Haw Par Villa is Singapore’s last remaining Asian cultural park, built
in 1937 by the Tiger Balm brothers and infamous for its “Ten Courts
of Hell” dioramas, which visualise the Chinese afterlife as a place of
constant judgment and punishment. Now facing an indefinite partial
closure for maintenance from December 2025, with large parts of the
park shut “until further notice”, the site embodies how a strange,
didactic piece of local heritage is becoming precarious for the next
generation. In a city where youth expression is tightly negotiated, this
editorial follows a lone figure as he moves through Haw Par Villa’s
layers of hell as if through a moral surveillance machine.
Shot on film
Photography: Noam Kaestner (@noamleon)
Model: Russel Su (@russu.v2)