Shows to See in Singapore, January 2025
By The Editors
"Light to Night" festival at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS), as part of Singapore Art Week in 2024. Courtesy NGS.
Now in its 13th year, the ten-day-long Singapore Art Week (January 17–26) spans more than 130 events—from public festivals to art fairs and gallery shows—as (the slogan goes) “Art Takes Over” the city-state. For mass spectacle, there is “Light to Night Singapore 2025: Do You See Me?,” which illuminates the National Gallery Singapore (NGS) and neighboring facades in the Civic District. The international art fair Art SG returns to Marina Bay Sands for its fourth edition from January 17–19 with 105 galleries from 30 countries and territories, large-scale installations, films, and a talk program. At Tanjong Pagar Distripark, the SEA Focus platform runs from January 18–25 and features more than 200 artworks by 40 artists showing with more than 20 exhibitors in a presentation curated by John Tung on the theme “Disconnected Contemporaries.” And Sotheby’s returns to Singapore, holding its first auction of 19th-century, modern, and contemporary art on January 18.
Installation view of TEO ENG SENG‘s "We’re Happy. Are You Happy?" at National Gallery Singapore, 2024. Courtesy NGS.
Among the shows at Singapore’s major museums, NGS is hosting a retrospective of Singaporean dyed-paper artist Teo Eng Seng, “We’re Happy. Are You Happy?” and the first major retrospective of the postwar sculptor Kim Lim, “The Space Between. A Retrospective.” The Singapore Art Museum (SAM), also located in Tanjong Pagar Distripark, has three solo shows: the return exhibition of Robert Zhao Renhui’s “Seeing Forest” from the Singapore Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024; a survey of Bangkok-based conceptual artist Pratchaya Phinthong’s practice, “No Patents on Ideas”; and a two-decade survey of Sabah-based artist Yee I-Lann, “Mansau-Ansau.” The ArtScience Museum in Marina Bay Sands presents a survey of famed animator Studio Ghibli and “Altered States: Experiments in Moving Image.”
Participants in the residency program "Communities of Practice. Techno Diversions" at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore: BANI HAYKAL, CHOK SI XUAN, ONG KIAN PENG. Photo by Eunice Lacaste. Courtesy the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.
SAW programming extends across the city, with the Singapore Art Week Forum 2025 featuring a January 15 keynote by Chicago-based sculptor Theaster Gates, followed by a moderated conversation by NGS senior curator Patrick Flores. The new Tanoto Art Foundation, announced its launch on January 14, with a program called “Soul Song of a New Organisation,” featuring performances by artists Melati Suryodarmo and Chang Yuchen and a keynote by scholar and art historian Joan Kee. At Gillman Barracks, NTU CCA Singapore’s art incubation program, “Communities of Practice. Techno diversions,” presents an exhibition by three Singaporean artists, Chok Si Xuan, bani haykal, and Ong Kian Peng, “Nothing has to be the way it is” in The Hall from January 17–26.
Singapore’s commercial galleries also come alive during this season. Here’s a look at AAP editors’ picks for Singapore Art Week.
SUZANN VICTOR, Afterglow, 2024, acrylic paint, glaze medium on acrylic disks, 163.5 × 186 × 37 cm. Courtesy STPI Gallery, Singapore.
Jan 15–Mar 2
Suzann Victor
Constellations
STPI Gallery
Over a three-decade career, Sydney-based Singaporean artist Suzann Victor is known for her immersive work that explores perception and natural phenomena through materials such as water and glass as well as kinetic movement. Her exhibition at STPI Gallery showcases a new body of work produced during her residency at STPI Creative Workshop where she transformed acrylic disks into luminous “shadows made of light,” evoking both microscopic landscapes and vast natural patterns.
GRACE TAN, Projected Tesseract Resembling a Cube (Pale Gold and Copper), 2025, site-specific installation, programmable RGBW (red, green, blue, and white) LED light projections and pearlescent pigments with aqueous acrylic binder, dimensions variable. Courtesy Fost Gallery, Singapore.
Jan 11–Mar 1
Grace Tan
A Cube is a Cube is a Cube
Fost Gallery
In “A Cube is a Cube is a Cube,” Malaysia-born artist Grace Tan continues her investigation into the possibilities of imagining new forms through the deconstruction of geometric forms. Taking the cube as her subject, Tan showcases 12 works that reveal how this rigid shape can serve as a medium of flux—dissecting, reassembling, and reframing it into new forms that challenge our views on solidity and stability.
ROBERT ZHAO RENHUI, Every Tree is its Own Universe 7, 2024, archival inkjet print, 80 × 120 cm. Courtesy ShangArt Gallery, Shanghai.
Jan 11–Feb 23
Robert Zhao Renhui
The Divine in the Trash Stratum
ShanghArt
Continuing his explorations into ecological resilience, Singaporean artist Robert Zhao Renhui’s solo exhibition “The Divine in the Trash Stratum” presents newly released photographic works that feature the radical transformation from sites of decay to restored life. His multidisciplinary approach to photography binds images with objects and documents, prompting a reimagination of the intertwined ties between humanity and nature.
ARI BAYUAJI, In Search of My Ancestors #6, 2017-22, Chinese ink and acrylic paint on canvas, 45.5 × 35 × 4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Mizuma Gallery, Singapore.
Jan 11–Mar 16
Ari Bayuaji
The Old Soul | The New Universe
Mizuma Gallery
From woven textiles to mixed-media installations, Indonesia-born Montreal-based artist Ari Bayuaji deals with contemporary issues with a twist at his solo show “The Old Soul | The New Universe.” Taking found materials beyond their functional usage, he creates works that serve as a response to socio-environmental issues. His series Weaving the Ocean involves close engagement with the community in Sanur, Bali, who were heavily struck by the pandemic, and where discarded plastic ropes from the fishing industry are recycled and woven into his artworks.
FYEROOL DARMA, Gateway 404, 2024, laminated photovoltaic sheet, wood, polymer synthetic paint, resin, 57 × 116 cm. Photo by Jonathan Tan. Courtesy Yeo Workshop, Singapore.
Jan 11–Mar 2
Fyerool Darma
krØmæ§pirit
Yeo Workshop
Blurring the lines between the natural and digital world, Singaporean multimedia artist Fyerool Darma presents new works for his solo show at Yeo Workshop that explore how technology is altering our perception of organic matter and history. From bold colors to geometric shapes and undulating forms, the exhibition features AI-infused paintings, sculptures, totems, and maps combined with bird sounds that reflect the perpetual cycle of creation and destruction.
TUN WIN AUNG and WAH NU, White Piece #0184: Inked Over, Zan Myint, 2017, acrylic and collage on canvas, 34.3 × 28 cm. Courtesy Richard Koh Fine Art, Singapore/Bangkok.
Jan 11–Feb 15
Tun Win Aung & Wah Nu
The Squares
Richard Koh Fine Art
A new part of Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu’s ongoing project Thousand Pieces of White from 2009, “The Squares” offers a tragic dive into the micro-history of Myanmar through a minimal abstractionist visual translation of the once-censored Burmese magazine by this local artist duo. Curated by Louis Ho, the show remembers and reinterprets the material traces of a repressed past, where the complexity of memory, history, and erasure emerge to form deeper reflection.
PRAJAKTA POTNIS, Capsule 202, 2016, print on cotton rag paper, 146 × 217 cm. Courtesy Gajah Gallery, Singapore.
Jan 11–Mar 1
In Dialogue
Ota Fine Arts
Featuring eight artists from across Asia—including New York-based sculptor Rina Banerjee, Singaporean painters Hilmi Johandi and Guo-Liang Tan, Mumbai-based photographer Prajakta Potnis, and the famed Yayoi Kusama, among others—“In Dialogue” is a multidisciplinary group exhibition demonstrating the diversity of expression in Asian contemporary art. Within the gallery, the works come into conversation with one another, contemplating themes of memory, personal growth, space, gender, and the urban experience.
MANNAT GANDOTRA, Tendril of the Same Continent, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 180 × 180 cm. Courtesy the artist.
Jan 17–Mar 2
Big Bang: A Myth Of Origins
Gajah Gallery Singapore
As the title implies, “Big Bang: A Myth of Origins” observes universal acts of creation and the mysteries of beginnings that transcend time and cultures. Featuring 12 artists from India, the Philippines, Singapore, and Indonesia working in diverse media, the group exhibition contemplates the spirit of human creativity and the intersections between origin myths, artistic expression, and the timeless quest to understand where we come from.
Detail of LE HIEN MINH’s Apocalypse Nail, 2024, traditional Vietnamese handmade Do paper, bioplastic, 24K gold paint, 38.5 × 115 × 15.5 cm. Photo by Mia. Courtesy the artist and Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York/London/Singapore.
Jan 11–Mar 8
Disobedient Bodies: Reclaiming Her
Sundaram Tagore Gallery
Curated by Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani, “Disobedient Bodies: Reclaiming Her,” is a group show of eight Asian female artists that mediates a discourse between womanhood and patriarchal ideals across painting, photography, sculpture, and video installation. The works pose different gestures of disobedience, firmly questioning and deconstructing entrenched social norms around the female body in the quest for emancipation and autonomy.
ALVIN ONG, Roots, 2024, oil on canvas, 30 × 40 cm. Courtesy the artist.
Jan 11–Mar 8
a gesture, a room, a memory
Ames Yavuz
For the group exhibition “a gesture, a room, a memory,” Ames Yavuz brings together six contemporary painters—Shane Keisuke Berkery, Mark Maurangi Carrol, Chen Ching-Yuan, Gus Monday, Alvin Ong, and Tom Polo—whose works ruminate on the crossroads between reality and imagination, individual and collective memory, the mundane and the extraordinary. Across each canvas, dreamlike visual narratives and bodily compositions gently capture moments of desire, loneliness, and self-reflection that bespeak the bittersweet human condition.
