The Tiger That Is No Longer Here, 2025
acrylic and mixed media on canvas,
(H) 60 × (W) 90 × (D) 3 cm
Image: artist
Mah is drawn to a particular tiger skin held in the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum in Singapore. Stripped of its body and fixed into symmetry, the specimen exists between presence and absence. It is an animal marked by histories of hunting, scientific collection and national symbolism. Draped across canvases, the skin operates as a surrogate for painting itself, a surface that was once alive and is now suspended like an image prepared for display.
The Malayan tiger once inhabited the swamps and forests of Singapore before being hunted to extinction in the early twentieth century. While historical accounts suggest that tigers had largely disappeared from the island by the 1930s, the exact identity and origin of the tiger skin held by the museum remain undocumented. This absence of provenance allows the artist to imagine the specimen as the last tiger in Singapore, transforming uncertainty into a speculative and critical gesture. The skin becomes a stand in for a life that can no longer be verified, only inferred through fragments.
Today, the tiger’s likeness circulates widely as a symbol of pride, authority and regional heritage, despite the animal no longer existing within the landscape it once shaped. By returning to the museum specimen, the work reflects on how the tiger’s remains were converted into evidence for colonial science and later absorbed into the visual language of national identity. Nature is rendered into symbol, property and myth, while its material disappearance is quietly obscured.
This tension is further echoed in Singapore’s state crest, which is supported by a lion on one side and a tiger on the other. The lion refers to a mythical sighting that underpins the founding narrative of the Lion City, while the tiger represents a creature that once existed locally but was hunted to extinction. One figure is entirely imagined, the other historically real yet absent. Together, they reveal how national symbols operate independently of ecological reality.
These paintings consider what it means to depict a creature that has vanished. The blank canvas functions as a mortuary surface, and the act of painting shifts from depiction to witness. Each work holds the tension between preservation and loss, beauty and violence, image and extinction. By approaching the tiger skin as both artefact and threshold, the series asks how art might contend with histories that persist only in fragments, and how representation can carry the weight of what will not return.
The Malayan tiger once inhabited the swamps and forests of Singapore before being hunted to extinction in the early twentieth century. While historical accounts suggest that tigers had largely disappeared from the island by the 1930s, the exact identity and origin of the tiger skin held by the museum remain undocumented. This absence of provenance allows the artist to imagine the specimen as the last tiger in Singapore, transforming uncertainty into a speculative and critical gesture. The skin becomes a stand in for a life that can no longer be verified, only inferred through fragments.
Today, the tiger’s likeness circulates widely as a symbol of pride, authority and regional heritage, despite the animal no longer existing within the landscape it once shaped. By returning to the museum specimen, the work reflects on how the tiger’s remains were converted into evidence for colonial science and later absorbed into the visual language of national identity. Nature is rendered into symbol, property and myth, while its material disappearance is quietly obscured.
This tension is further echoed in Singapore’s state crest, which is supported by a lion on one side and a tiger on the other. The lion refers to a mythical sighting that underpins the founding narrative of the Lion City, while the tiger represents a creature that once existed locally but was hunted to extinction. One figure is entirely imagined, the other historically real yet absent. Together, they reveal how national symbols operate independently of ecological reality.
These paintings consider what it means to depict a creature that has vanished. The blank canvas functions as a mortuary surface, and the act of painting shifts from depiction to witness. Each work holds the tension between preservation and loss, beauty and violence, image and extinction. By approaching the tiger skin as both artefact and threshold, the series asks how art might contend with histories that persist only in fragments, and how representation can carry the weight of what will not return.