Sam Lo

(they/he)
b 1986, Singapore
Lives and works in Singapore

In 2012, Lo was arrested for spray-painting the words ‘My Grandfather Road’ on roads throughout the Central Business District, leading to a year-long court case and a subsequent charge of 240 hours of community service. Lo’s photographic documentations of their work, which survive the actual material interventions, serve not only as a record of their ‘crime’, but also as an intimate snapshot of the entangled relationship between community, space and the city-state unique to Singapore. The phrase, used colloquially in Singapore to berate people for obstructing others in a public space (“you think this is your grandfather’s road?”) is repurposed in Lo’s work as a way of reasserting a sense of place in the face of Singapore’s rapid urbanisation, economic development and attempts to rebrand itself as a model global city. Here, the photographic remnants of Lo’s transient material markings invite us to reflect on the ways in which the connection between people and place can be re-imagined, reinvigorated and reclaimed over time. As Lo suggests, the power of their art can be found in its subtlety—‘It was like a little inside joke, our intimate moment found in a chance encounter on the streets to make it feel like home again.’

Over a period of five years, Sam Lo (SKL0) pasted stickers all over the Singapore cityscape. Small, inconspicuous, and mostly uniform in design, the stickers appear to be the unremarkable insignia of corporate advertisement, or an ordinary feature of urbanised space. But in Singapore, where the state has historically taken a heavy-handed approach to regulating public space, Lo’s stickers generated major controversy and were denounced as acts of vandalism. Seemingly anticipatory of the furore, Lo’s stickers bear tongue-in-cheek phrases in Singlish, a creole language that is widely spoken in Singapore but frowned upon by the government for its perception as a form of ‘broken’ or ‘bad’ English. One sticker placed on a lamp post captures this flippancy in its tagline: ‘Anyhow paste kena fine’ (just paste it anyhow and cop a fine).