New Village

New Village is an interactive artwork and walking simulator game reimagining the New Village in 1950s Malaya. In March 2024, Malaysian politician Nga Kor Ming's proposal to nominate Chinese new villages in Malaysia as a UNESCO World Heritage site sparked intense debates about their cultural significance and whether they could represent national identity amidst racial tensions. The Selangor government later clarified there were no plans for such a nomination.

As a Singaporean artist with a Malaysian-born father, the New Village is a site of curiosity and personal significance. Before my father’s terminal diagnosis and dementia-like symptoms, he was obsessed with sketching the New Village from memory and had described it as a beautiful rural site of his carefree childhood memories, that he wanted to capture somehow in order to share with my daughter who had never seen or visited it.

But rather than a carefree, rural countryside existence, his “New Village'' was actually one of 631 internment camps for ethnic Chinese set up by British colonialists in Peninsular Malaysia during the Malayan Emergency to eliminate underground support for the Malayan Communist Party. Originally named as “Resettlement Camps”, the euphemism “New Village” was coined in 1952 to distance it from the traumatising camps that the Japanese had established during WWII – which had only ended in 1945, less than a decade prior. Malayan Communist guerilla leader Chin Peng’s home was just down the road from my father’s childhood home. Life in the New Village was marked by extreme surveillance, curfews, vigilante patrols, and a very simple and often hard existence.

Although today we can virtually visit the unnamed rural road on Google Street View, the original buildings have long been demolished. The only way for future generations to visit the “New Village” would be through a journey of the imagination. This new work translates my father’s hand-drawn maps into a fully 3D-rendered virtual world that one can step into.

Can I “unforget” a place that I have not visited? Not a return to one’s motherland, but a voyage to new dimensions? The artwork reimagines the village buildings as dislocated remnants from the Cold War but also emotional-architectural containers, where tiny altar houses within the rural houses become magical portals to parallel villages. "New Village" operates as a digital hauntological space, where the multiple villages are sites of memory that preserve cultural identities while suggesting alternate futures.

The work draws inspiration from the structure of a four-dimensional hypercube and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a novel where Marco Polo describes his travels through 55 fictitious metaphorical cities to Kublai Khan. The use of hypercubic structures as portals to parallel villages serves as a metaphor for the multiplicity of histories and futures coexisting in the digital realm.