Presented as a seamless loop, ‘Only nearer than half a world apart’ is a digital composite of documented and archival images collected from the early 1920s to present day. Contemporary spaces filled with fading remnants of the past situates viewers in an intermediary space, halfway between reality and hallucination.

Referencing imagery from early ‘Entertainment’ worlds in Singapore, Choo traced then sutured records of New World, Great World, and Gay/Happy World, creating a moving time-lapse within a shared space. This memory-image presents individuals, from past to present, as unconscious performers in pensive states. A juxtaposition from the grandiosity and spectacle of fairgrounds, familiar characters are grafted in identifiable moments, existing in splices of time and image, document and monument.

READ MORE: On the other side of the glass: Sarah Choo Jing’s Dancing Without Touching by Dr. Karin G. Oen