'My intent was never surreal or gee-whiz,' says Bickerton. 'It was more an attempt to release some inner physiological being, a malevolent Caliban or a mindless green imbecile, half riotous festival and half reptilian instinctual knowing.

'The half submerged heads reflecting is only the latest incarnation. I liked something about the utter stillness of it all, the blank but latent crocodilian staring in the oil smooth water. There is no point to be made, at least not one that I would care to summarise with words. It is precisely an intrinsically visual language that I am trying to get at. The image should explain itself on its own terms.'

Bickerton came to prominence in New York in the 1980s with a fusion of pop, minimal and conceptual art. Famous for 'a New York second' as he puts it, he was tagged one of the 'Fab Four' in the Neo-Geo movement along with Jeff Koons, Peter Halley and Meyer Vaisman. But when the art bubble burst in the 1990s, his career nosedived and he ended up in Bali.

With the Singapore institute, Bickerton has created a series of metaphorical landscapes, where desolate, volcanic expanses are littered with images of detritus, perforated with deep holes, or entangled dead branches.

'It is, I suppose, a poetic meditation on the relentless grinding of time and all that that includes, the spectacular and the mundane,' he says.

The landscapes are cast from heavy paper 5cm deep, with deep pits etched into the base. Black velvety flocked circles puncture the works, creating the illusion of black holes. In some, photo-realist printed images such as flip-flops, toothbrushes, old bottles and bones are pinned methodically onto the landscape, reminiscent of an insect collection. In some, a volcano smoulders on the horizon; in others, a group of idealised women, children and animals are gathered in the distance.

Bickerton says there's no specific moral agenda or commentary. It's what he sees. 'I don't really want to know what I'm saying,' he says. 'To have a point to make is a kind of death.'

Bickerton's work still has a bite that New York seems to appreciate. After Singapore, his STPI collection will be presented at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in the city in May.