Hang around a bed long enough — and maybe obsess a little over it — and it will certainly take you places.

That is what happened to Singapore artist Lucy Davis, who, over the past few years, has held exhibitions and created artworks that all seemingly revolved around or were at least jumpstarted by a piece of second-hand wooden furniture.

Ongoing at the National University Of Singapore Museum is “When You Get Closer To The Heart, You May Find Cracks ...”, the latest and most comprehensive exhibition on the theme by Davis and her collaborators under Migrant Ecologies Project, which she founded in 2010.

Comprising a wide array of objects — from huge woodprint collage works and dioramas to photographs and archival newspaper articles, even chunks of wood and an animated video entitled Jalan Jati (Teak Road) — the exhibition’s scope extends beyond Singapore to the far reaches of Myanmar and a small island in Sulawesi. And the teak bed that started it all is what greets you at the entrance.

In 2009, Davis became fascinated with the histories behind wooden objects. Then a resident of Little India, “I would pick up pieces of wood and began asking where they came from”, she said, working with timber tracking company Double Helix Tracking Technologies to actually test the pieces’ DNA. At some point, she stumbled upon the teak bed in a furniture store in Rangoon Road, took it home and also had it tested. Made in the 1930s, the teak used apparently came from Sulawesi. The rest, you might say, is Davis delving into history — or various strands of it.

“What fascinated me (about Davis’ project) were the multiple investigations and the different ways of investigating she did,” said artist-curator Jason Wee, who guest-curated the exhibition.

What started out as a story about a bed has, in this show, transformed into two parallel tales of wood and trees and its relation to two islands: Muna Island in Southeast Sulawesi and Singapore.

In 2010, Davis and photographer Shannon Castleman flew down to the former, an island long known for its teak plantations. Unfortunately, after the timber boom of the ’60s that lasted into the ’90s (“Singapore, Malaysia and other countries made a lot of money,” Davis highlighted), the place was devastated. The older plantations have now been granted conservation status — a desperate move after rampant logging damaged the island’s water table.

More recently, Davis unearthed another interesting story closer to home. The bed had led to her thinking about talking to teak furniture makers in Singapore but, aside from old newspaper ads, she couldn’t find any. Then, in April, she came across someone who had actually worked in the timber industry — Allen Oei, an established timber magnate with a rags-to-riches story to tell in a life entwined with lumber.

Davis said Oei “controls a significant amount of import of teak in Singapore” but, at the same time, has a “real love of wood”. As the founder of Nature Wood Company, he ships teak logs from places such as Myanmar. In fact, he gave Davis a few pieces of log ends from what was supposedly the last shipment to Singapore before the Burmese government implemented its ban on log exports this year.

Set on retiring this month, Oei will be handing over the reins of his company to his son. The exhibition features a book on the timber magnate, done with photographer Kee Ya Ting, and features some of Oei’s more interesting and surprisingly frank quotes about the industry and his life.

Incidentally, the show’s rather poetic title was a quote from Oei, although, perhaps, he meant it in a more literal sense.

Davis’ stories about the two islands dominate the show, but there’s one more narrative that she branches out into.

While Davis presents a kind of “archaeology of the bed”, said Wee, she is also emphasising on woodcuts for the first time. “It’s one of the under-acknowledged art traditions in Singapore,” he said.

Indeed, her huge paper collage works (using cut-out strips from woodcut prints of both the teak bed and the teak log ends Oei gave her) offer a direct link between the woodcut and the Singapore and Muna Island threads of the exhibition: A huge thumbprint of the man who sold Davis the bed, an image of Oei’s son as a young boy standing over teak logs based on a photograph, among others.

But, there’s an even more overt nod to Singapore’s woodcut history, located in another section of the gallery space. It is a series of mechanised dioramas that play on light and shadows. And here, the cut-out strips Davis created come to life, recreating fragments of woodcut prints by Singapore artists such as Lim Mu Hue’s Love, Lim Yew Kang’s After The Fire and Lee Kee Boon’s Nanyang University.

It’s a show swirling with art, science and history, while subtly touching on economics, geopolitics and even the fantastical. There’s a lot happening here and if, like Davis, you stick around long enough, you may discover in all these wood, grains of truth.

“When You Get Closer To The Heart, You May Find Cracks…” runs until November, 10am to 7.30pm, NUS Museum, University Cultural Centre, 50 Kent Ridge Crescent. Closed on Mondays and public holidays. Free admission.