Singaporean Love explores Jay Lim’s identity as a gay Singaporean man, tracing his experiences of love, intimacy, and belonging through a lens of reflection and resistance. Lim photographs intimate moments shared between his family and ex-lovers, using the camera to navigate the tensions within these relationships. Taken within recognisably Singaporean settings such as cafe dates, overseas vacations, and family gatherings, the photographs reveal how these environments, familiar within heteronormative scripts, also serve as quiet witnesses to the lives of queer Singaporeans.

The key photograph in this body of work depicts a close-up of two bodies touching slightly inside what is presumed to be a taxi. Only a limited number of visual details are decipherable; no decisive moment is captured, and the photograph could be described as boring or undynamic. Yet by shifting focus from what is photographed to where, how, and why it was made, whilst considering the intersectional identity of its maker, additional layers of meaning and intimacy once hidden in plain sight emerge.

While challenging conventional expectations of queer representation, Singaporean Love also questions the city-state’s narrative of the traditional nuclear family, asking what experiences are left out and what truly counts as Singaporean. But perhaps most importantly, the series considers how photographs, as a visual language, can serve as an alternative mode of communication that queer people can use to feel, remember, convey, and document their lives in environments where direct expressions of queerness may be difficult or even unsafe.