Catalogue > At random

Garden of No Return is a new hand-tracked VR experience by Sim Chi Yin and Dan Archer which chronicles the depletion of sand from Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and across Asia. The world is running out of sand. The insatiable demand for this non-renewable resource has led to large-scale environmental impact driven by rapid urbanisation and land reclamation. In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, land about the size of a football field is melting away into the river every day. For local residents, the land snaps off suddenly, sometimes in the dark of night, and robs them of their homes, shops and ancestral shrines. This work weaves together lullabies, laments, and poetry narrated by Vietnamese writer Kh?i ??n to speak about the erosion of both memory and site as the consequence of large-scale global sand mining. It combines reconstructed 3D terrain using photogrammetry and filmed sequences to allude to communal losses and extreme precarity in the global business flows of sand mining. It brings viewers to the site of the landslides and see, hear, and feel firsthand the landscape of the Mekong Delta where large-scale erosion is taking place, and convey the human cost of sand mining in a visceral and experiential manner.

Sim Chi Yin (b. 1978, Singapore) is an artist whose research-based practice uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. She works across photography, film, installation, performance and book-making. She is participating in the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and has exhibited at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); the Barbican, London (2023); Harvard Art Museums, Boston, USA (2021); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2021); Nobel Peace Museum, Oslo (2017), Arko Art Centre, Seoul (2016); Zilberman Gallery Berlin (2021); Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2019). She has also participated in the Istanbul Biennale (2022, 2017) and the Guangzhou Image Triennial ( 2021). Her work is in the collections of Harvard Art Museums, The J. Paul Getty Museum, M+ Hong Kong, Singapore Art Museum, and the National Museum Singapore. She was an artist fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2022-3) and is completing a PhD at King’s College London. Dan Archer is a creative technologist, computer scientist and immersive storyteller who co-founded Empathetic Media, an XR production studio, in 2014. EM leverages augmented, mixed and virtual reality to foster stronger connections and perspective-taking between the subjects in its stories and its audiences. A leading thinker and practitioner in the immersive space, Archer has researched and written about the link between empathy, impact and immersive story-telling. He was a 2016 fellow at the Tow Center at Columbia University, a Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow (University of Missouri, 2014) and a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University (2011). He is currently completing a PhD at UCL focusing on evaluating embodiment and performance using biological signals in virtual reality environments, and exploring persuasive immersive technologies as a researcher at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.