The religious landscape of Singapore is one that is textured through politics, regulation, strategic compromise and individual agency – and none more so than that of Chinese Religion practitioners, defined here as a syncretic mixture of folk religion, Taoism and Buddhism. In this talk, I map out the making of Chinese Religion sacred spaces, showing how such spaces are a product of what I call a “spiritual imagination”, a material and embodied process through which individuals and groups find ways to co-exist with state policy and urban planning. I will draw from three case studies made over a period of 15 years of visual ethnographic fieldwork. The first examines the enchantment of mundane urban spaces during the Hungry Ghost Festival – a use of roadside offerings that perform heterogeneous ethnic identities. The second looks at embodied sacredness in the form of Tang-ki, or Chinese spirit mediums, and how their everyday practices demonstrate temporal enchantments of any domestic or public space into a liminal sacred realm. Finally, I consider what happens when the spiritual imagination’s material and embodied practices come together into an ebb and flow of actors, actions and artefacts – creating “sacred flowscapes” that move over, under and alongside physical and political restrictions.
Speaker
Terence Heng is Reader in Sociology at the University of Liverpool. Working at the intersections of visual sociology, cultural geography and photographic practice, he investigates the making and shaping of sacred places in mundane spaces through the use of visual methods. He is the author of three books including Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts (2020), a visual monograph of spirit mediums and hungry ghosts in Singapore and Diasporas, Weddings and the Trajectories of Ethnicity (2020) – a visual study of Chinese Singaporean wedding rituals. He is also co-editor of two collections, Death and the Afterlife (2024) and Photographic Collections as Visual Method (2026). Terence has also published in journals such as Area, The Sociological Review, Cultural Geographies and Social and Cultural Geography. He has recently concluded a solo photography exhibition, The Spirited North, at the Victoria Gallery and Museum in Liverpool on a project documenting makeshift sacred spaces in the North of England.
