Zheng Mahler
The Green Crab: A Virtual Diagram of Auspicious Spatial Organization
Interactive video game
The Green Crab is a speculative investigation of East Asian urbanism taking Singapore and Hong Kong as its two diametrically opposed exemplars. The interactive video game allows users to explore a coastal map of Singapore to uncover the feng shui principles that inform the city-state’s planning. While Hong Kong, as the cyberpunk city par excellence, projects and absorbs in equal amounts techno-orientalist fascination, horror and desire, Singapore is positioned in the western cultural imaginary as its opposite. Challenging this framing, The Green Crab reveals Singapore as the spiritual epitome of an East Asian feng shui city, engineered through (reverse) state alchemy.
The Green Crab was created in close collaboration with architectural historian Ian Tan and Onebite Studio, Hong Kong.
Zheng Mahler consists of artist Royce Ng and anthropologist Daisy Bisenieks. Together, they collaboratively examine global trade, the relational networks connecting nature and technology and more-than-human geographies, while also exploring their flows of mutual influence and the environmental architectures they produce. Utilising digital media, performance and installation, they develop speculative scenarios and immersive, sensory encounters that explore the limits and potentials of their respective disciplines. They have exhibited, performed and participated in numerous art spaces, institutions and residencies, working alongside various communities in Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe and the US.