Chia’s Singapore is grittier, darker, and sometimes precarious, but it is also filled with the warmth and joy of human interaction and a sense of community that makes evident the complexities of everyday life lived in a constantly evolving megapolis. Spanning more than a decade, his practice has taken many forms, from long-form documentary projects on community spaces that are fast disappearing to visual essays on contemporary Singapore, with tongue in cheek commentaries on its touristic imaginations, and its desires to conform to standardized modes of language and expression.

A strong connecting thread that runs through his work across its various narrative modes is his idea of ‘The Space between Us’, which he terms as a “musing on the bond between living and urban spaces. One part loud, rash, unpredictable. The other, subtle, calm, encompassing. Both always a part of each other but in one moment, this space forms a connected whole.” Whether as a caption on his Instagram posts of the eclectic, absurd and sometimes profound moments he photographs on the city’s streets, or as a more subtle current running through his personal projects, this idea of space also hints at many other possibilities, including the space between moments of a day, between image and text, photographer and subject, image and viewer, and the space between living and looking.

As we spoke on his long engagement with a rapidly changing Singapore, Chia reflected on the complex relationships between the city and its citizens, bringing up lingering questions around change, progress, desire, loss, and community. A project that was especially central to our conversation was The Night We Never Met, where he photographed Singapore’s oldest nightclub for close to three years; an almost otherworldly place that had managed to survive, despite the upheavals caused by Singapore’s evolution into a global economic hub. As Chia tenderly puts it, “Club Hawaii was more akin to an old folk’s club than a nightclub”, a space of familiarity and solace for a loyal clientele who have lived through a most extraordinary period in the city’s history. Chia managed to photograph the establishment before it, like all other entertainment spaces in the city, shut its doors at the start of the pandemic. The images in this work allow for a sense of deep loss to percolate through them and yet are not irreducible to being mere objects of nostalgia. Instead, they invite us to consider transience as a fundamental essence of the human experience, even as we experience time as a neon-lit glacier inside Club Hawaii.

In his photo essays on other old Singapore institutions like the Heap Seng Leong Coffeeshop, and Lao Sai Tao Yuan, the oldest remaining Teochew Opera group in Singapore, Chia further examines the push and pull of time in the life of the city, and the residues it leaves in the lives of its inhabitants. Although not directly, Chia’s work in this context also brings forth questions around gentrification and access: how does an old ‘kopitiam’ or coffeeshop hold on to being a community space, as the city around it becomes increasingly remote and inaccessible for its ordinary citizens? Chia’s photographs of Opera performers alternating between their characters as everyday citizens and kings and queens of old, also playfully prods us to consider how notions of ‘citizen’ and ‘everyday’ can themselves be performative and imagined formulations.

Although his projects largely emerge out of his deep involvement with Singapore, Chia’s work over the last decade has gathered an enthusiastic global audience, whom he engages with through his popular Instagram account, as well as by publishing zines and books. Reflecting on his practice as being both instinctive and diaristic as well as structured and organized, he spoke about having no qualms in deleting older images from his Instagram to keep his feed fresh for a social media audience not accustomed to delving too deeply into a photographer’s Instagram page. While Instagram provides a daily dose of his work, his zines and books, – especially his recent publication SingKarPor, which he prefers to think of as an extension of a zine rather than a photobook, – are more experimental and playful in their use of text, formats and sequence. Stressing the importance of being open to creative collaboration with designers and publishers, Chia spoke about how this process made designing his books interesting and fun, an experience that he hopes has carried forward into the books themselves.

Engaging with audiences in new and innovative ways is what has prompted Chia to get involved with a platform like Arttaca, which he says opens a new beginning in the way photographers can show their work and connect with collectors, other practitioners and a wider audience. Being a pioneer is often critical in making a new platform successful, and for Chia, it is to Arttaca’s advantage that it is at the head of such a journey, while also being invested in creating a supportive community for practitioners. Another aspect of Arttaca that excites Chia is its embracing of NFTs to create a reciprocal relationship between photographers and those who collect their work. By allowing artists to engage with a global network of collectors, Chia is hopeful that NFTs can help artists earn sustainably from making the work they love.

As our conversation ended, I thought once again about Chia’s initial statement on not being a full-time photographer, and I came to realize that for him, to pursue photography as a career would be to reduce it. He prefers instead to let it constantly challenge him, engage him, and entice him outside of regular life, for it to be a getaway car from falling prey to banality and cynicism. As he put it so succinctly, ‘for me, photography is like having a crush, it has to give you butterflies in your stomach.’