Departing from Singaporean artist Sim Chi Yin’s video archive of the last decade, the two-channel film The Mountain that Hid is part of the artist’s project on her family history and the anti-colonial guerrilla war known as the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), between the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) and the Commonwealth forces in modern-day Malaysia and Singapore.  

The two channels develop in different locations: in a railroad tunnel in the jungle in Singapore and in Sim’s ancestral family house in China. Taking a speculative approach to historical processes, topics such as anti-colonial resistances, deportation, diaspora, and trans-generational silences and inheritances take a spectral presence in the work. In this visual essay, history’s circular nature is unfolded, tracing it back to the artist’s grandfather’s deportation to China in 1949 by the British colonial government, and his  subsequent execution, in the context of the war officially known as Malayan Emergency.