This two-channel video features footage collected over a long period, including moments captured during the artist's forest visits, from his apartment on the 26th floor via zoom lens, and from motion-capturing and body temperature cameras that he installed in the forest.

This secondary forest is a place where natural and man-made elements interact, introduced and native species coexist, and past and present intertwine.

Abandoned tents languish under the trees. Animals and migratory birds rest on a trash bin and a broken concrete drain. Remnants of military facilities from the British colonial era and the Japanese occupation, as well as items left behind by migrant workers are scattered and buried in the forest. Layered onto this landscape is the unfathomable narrative of two travellers passing through the forest, who speak of things seen in the forest and things the forest sees.

The juxtaposition of the two screens also showcases the contrast and interaction between the natural world and the events caused by human interventions. Through this, the artist prompts us to reimagine these forests, which are continually shaped and erased by urban expansion, as a mutable space of possibility where the boundaries between human and non-human, and native and foreign are dismantled.

The central structure of the installation is a crumbling cabinet made of stacked wooden boxes, which both harks back to the concept of a cabinet of curiosities and challenges the colonial approaches to collection and categorisation that are associated with it.

Within this structure, 12 screens show various creatures visiting a watering hole in the form of an abandoned dustbin. They are interspersed with various objects from the forest that serve as reminders of human history. Collected during the artist's research or discovered as physical traces entangled with exposed roots, the footage and objects speak to transformations over time within a place, and the endless reconstitution of the forest.

Through destabilising colonial narratives of control over nature, Trash Stratum imagines more fluid relationships between the human and nonhuman and reminds us of our entangled existence.

The Buffy fish owl is a bird native to Southeast Asia. The image of Buffy with its back turned to us is a reference to the Heraclitan fragment, “nature loves to hide,” which alludes the true essence of things is not easily grasped or understood by human beings.

This imaginary forest map presents an overview of the artist's extensive explorations and research in Singapore's secondary forests — the ones that have sprung up after the destruction of the primary vegetation. Reflecting the rich ecology of the secondary forests near his home and the forgotten Queen’s Own Hill area — which comprises native and foreign species that interact to create new ecological situations — the map incorporates symbolic stations and features that Zhao encountered on his frequent walks and via remote sensing cameras over an extended period. Notable natural and man-made scenes and elements depicted include a shattered concrete drain revealing a re-emerged river, which became vital to the forest's living organisms.