How a Floating Community and a Luxury Waterfall Are Connected by a Power Grid

Now in its second year as media sponsor for Storefront for Art and Architecture’s open call initiative, frieze supports the culmination of the nonprofit's a year-long research project and exhibition series dedicated to a single thematic inquiry. This year’s focus, Swamplands, uses the murky soil and unstable grounds of swamps as a conceptual framework to explore the ecological and socioeconomic intricacies at the threshold between land and water. Selected through this open call, Jingru Cyan Cheng and Chen Zhan present 'How Much Wattage Is One Handbreadth of Water?', an exhibition at Storefront that traces the invisible infrastructures connecting transnational power grids, large-scale dams, and engineered spectacles like Singapore’s Jewel Rain Vortex. In the conversation that follows, the duo reflects on the politics of water and how sound became a key medium for revealing what often lies just beyond perception.

Terence Trouillot What was the inspiration behind your current exhibition, ‘How Much Wattage Is One Handbreadth of Water?’, at Storefront for Art and Architecture?

Jingru Cyan Cheng We conceptualized the show in two parts. The first centres on two distinct bodies of water: the Jewel Rain Vortex at Singapore’s Changi Airport – the world’s largest, electric-powered indoor waterfall – and the Vajiralongkorn Dam in Thailand, which displaced the indigenous Karen Hill Tribe into a floating community after its construction in 1984. The electricity for the waterfall is generated by a transnational power grid that links it directly to the Karen people, intertwining these two bodies of water through the infrastructure of energy transmission.

This connection is explored in our video installation Drifting Bodies [2025], which begins with a projection of the Jewel Rain Vortex that greets you as you enter the space. Passing through the curtains on which the waterfall is screened, you encounter a looped, three-channel video which shows glimpses of the Karen people navigating their new environment on boats.

The second part of the exhibition focuses on making infrastructure more tangible. Transnational power grids can often seem abstract since transmission lines frequently go unseen, but we were drawn to the visible marker balls mounted on powerlines in remote mountain regions. We were also captivated by the soundscape beneath those lines: wind, birds and a strange hum.

Rather than replicate those sounds, we worked with sound artist Shuoxin Tan to develop a live audio feedback system in The Humming of the Power Grid [2025]. The work comprises a wall-hung bar of aluminium – a key material for conductivity in transmission lines – that responds to the sounds and movements of gallery-goers and to the precise conditions of Storefront’s location in central New York, making the experience both site-specific and dynamic.

Chen Zhan The starting point was really the Jewel Rain Vortex. Back in 2019, when I was still a practicing architect at Heatherwick Studio in London, I worked on the design for Terminal 5 at Changi Airport. It was a sleek, high-profile commission but I often felt disconnected – from the site, the people, even the design rationale.

This exhibition was about restoring lost links between materials, communities and the places impacted by these vast infrastructures. That happened through fieldwork and direct encounters. We travelled along the Mekong River Basin, along the dam routes. One of the most surprising discoveries from that trip was realizing the complex, often invisible flows of energy: how water is constantly moving, channelled, never at rest. That energy powers spectacle, like the Jewel Rain Vortex, but it also dramatically reshapes communities.

TT I was struck by the contrast between the eerie silence of the Jewel Rain Vortex projection and the vibrant, layered sonic environment of the three-channel video installation, especially in the scenes depicting the everyday life of the Karen people. That contrast really comes through: the silence of spectacle versus the textured noise of lived experience. I’d love to hear more about your thinking around that dichotomy and how it shaped the exhibition overall.

JCC What really surprised us when we first encountered the Jewel Rain Vortex was the silence. Of course, it is famous: it’s the world’s largest indoor waterfall and it’s been written about and photographed countless times. But no one ever mentions that it’s silent, especially at the basement level, where the waterfall is contained inside a huge transparent tube. The usual multisensory cues – roar, mist, moisture – are gone. All that remains is the visual.

That stood in such sharp contrast to our experience of the Vajiralongkorn Dam reservoir. Living on the raft meant sound was everywhere, totally immersive, especially at night. I could almost hear the fish swimming underneath us. Maybe that was a figment of my imagination, but the experience emphasized how sensitive we become when the environment is allowed to speak.

CZ We wanted to show how water shapes experience through sound. As you’ve seen in the video, the boat travels in all directions and you become acutely aware of that movement because of the audio. Often, you hear something before you see it. Sometimes, you never see the source of the sound and you’re left wondering what it was. We found that quite fascinating. That sensory disjunction – where sound leads and vision lags or never catches up – is something we felt could be effectively translated through a three-channel video installation. It allows for a different kind of perceptual engagement, one where listening, rather than sight, drives the experience.

TT Let’s talk more about your engagement with the Karen people. One thing I found particularly compelling about the three-channel video is that it doesn’t feel like it’s essentializing the community. In fact, for much of it, you don’t actually see any people and, when they do appear, it’s fleeting. Instead, it gives a strong sense of presence without relying on direct human depiction.

CZ Our encounter with them was very unexpected. We were in conversation with the abbot from a Thai Forest Tradition temple – though not the one near the reservoir – when he casually mentioned this floating community. He explained that their homes shift throughout the year, sometimes moving hundreds of metres depending on the water flow. When we finally arrived at the reservoir, we didn’t see them right away. The reservoir is deep in the mountains, and the community is spread out across quite remote areas. You really have to seek them out.

JCC It takes an hour by speedboat to even reach the first houses. For a while, you just see islands – until you realize they are mountain tops. That reorients your sense of space. We tried to capture that shift through sound as well.

CZ That sense of absence became part of the experience for us, and we chose to retain that in the final film. We didn’t want to put them at the centre of the frame in a literal or forced way.

JCC Indigenous communities are often portrayed either as victims or as idealized ecological wisdom bearers. We didn’t want to fall into either of those tropes. We wanted to just show things as they are, as constantly evolving, not contained by certain imposed ideas. That meant no close-ups, no invasive camera angles. We don’t need to see people to capture their presence: the environment also represents them.

TT Even when we try to present something objectively, so much of it is filtered through personal, subjective experience. Maybe that’s a good segue into talking about The Humming of the Power Grid – a work inspired by a deeply personal, if not imagine, experience of hearing the hum of transmission lines.

JCC We kept returning to the question: how do you relate to large-scale, invisible infrastructures, especially ones that sustain our energy-intensive lifestyles? One dam operator in Thailand told us, ‘The dam knows when you have dinner.’ That stuck with me. It made infrastructure feel intimate, almost sentient.

Later, while deep in the mountains of Laos, we had a sensory moment of connection with the transmission lines above us. Not a literal hum, but a bodily awareness of our embeddedness in these systems. The aluminium bar installation, as I said, doesn’t replicate that moment: it creates a space for others to imagine their own relation to it.

CZ And we allowed ambient New York street sounds – sirens, footsteps – to enter the space. Initially, we tried to block them out. But we realized they were part of the experience, so we incorporated them into the composition.

TT I wonder if you could talk about the back room of the space, which contains photographs documenting dams along the Mekong River in Laos as part of the transnational power grid?

CZ Though placed at the end, these images are a kind of connective tissue linking the waterfall in Singapore to the Thai reservoir. These dams are remote; most people never see them. We encountered them by boat and felt compelled to document them without editorializing. You could talk about dams from many angles – environmental impact, village displacement, energy production – but we chose to leave it in a kind of silence. The photography does the work of holding that complexity without prescribing a fixed narrative.

JCC There are many competing narratives about these infrastructures – some celebratory, some critical. We didn’t want to flatten that complexity. Instead, we created space for contradictions to coexist. That’s central both to the show and to our fieldwork methodology. 

'How Much Wattage Is One Handbreadth of Water?' is on view at Storefront for Art and Architecture until 26 April.