SINGAPORE: From a distance, the patch of gray sunflowers glistening under the tropical sun

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in the middle of large grassy setting is arresting. A small note next to the plastic flowers explains that the art installation, by the Singaporean art collective Vertical Submarine, is a reference to Chien Swee-Teng’s poem about a sunflower plantation owner’s Faustian pact: He gives up his sense of colour for the success of his business.

We’re hoping the flowers will catch people’s attention for a split second, making them pause and wonder what this is,” said Fiona Koh, one of the collective’s three members, along with Joshua Yang and Justin Loke.

But there is more to the visually beautiful installation than meets the eye: There is no Chien Swee-Teng or poem — the collective invented the writer and his poem about avarice, giving a conceptual twist to their work.

The work, “Planting Shadows,” is a part of “Nature Borne,” a sculpture exhibition running until December 27 in the Singapore Botanic Gardens. A combination of primary rainforest and specialty gardens displaying tropical plants and flowers are found in the 52-hectare, or 130-acre, park that lies on the edge of the main shopping belt. The exhibition of works by 10 artists, five Singaporeans and five Koreans, was commissioned to celebrate the gardens’ 150th anniversary and the Korea Festival 2009.

“It started with an idea of integrating sculptural art into the environment but we didn’t want everything to be conventionally sculptural,” said Joanna Lee, one of two curators for the show. “So while some works are very sculptural in the conventional sense, answering questions of volume and space and using natural materials that echo the natural surroundings, other works are a bit more conceptual, more ephemeral because we wanted to stretch the exhibition a bit and have works that are site-specific and don’t automatically look like sculptures.”

Such conceptual work includes Michael Lee’s “An Almost Natural History of Life: The 2009 Singapore Edition,” a large white board where words associated with myths and natural history are linked together through a complicated network of arrows and boxes, in what the artist describes as a “sculpture of the human mind.”

“I’m interested in how human psychology relates to the environment,” said the artist. “Within this mind map, what I’m proposing is a sculpture of a different kind, something that is not materially driven.”

The artworks, which are generally small in size, have been scattered in the different nooks and crannies of the gardens. Lee, the curator, said: “We wanted them to be more hidden, giving a feeling of Alice in Wonderland. People walk and then suddenly there’s something odd, it doesn’t quite fit. Like Jason Lim’s sculpture, it seems to work, but at the same time it’s quite an alien life force.”

Lim’s ceramic installation is embedded amid ferns and heritage trees, with 15 sculptures covered in moss barely peaking out of nature, like aquatic anemones.