Yesterday Was No Good Day (Lost Monuments)

An explorer in projects has reached the end of the road in search for creative meaning. The desire is to travel, the search for The Project and historical mystery. Is the artist a postcolonial tourist of sorts, a self-imposed challenger of cultural frontiers? There is very little, if any, remaining architecture from the days of Japanese occupation (1942-1945) in Singapore. The Japanese army built a Shinto temple respectively a shrine to honour their fallen in Bukit Timah Reserve and MacRitchie reservoir, two of the few remaining pockets of primary rainforest in the country. They were built with forced labour from prisoners of war. The clearing of acres of forest to accomplish a more powerful effect for the Syonan Jinja shrine in MacRitchie is regarded as a crime, overshadowed by the massacres of civilians during Japanese rule in Singapore. In connection with the ending of war the structures were destroyed. The locations were made Historical Sites as late as 2001 and 2002, but there seems to be no intention to actually preserve the sites or even make them accessible.