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.