This blog post is part of the Random Sampling Singapore project. The Project aims to sample 100 places on the island of Singapore over a one year (+) period in order to gain an unbiased and holistic view of the city state.

On a July day in 2022 we made a road trip to Malaysia! The drive was only about an hour away and our destination was coordinate #44. YES, sometimes you have to go outside and look from a distance to have a better insight!

Coordinate #44 is located at the NW boarder – exactly opposite to Puteri Harbor, Malaysia. It happens that Puteri Harbor (Puteri is Malay for princess 👸 ) is Sean Soh’s favorite place! I was dazzled when he invited us to stay a weekend there. Sean is not only the cofounder of Artporters Gallery, he is also Otha boy – a delicious friend who treats us from time to time with the best mochis in town. He was born in Malaysia and left in young years Malaysia to study in Singapore and had an eventful life since. He not only showed us around in the area of Johor, it was almost a mental time travel experience when he shared stories from the past when we sampled the beach side closest to the coordinate #44.

On our tour around the beach side we discovered some bright orange-red rocks. This area is heavily under development and the rocks might have been moved there from a close by building construction side. We climbed on them and looked over to the distant Singapore – showing its green swampy belt on the north west coast.

Samples

I photographed the samples back in my Singapore lab. The rock samples I looked on closely under my microscope and under 450x magnification some crystals were reflecting in bright rainbow colors.

Artwork

Work in progress