Partial Bodies, Whole Worlds: Act 2

Through dream states, mythologised landscapes, and hybrid beings, the films turn to forms of understanding that are embodied and experienced

Content Advisory Warning: This session features moving images with flashing images. Viewer discretion is advised.

Act 2: Knowing Otherwise

This screening brings together three films that think through different ways of knowing the body. Through dream states, mythologised landscapes, and hybrid beings, the works turn to forms of understanding that are embodied and experienced, drawing on ways of knowing that resist empirical habits of categorisation, measurement, and control.

The body here is not treated as an object to be fully mapped or explained. It is approached through sleep, storytelling, speculation, and projection — modes that emerge from within rather than from methodological and objective observation. What unfolds is not a definitive account of the body, but a sense of how bodily knowledge is shaped by memory, environment, and imagination, and how it continues to exceed attempts to fix or contain it.

Featured Short Films

Child’s Concise History of Garden City (2005); dir. Sean Li-wen Cheong and Jason Ebo Johnson

Artwork with narration that tells of an orchid hybrid from the cross-breeding of an orchid and a firefly. Creating the beautiful orchid hybrid has intensified the scientist’s feelings of loneliness, despite being surrounded by beauty.

Goodnight Baby (2023); dir. Lê Quỳnh Anh

In her sleepless nights, Gia Gia watches online videos and finds out why she is afraid to fall asleep.

Mountain Land: A Celebration (2023); dir. Kris Ong

A film about a fictional island shaped like a human body that cannot be conquered or fully understood. ‘Mountain Land’ uses a mix of archive and newly filmed footage to tell a strikingly emotional story of adventure, discovery, our relationship with our body, earth, and climate.

About the Series

Partial Bodies, Whole Worlds brings together moving images that reflect on how the human body is seen, remembered, and reimagined through fragmentary forms. Taking its cue from artist Ng Eng Teng’s sustained engagement with the figure - at once expressive, intimate, and pared down - the series places his work in conversation with other bodily representations across the Museum’s collection.

These include documentation of performance-based practices, sketches of people encountered in everyday life, studies of the human form, and archival photographs that register the body through gesture, movement, and trace. Across these varied materials, the body appears not as a fixed or idealised whole, but as something partial, contingent, and shaped by time, observation, and lived experience.

Through the moving image, the series considers how fragments of the body can carry emotional, social, and imaginative weight. Each screening invites audiences to encounter the partial figure not as something lacking, but as a site of possibility - where presence is felt through what is incomplete, and where every part opens onto a wider world.

Presented within the exhibition Ng Eng Teng: 1+1=1, this film series takes place in the gallery itself, allowing audiences to watch the films alongside the artworks that inspired the programme.