
@isabella_ong_
About the Residency
The word artefact has two meanings. It can refer to a human-made object, or an error in observation or representation introduced by the technique or tool involved. During my residency, I explored the duality of object and error through a body of work that interrogates the Corinthian column as a Straits artefact: a classical form adopted into the local building vernacular, often described by historians as ‘untutored’ or ‘plagiarised’ copies of the classical order. It is this act of copying that forms the basis of my experiments into techniques of reproduction.
In one series (‘coarse copy’), I made casts and bricks out of Shanghai plaster, a faux-stone finish made of stone aggregates held together in a cement-binder that results in a rough, speckled texture. As a material introduced by Chinese labourers hired to construct many of Singapore’s classically inspired buildings, Shanghai plaster embodies the material culture of labour histories and transmission. In the work, the bricks are cast patterns of botanical specimens selected from Rimbun Dahan’s native garden, their impressions read against the grain of the textured plaster. The bricks form a pedestal, presented as a pattern book of alternative ornamental motifs, indexing botanical taxonomy alongside Vitruvius’ architectural myth of the column. The coarsened medium of this casting technique challenges the assumption of fidelity, drawing attention to how imposed forms require local hands to make—and remake—them, their labour an act of translation.
In another series (‘carbon copy), I worked with carbon transfer paper to manually copy text. Using a basic black-and-white printer, I printed out copies of Vituvius’ architectural myth, sourced as a low-res scan from the Internet Archive. Enlarged tenfold, the text rendered as pixelated fragments, which I then copied by hand. The letters began to blur into artefacts. This exercise draws from the attitude towards copies and imitation in Eastern art, such as the copying of calligraphy masterpieces, where reproductions are often regarded with equal (or even greater) value than the original.
Across the works, I am interested in how forms shift through processes of transmission. Working with low-res scans, transfer materials and patterning, the project explores the methods of reproduction as both a technical and cultural act. By destabilising familiar artefacts and forms, I examine how monuments are not only inherited but also being rewritten through acts of documentation and replication. Copying thus becomes a way to look at how inherited structures—architectural, botanical, archival—are mediated through the tools, labour and material knowledge of those who remake them.
