Robert Zhao Renhui - Seeing Forest - Vol. 2 of 2

Robert Zhao Renhui: Seeing Forest, Volume 2 of 2 furthers the exploration of Singaporean artist Robert Zhao Renhui’s work, following last year’s first volume, released alongside his exhibition at the Singapore Pavilion of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Haeju Kim and organized by the Singapore Art Museum.

This second volume accompanies a reimagined iteration of Seeing Forest, opened in early 2025 at the Singapore Art Museum. Expanding upon Zhao’s deep engagement with secondary forests and overlooked green spaces within Singapore’s urban landscape, the book engages themes such as temporal coexistence, ecological improvisation, and the entanglement of human and nonhuman life amid rapid urbanization.

While echoing the structure of the first volume, Seeing Forest, Vol. 2 introduces new perspectives and voices, offering reflections that draw throughlines and lines of flight between both publications. Newly commissioned essays and translations by leading writers and thinkers resonate with Zhao’s work, tracing alternate pathways through relational habitats, multispecies rhythms, and speculative futures. As pioneer trees stretch skyward and animals claim abandoned spaces, the forest becomes a repository of memory and transformation, a site where the wild and the urban converge in unexpected resonance.

A testament to the decade-long friendship and collaboration between Robert Zhao Renhui and K. Verlag’s Anna-Sophie Springer, Etienne Turpin, and Wolfgang Hückel, this companion volume blends conceptual sequences of Zhao’s photography with a rich tapestry of texts spanning disciplines, geographies, and histories. Together, these contributions invite readers to reconsider the intricate, layered dynamics of urban ecologies and their improbable inhabitants. 

This book is a tribute to the art of seeing and being, differently, and of attuning to the subtle dialogues between life and place in a world already shaped by profound change.

Robert Zhao Renhui: Seeing Forest, Volume 2 of 2. Edited by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin. With artwork by Robert Zhao Renhui and contributions by Michaela Büsse, Roland Ennos, Cal Flyn, Maja & Reuben Fowkes, Mick Hennessy, Haeju Kim, Boaz Levin, Baptiste Morizot, Kang Min Ngo, Anna-Sophie Springer, Etienne Turpin, Maya West, and Ying Zhou. Design by K. Verlag with Wolfgang Hückel & Katharina Tauer.