Contemporary Singapore is facing challenges not only environmentally and economically, but more importantly, culturally. Guoyao painstakingly examines social and cultural issues affecting contemporary Singapore through the prism of his life in the country. His reductive mixed-media work uses both its material and its iconography, for example grains of rice and the Singapore flag, to create a matrix of complex signification. Through photography, his unique approach expresses the hidden condition in the relationship between the growing state and the individuals within it. 2011