Presented by Boon Lay Photo Club, Odd/Even brings together 8 photographers responding to the Lorongs of Geylang — a neighbourhood mapped, quite literally, by odd and even street numbering. Over two months of shooting, each photographer develops a project exploring the area beyond its best-known narrative.
Rather than treat Geylang as a single story to document, Odd/Even visualises its multiplicities. Overlapping narratives are layered to counter-map the neighbourhood visually.
The Lorongs' odd-and-even divide, which quietly denotes different typologies of people and activity, becomes a lens onto a Geylang that thrives on cultural merge: home to Singapore's largest concentration of clan associations, dozens of religious sites, and the accumulated stories of immigrants navigating both transient and permanent ground.
Odd/Even looks at these communities beyond the index.
01As AboveJesryn D’ Souza
Geylang neon signs are unique and eye-catching. However, one tends to see it from a distance and at a flat angle. "As Above" tries to see those signs from a different perspective: angular, obtuse and different. Maybe all it takes is just a little perspective to change one's whole view of a subject.
Jesryn D'souza is a Singaporean photographer, currently a year 1 student persuing a Bachelor of FIne Arts in the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University. Coming from a more commerical photography background, music and editorial, Jesryn is striving to slow down and explore the finer ideas of himself and the world through photography.
02Geylang’s Next Top ModelLee Yong Ler, Noah
Geylang’s Next Top Model Prints, signs, figures, statues, banners, light strips. The streets are lined with them to draw and entire potential customers even from far across the street, visible even when looking down the quietest lorongs of Geylang. These icons become a part of our spatial memory, becoming landmarks and monuments of the districts.
As gentrification, shifting community demographics, consumer tastes and demand settle and shape the use of Geylang spaces they form a transient impression of a Geylang identity - one that is nebulous, mutable, buzzing in constant flux. In voting for Geylang’s Next Top Model, we create a snapshot of the form that the Geylang identity takes at this moment.Deeply fascinated with the poetics of banality and the act of collecting, I am deeply engrossed with asking ontological questions of what it means to live in modern society and how we should be doing so. Tensions between ourselves and our objects, nature and the relations that bind them together inform my work, driving me to search for the way that we create meaning in our lives
Additionally, I have also been interested in integrating aspects of care and silliness into my practice, for I believe that being there for one another and moments of lightheartedness is core to being human.
03Geylang GhostsZachary Tang
Geylang is one of the few places left in Singapore where the spirit of the seventh lunar month – also the festival of the hungry ghost – still burns bright. Large paper offerings and elaborate effigies are set up and lit on fire along the main road and inside the lorongs, drawing worshippers and strangers alike into their fiery orbit. Zachary Tang is a Singapore-based photojournalist drawn to spirituality, subculture, and how people find meaning in contemporary life.
04soft groundsLynn Wen Wen
In a modest barbershop nestled in Geylang, a simple haircut turns into a quiet act of physical care, shared language, and quiet intimacy. Centered on Ah Mei, a hairstylist living in Singapore for twenty years, the series examines how time, labor, and routine reshape our connection to where we come from, and where we belong.
Lynn Wen Wen (b. 2002) is an multidisciplinary creative based in Singapore. Working primarily through lens-based mediums, she examines the inherent vulnerability woven into the collective rituals and habitual performances of modern society. Her practice is informed by an interest in the curious obsessions found within local landscapes, seeking out the emotional undercurrents that exist within the rhythms of daily life.
05green-skin districtYeow Zong Wei
Repeating, equally-spaced, endless. The green bins line up neatly along Geylang Road, order containing disorder. The green skins, scarred by cigarette burns and tattooed with vinyl stickers, are fully bare in the afternoon sun. Where is the red? Geylang is green. Zong Wei is happy to be here. He is concerned with regional and global environmental degradation and environmental justice. He studies Environmental Studies at the National University of Singapore and leads as the Publicity Director of the Inter-University Environmental Coalition.
06</3JX Soo
Geylang is a place for lonely hearts, or so we and the systems have agreed, and the framing for desire comes before the place. I went down the main road once, one way, and I did not turn in, kept at the seam between the odd lorongs and the even to look for connection unseen, because that is as far as someone like me actually stands. We were asked to look past the index, past the surface, past the sorting into odd and even, and I could not, because to look past a thing you must know what is behind it, and I knew nothing, none of the grit and desire in these streets. So to stay to document the ‘real’, I took the title's brief at face value, I stayed at the surface than to be a false investigator, and gathered what the place holds up of itself, a heart, a man holding his back, shapes that are stock before they are anything real, and I peered into them, found three, and gave the weightless thing a body. And the pictures begin in the real, and then they drift, one shape to the next by likeness alone, a heart to a heart, a hand to a back, until a story gathers that was never in them, a wandering, a daydream desire that has lost its way. What is told is invented, what is seen is real, and the distance between them is the work. To call it documentation would be too kind; a camera turned on a place it does not know holds not the place but the wanting that carried it there. So the thing I was looking at was the looking. A place for lonely hearts, we said; the loneliest may be the one at the glass, drawn to the light like the moth, and no wiser for it.
JX Soo works across photography, video, text, and sound. Informed by the distance and transience of their formative years across East Asia's cities, their primarily lens-based practice examines representations and artefacts borne of memory, transmission, and circulation.
They are drawn to how narratives — fictional, quasi-fictional, or actual — emerge from spaces of ambiguity, referentiality, and material negotiation, forming personal constructs of land, boundary, and identity. With a background in music, their images tend to resist documentary impulses, fixing instead on colour, primal emotion, and rhythm.
07The PolaroidsJin Tian
Jin Tian is a Singapore-based artist currently working with images, exploring themes of identity, memory, and everyday life.
08Hanging AroundWong Shu Xin
Hidden between the alleys lies evidence of the people living in Geylang. "Hanging Around" is a faceless series showing an alternative perspective of the streets of Geylang, where life moves slower, and residents linger. This is proof of life outside of the bustling nightlife Geylang is often reduced to.Shu Xin is a Singapore-based photographer and filmmaker who is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Communications in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communications and Information at Nanyang Technological University. With a foundation in filmmaking, she is finally exploring the art of storytelling through still images.
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