When the Burmese-Chinese businessman and heir to the Tiger Balm dynasty Aw Boon Haw built a villa and cultural theme park in Singapore, he intended it to educate Singaporeans about traditional Chinese cultural values as an antidote to the island nation’s emerging cosmopolitanism. However, Haw Par Villa ultimately stands as a display of supposedly immutable values that has ended up a physically and culturally layered site due to numerous attempts at restoring and reinventing it, including through the incorporation of Western theme-park technology. 

Singaporean-Australian artist Jess Bradford previously lived with her family near Haw Par Villa. Fascinated by its grottoes, which house garish representations of moral fables like the Ten Courts of Hell, and are decorated with repeated lumpy cement forms that variously represent caves, waves and clouds, the artist has made it the subject of her work for several years now. Using decades-old found black-and-white holiday snapshots of the park as a starting point, Bradford explores representational theory and the slippage between two- and three-dimensionality across painting, sculpture and installation in her latest show at Galerie Pompom, “An Image of a Tiger.”

As in previous exhibitions, the artist constructed a set piece to lure the audience into the works. In the past, Bradford has utilized a rocky proscenium arch and a mantelpiece with exposed back; this time, it was a large, wavy-edged, horseshoe-shaped table upon which her small-scale pastel-and-liquid-pencil renderings of anonymous archival photographs rested, each nestled in a bisque-fired porcelain “Rock Study” (all works 2018). Bradford is careful to remind us of the constructed nature of Haw Par Villa and her own representations of it, creating a train of references with opaque original authorship. Rendered on aluminum, with the roughly applied white primer glooping over the edges in places, the reproduced photographs include the original white borders, patches where the photographic layer has been scratched away to reveal the paper underneath, and sometimes small printed numbers in the lower right-hand corners, indicating the year the photo was taken. They depict decontextualized scenes from the park, such as a rhinoceros standing before an ornate fence, and a couple of visitors posing amongst statues of human-clothed monkeys.