Personal Work

01: The River Of Not-Knowing

The River Of Not-Knowing explores the tension between weight and lightness, belonging and dislocation. Across four years, I photographed between a small apartment in Singapore and the stillness of rural Japan. Though separated by geography and time, the images share a soft, dreamlike quality — light and ephemeral, yet edged with a quiet unease.

Threaded throughout are recurring views from train windows: metal beams cutting across the frame, appearing at beginnings, in-betweens, and endings. The train became both vessel and metaphor — carrying me between home and elsewhere, memory and longing.

In a world where planes take us anywhere and screens keep us everywhere at once, we are always moving yet rarely at rest. This work lingers in that unsettled space — hovering between here and elsewhere, between belonging and dislocation, presence and drift.

2021 — 2025

02: Flowers From A Dying Field

Singapore changes quickly, often erasing the corners where memory lingers. Marsiling, the town where I grew up and where my grandmother still lives, is one of those corners. Soon, the neighbourhood will make way for checkpoint expansion, and its elders are left with just a few years to carry a lifetime elsewhere.

Flowers From A Dying Field traces the small, quiet signs of life that remain. Flowers appear in worn tiles, in plants tended along narrow corridors, in paintings hung long ago, and in the patterns of clothes. Drawing also from archival photographs of Marsiling from more than 25 years ago, the work layers past and present to show how life, memory, and care quietly persist.

Where else will the flowers bloom once the neighbourhood is gone?

Ongoing

03: illuminance 光客

Illuminance is a series born from a single childhood memory: a brief yet profound encounter with something otherworldly. As a boy walking home one night with my mother and brother, the sky suddenly opened. In a flash of light, a figure appeared—a visitor of pure light that shone with an impossible brightness, a shape I remember as a horse.

This project is a direct inquiry into the act of witnessing. It explores how a shared experience can transform a fleeting, unbelievable moment into a shared truth. If my family and I had not been together that night, would this story have been a fantasy instead of a validated memory?

In this body of work, the photographs position forests and trees not as a backdrop, but as the true, silent observers. They are the everlasting witnesses to such a grand, temporal illuminance—a fleeting presence seen only by them. Through this series, the work narrates the possibility of a world where the most profound events are not seen by human eyes, but held in the quiet, unyielding memory of the natural world.

Ongoing

04: My Camera Died in Venice

My Camera Died in Venice is a diaristic zine made from screen grabs of an hour of camcorder footage recorded during my travels through Italy.

It wasn’t planned—it really only happened because my main camera broke. The backup camcorder is 20 years old, and its low-fidelity images became a quiet metaphor for the blurred memories my partner and I carried home from the trip.

Ongoing

Index

Commissioned Works

FEATURED WORKS
Leica, Singapore Tourism Board, Lufthansa, POSB Bank, Tanjong Beach Club, The Warehouse Hotel, Corum Watches, and more.

It was in the overlooked that I began finding my way back to making photographs. I’m not sure when or how, but I know it had something to do with the act of remembering. The notion of time is something I’m constantly grappling with, how beautifully it reveals life and yet how quickly it disappears.

There are many things I’m desperately trying to hold onto, bits and pieces of what I know in the short life I’ve been fortunate to live: my mother’s cartoonish pyjamas, the way my father dozes off on the massage chair he refuses to turn on, the clock that’s perpetually slanted on the kitchen wall. I could go on. I don’t know if we’ll still be here tomorrow, and maybe that is why I treat every breath as if it’s my last. That, to me, is the essence of photography at this juncture. Every second is a new moment, and every second is the death of a moment. They are interconnected.

If you’re looking for a bio, I have been photographing for the last twelve years, mostly as an advertising and commercial photographer turning my lens on people, objects, and spaces. My personal long-form projects have spanned the last five years, focusing on displacement and on time as both a friend and an enemy, turning my lens toward the subjects it shapes and touches.

SELECTED CLIENTS
Lufthansa / POSB Bank / Leica Singapore / Canon Asia / Sony Singapore / Under Armour / Lululemon / Puma / Asics / The Warehouse Hotel / Tanjong Beach Club / Atlas Bar / Tales Of The Cocktail / Lenskart / RICE Media / VICE / Singapore Tourism Board / Corum Watches / Samaritans Of Singapore / People Association / Carousell / Harman Kardon

Contact Information
zactannn@gmail.com

Location
singapore & beyond

Instagram
@zactaaan