wiggle to wipe

When problems pile up, the instinct is to keep moving. Staying busy is how many of us cope, and the piece pokes at how that plays out in Singapore, at how Singaporeans operate. Its wall fills with the small frustrations of daily life, written the way they are usually said. Many are drawn from personal experience. Even more were submitted by the public, in replies to an Instagram story asking for the little frustrations of Singapore life.

A camera tracks everyone in front of the wall and renders each body as a glowing figure among the frustrations. Three states run through it. Stillness: the frustrations hang in the air, and standing among them changes nothing. Motion: a wiggle, a flail, a shake, and each frustration breaks into letters that fall away, faster with every extra body in the room. Rest: the movement stops, and the letters remain, heaped along the base of the wall.

Visitors began cautiously, an arm raised, a tentative wave, and went further once others were already playing. Friends pulled each other in, scattered each other’s letters and flung them across the wall until the room became a game.

Friends do this for each other. They arrive, prod at the problems, toss them around, and for a while attention drifts elsewhere. Then the day ends, everyone heads home, and in front of the mirror the problems return. The installation offers that same relief and nothing more. Moving the frustrations around never removes them. It only decides where they land, and they land at your feet.

The first version was made for a larger space than it was given. At the BYOX fair (Bring Your Own X), part of Singapore Design Week 2025 at Singapore Science Park, it had to fit within a single booth. It ran on a small monitor, and wiped words simply disappeared. Nothing fell and nothing remained.

It found its room at supermoon 01, a show of work in progress at Goodman Arts Centre from 14 to 16 August 2026, hosted by Irsyad Ishak. Rebuilt as Wiggle to Wipe II, it now fills a wall and holds a whole room of players at once, and every frustration falls, tumbles and accumulates, with sound following each letter down. Chrissie Choo visited with her eight-year-old daughter and wrote about what they both felt.

Wiggle to Wipe sits within a practice that treats people’s movement as its material: the way visitors move through an exhibition, and the way they handle what they find there. Each work opens with a moment of absurdity that lowers the guard and reads as play, so the threshold to enter is low. Play comes first. Questions follow, about why the work behaves as it does and what it might be for. The depth is there for anyone who stops to look, and for everyone else, the play is complete on its own.