Last year, from my parents’ windows in Penang, Malaysia, a dark arm of sand appeared on the surface of the water. It was small and skeletal, with an exposed spine and arteries: dredging pipes that disappeared underwater, floating platforms, mounds of sand. This year, when I returned, the arm had grown. Although still frail, it now stretches further across the seascape, westward, as if reaching to grip the reef in a kind of coastal embrace.
Boats shuttle sand and workers back and forth. Pumps churn seawater and spit up land. Small lights glint at night so the work can continue without pause. And land rises where there was once only a flat horizon of water.
Such territorial expansion is a fairly common sight in Penang: Land is extended seaward to host luxury developments like the one I’m witnessing or to support rail transit and ports. The environmental damage is permanent, directly threatening fishers’ livelihoods and broader food security. In response, activist and fisher communities have begun organizing under the banner Penang Tolak Tambak, combining protest with legal action. The movement’s reach extends beyond the island, as the ecological consequences ripple outward, affecting not only Penang’s coast but also inland regions where sand for reclamation is dredged. Similar damage is unfolding across Southeast Asia, endangering coastal communities and further excluding from housing those whom such projects claim to protect. In Indonesia, the Great Garuda Sea Wall off the coast of Jakarta proposes to address flooding and land subsidence with an infrastructural spectacle: artificial islands shaped like the nation’s mythical bird. Meanwhile, China is reclaiming land to respond to urban population growth and reinforce its strategic military presence in the South China Sea. Other megaprojects also multiply across the already climate-vulnerable region—such as the South–North Water Transfer Project, which channels water from the Yangtze River to the arid north—at the cost of mass displacement and environmental damage.
With megaprojects such as these, entire environments are distorted—stretched, flattened, erased, or reassembled—and their inhabitants are caught in the crosscurrents. Such distortions have compelled a number of artists to turn their gaze to these large-scale transformations and ask what is becoming of us and what, in turn, will become of the earth. Here, I turn to three artist projects, each focused on infrastructural interventions in China and Southeast Asia: Izat Arif’s multi-chapter project Taman Kenangan (2019–24), Alex Quicho’s film Alley to Heaven (2023), and Flora Weil’s digital atlas windris.ing (2025). The three projects experiment with ways to document the world-warping effects of large-scale infrastructure, not through grand views but through fractured, grounded perception. In a world reassembled through climate mitigation, real-estate speculation, and techno-nationalist ambition, these artists propose counterimages that shift our focus toward the fragilities that megaprojects produce and the fragilities within their planning. The fragilities leave cracks, and through these cracks, possibilities emerge: spaces to inhabit, stall, or even exploit.
Maquette realism
Izat Arif, Ubati Rindu Dengan Kenangan Lalu, Ubati Pilu Dengan Air Mata. Heal longing with memories past, mend sorrow with tears shed, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
In Penang, officials justify building offshore by citing a lack of space and the inability to cut into hills. Izat Arif imagines a world where mountains, once spared by ethical restraint or technical inconvenience, are shaved down into fully exploitable flatlands.
His four-year worldbuilding project, Taman Kenangan (Nostalgia park), charts an imaginary terraforming effort on Gunung Ledang, a mountain in Malaysia. In Malay folklore, the mountain is home to a celestial princess, embodying a connection to the divine, a trait shared by many mountains across cultures—think Mount Olympus, Mount Sinai, Mount Meru, or Mount Kailash. But in Arif’s alternate timeline, the mountain is whittled down and transformed into luxury condominiums. The erasure holds a profound symbolic violence: the flattening of godlands to make way for a new neoliberal mythology.
The project has developed across three recent exhibitions in Kuala Lumpur—at A+ Works of Art, Mutual Aid Projects, and Ilham Gallery. Arif borrows the languages, tools, and visual strategies of real-estate speculation to make promotional videos, office merch, organizational charts, and staged photographs of ribbon-cutting ceremonies. These coexist with sculptural models, framed maps, and diagrammatic drawings. Each exhibition functioned as a set. The first presented the architect’s design, featuring documents and models from the planning phase. The second, installed within a glass box that resembled a real-estate office’s storefront, highlighted the selling phase. The space featured gray carpet and walls clad with printed landscapes overlaid with large text that read “Nature, technology & culture,” and “We strive to create inspiring homes for everyday people.” At the center of the room, an architectural maquette appeared atop a round table. In the final chapter, an archaeologist confronted the ruins of the failed development, and artifacts, including weathered fragments of bricks stamped “Impian” (dream), are laid out on a wooden table.
Izat Arif, Taman Kenangan (Sempadan), 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
Through Taman Kenangan, Arif portrays the perennial landscape of incompleteness in Malaysia, where unfinished developments are so widespread they have earned their own term: sick projects. A project is “sick” when construction is delayed by more than thirty percent of its timeline, or when the sale-and-purchase agreement lapses. This ongoing crisis affects infrastructural and residential development alike, epitomized by the infamous Forest City, a $100 billion megaproject for a futuristic, eco-friendly urban hub in Johor Bahru, now largely abandoned. Forest City, which Arif cites as a source of inspiration, is a ghost town and a symbol of the nation’s development fatigue.
Architectural maquettes are central to Taman Kenangan. Typically used to render a finished and believable future, here they are stripped of that promise. In fact, Arif never discloses to viewers an image of the completed development. One maquette features a stair-stepped mountain fragment, consolidated with concrete, scaffolded and shrouded in a large, weather-beaten blue tarp. A few coconut trees remain upright, and a makeshift banner that stretches between them reads: Akan Dibuka, or “will open soon.” Through tangential means—fiction, pastiche, and satire—Arif’s maquettes reveal the gap between a developer’s language and a common on-the-ground reality: There is no misleading manicuring, no completeness, just a messy, stalled present, eternally under construction or in ruin.
Megaprojects distort time as aggressively as they distort space, compressing and erasing futures—those of local communities, ecosystems, and cosmologies, but also of developers and investors. Delay itself can be a tactical distortion: a stretch, a stall, a refusal to move forward on the master plan’s terms. In Malaysia, activists “buy time,” in the words of social anthropologist Pierpaolo De Giosa, using legal action and political instability to interrupt development. In Taman Kenangan, Arif evokes the warping effects of stalled ambition and extractive acceleration, while also capturing time’s potential as a tool for resistance: Refusing to move forward, or preventing a development from moving forward, can be a way to inhabit time differently.
Liquid fantasy
Alex Quicho, Alley to Heaven, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Alex Quicho’s film Alley to Heaven delves into the emotional and environmental vulnerabilities that underlie territorial claims. It takes place on Mischief Reef, an island at the heart of the disputes over territories in the South China Sea. Situated within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone and fishing grounds, the reef is claimed by China, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Today, it is no longer just a reef. It has a full artificial island complete with a military base, harbor, and runway, all built by China. In this sea, infrastructural possession—buoys giving way to stilts, transforming into bamboo-like frames, and eventually solidifying into permanent structures—is one of the ways China asserts sovereignty. Quicho’s narrative emphasizes the fluidity of the air, organisms, currents, and sand that such assertions attempt to contain.
Alley to Heaven is informed by territorial claims and infrastructural possession, but it isn’t set in our present. The narrative displaces us into a future where Mischief Reef’s island has been abandoned due to extreme weather conditions that have disabled logistical operations. As a form of reclamation, the Philippines sends an eco-cult to occupy the island, transforming it into a climate-resilient sanctuary amid sprawling, genetically engineered coral reefs that were originally part of a geoengineering experiment and are now growing wildly out of control.
Three “V-tubers,” acting as avatars for nonhuman actors—a coral polyp, a carabao calf, and a nanosatellite—lead viewers on tour. Their observations repeatedly reveal their nonhuman forms of perception, shaped, in the case of the satellite, by their existence in swarms where they share consciousness and operate at a distance from the earth; or, conversely, as with the polyp from the coral-swarm colony, their extreme proximity to earth, dispersed within ocean currents. For example, we watch the nanosatellite grow tender at human-based territorial anxieties that inform her very purpose: “I just think it’s cute how you smuggle all your fears and desires into something so vast and subject to change. Every island that you build is swallowed by water again,” she says. Her nonhuman, collective mind interprets her own human-designed mission—gathering information to protect nationhood—as oddly desperate, though she is touched by the human insistence on control.
Alex Quicho, Alley to Heaven, 2023. Courtesy the artist.
From this tour guide’s perspective, territorial logics and sovereignty appear as a hopeless search for fixity in fluid realities. Specifically, the narration highlights the ongoing efforts involved in categorization—what counts as land versus sea, territory versus sanctuary, surveillance versus intimacy. As the coral polyp muses: “I can understand navigation, sympathetically. Only because I imagine what it would be like to be just one and not many, the stupidity I would experience if I had to find my way alone, as just one of me. But can you explain the concept of ‘territory’? Can you explain ‘sovereignty’? Why is it so crucial for you to see where I begin, and where I come to an end?”
What emerges from the three tour guides’ reflections is the recognition of a “crazy flow,” a state within which everything is a form of surrender. As the satellite guide puts it: “You’re only living because of a communication between fragilities, the archipelago below, constellation above, and in between pure liquidity. Your obsession with resilience is really just a surrender to ‘crazy flow.’” As climate collapse reshapes the world as we know it, being guided through this land distorted by territorial claims, militarization, environmental crisis, geoengineering turned awry, and now, a cult, feels like an exercise in estrangement, a constant unsettling of forms and categories. Listening to the nonhuman agents, I begin to appreciate their perspective—their inability to grasp what it means to be a single thing: a single person, a single country, a single grain of sand. They seem baffled by our need to draw boundaries, to insist on where one thing ends and another begins. Their multi-scalar perception offers a space for renegotiating categories, an estrangement of the Earth, in order to reenter the world anew.
Chorus vision
Flora Weil, windris.ing, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
As I open Flora Weil’s digital atlas on my laptop, a satellite view shows a vast terrain in shades of brown, green, and beige, devoid of cities, roads, or other familiar infrastructure. Instead, moving images gather in clusters. I imagine these are Weil’s image traces, left behind as she traversed the landscape, mapping its ongoing transformation.
The atlas windris.ing is the manifestation of Weil’s yearlong field study of China’s largest climate-mitigation project in the Gobi Desert. The region has been scarred by industry-led ecological devastation, where rising temperatures and declining water levels have dried up reservoirs and lakes, brought back cyclical sandstorms, and allowed the desert to expand, consuming farmland and villages. In response, in 1978 the state designed the project colloquially known as the Great Green Wall of China. The seventy-two-year geoengineering plan, which affects four million square kilometers of land, aims to contain the expansion of the desert through a large-scale tree-planting program.
Weil wanted to understand the effects of the Great Green Wall on the environment and people’s day-to-day lives. She spent time in the region documenting the land, interviewing inhabitants, and speaking with engineers and scientists. This research culminated in the online atlas, which gives multilayered insight into the on-the-ground impacts of the Chinese government’s territorial interventions.
As I zoom in on Weil’s atlas, image clusters begin to resolve, and scenes of a travel journal appear: snapshots of a breakfast plate, a man peering into a car window, ancient star maps photographed through a museum glass case, screenshots from popular Chinese social-media sites. Resolutely lo-fi, these images convey a sense of intimacy. Snippets of text hover over the visuals, together forming an animated chorus revealing a lesser-known side of the Great Green Wall. I learn, for instance, how the new forest landscape gave rise to parasitic rhizomes, like the Cistanche, a plant long valued in traditional herbal medicine. As the artificial forest imposes new lifeways and displaces entire villages, organisms find growth in its interstices, forming new ecologies.
Among the image clusters, visitors encounter six new artworks that Weil commissioned for windris.ing. These works look both forward and back, imagining futures and past encounters. I watch a speculative CGI video by Wendi Yan titled A Magnetist Dreams of Universal Healing (2024), in which a jade satellite is launched to operate on the magnetic fields that—as the hovering subtitles explain—circulate across the heavens and earth and throughout all living beings. I watch another film by Adnan Naqvi, Wandering Signals (2024), which pairs the sound of the wind with testimonies from members of Uyghur communities migrating across Western China. Naqvi’s film reflects on the wind’s power to transform desert landscapes into clouds of dust.
The cascading accounts and perspectives that populate Weil’s project reveal the multitude of subject positions and perspectives residing within the cracks of the Great Green Wall’s master plans. This multitude fractures the notion of a unified national policy, a homogenous land, and a coherent, believable future. In this way, the atlas also acts as a host: a place where evolving accounts of adaptation to infrastructure can be lodged, and where Weil can indefinitely continue to upload new artworks and texts by various artists. I imagine it continuing to grow as a micro-social terrain, favoring an abundance of life over myths of official control.
Extraordinary living begins here
Flora Weil, windris.ing, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Returning to my window in Penang, I watch the landmass congealing before me, and I google its name. Landing on promotional websites, I immerse myself in 3D-rendered videos describing it as a vibrant, eco-conscious township that reinvents island life with future-ready urban design. “Extraordinary living begins here,” the website declares.
Residences are already for sale. The houses are designed to evoke Penang’s so-called glory days under British colonial rule, a marker of distinction aimed at the developer’s target audience: foreign investors and wealthy locals. The tagline is “Colonial Concepts Made Relevant.” From where I sit, in front of my screen with the landmass in the distance, it seems as if the land’s postcolonial identity, the country’s past, and its future have acquired total plasticity. History is stretched, molded, and repackaged. Terraforming, under the guise of climate mitigation, demographic management, or progress, appears as another form of speculative extraction, recycling colonial logics and semiotics on lands called “new.”
Yet distortion is not unidirectional. As Arif, Quicho, and Weil demonstrate, the master plan does not act upon a passive, new, or empty landscape; those affected exert their own distorting force, slowing, rerouting, and warping the very infrastructures meant to overwrite them. The ways of living within and against the imposed warping emerge from everyday practices and counter-use of large-scale infrastructures: subtle interferences, partial adaptations, and small claims to autonomy. From large-scale geoengineering projects drastically reshaping the land, informal, citizen-led cultivation of traditional Chinese medicine takes root, opening the door for artists to speculate on new uses for inherited technologies, such as the jade satellite. Similarly, large-scale coral-seeding efforts meant to mitigate climate collapse inadvertently trigger infestations, giving rise to a swarming consciousness that reimagines the land as dynamic and flowing. Borrowing the lenses from the technical infrastructure itself and experimenting with scale, from the close-up to the distance, from the eyes of the machine and the one of the multitude, the world reveals itself differently.
These artworks show us how infrastructure might become a site of negotiation, where differing visions are met with improvisation, resistance, and alternative logics of use, ultimately leading to new ways of relating to space. These ways are tactical, provisional, and highly situated, refusing the globalizing, single-future, techno-solutionist visions, and colonial continuum that large-scale geoengineering often extends. Such day-to-day misuse of technologies and infrastructures can be situated with a broader struggle over spatial rights, one that should be negotiated with those with lived, embodied knowledge of the lands transformed: the fishers, the residents, the coastal workers, the plants and ecosystems, and the machines. This would lead to a form of spatial politics rooted in proximity and improvisation, where knowledge comes from lived experience rather than design. The future doesn’t arrive fully formed through the master plan. It accumulates slowly, in the gaps and delays, through actions that sustain life in the midst of ongoing disruption.
