Singapore Art Week 2026
3 best shows picked by ST’s arts team that you can still catch
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Korean American artist Anicka Yi's glowing cocoons of kelp stole the show at Rituals Of Perception during Singapore Art Week.
PHOTO: TANOTO ART FOUNDATION
SINGAPORE – The 14th edition of Singapore Art Week (SAW) brought together an impossible assortment of more than 200 programmes. Here are The Straits Times’ arts team’s top three picks that you can still visit.
1. Rituals Of Perception
If there is one sanctuary from the rush of SAW, it is the Tanoto Art Foundation’s inaugural show at the New Bahru School Hall. It is an ode to the pleasures of tactility in art – from Korean-American artist Anicka Yi’s glowing cocoons of kelp that house flying animatronic insects to Peruvian artist Claudia Martinez Garay’s tufted carpet of Andean symbols.
Curated by Shanghai-born, New York-based Xiaoyu Weng – who is on the artistic team for the 2027 edition of the influential Documenta exhibition in Germany – the show boasts sleek exhibition design inspired by bamboo kelongs and thoughtful wall text. It is a welcome respite from the doomscroll of existence.
Info: Free, ongoing till March 1. Go to str.sg/tmjS
2. The Strange Archive
The Strange Archive invites visitors to query the nature and function of archival materials and practices.
PHOTO: MUHAMMAD RASHID
One of the more humorous moments during SAW is seeing the earnest, if now overmilked, revolutionary fervour of Singaporean master painter Chua Mia Tee’s National Language Class (1959) transformed into a classroom of tattooed and blase ah bengs and ah lians.
The terms are usually pejorative words for loutish Chinese youth, but in Singaporean artist Ezekiel Wong’s charcoal works, the band of misfits is elevated to the stuff of anti-colonial art history.
The Strange Archive, a modest show at Tanjong Pagar Distripark and curated by Adrian Tan, contains many such double-take moments as it interrogates familiar maps, documents and artworks.
The show demonstrates that the archive is no neutral repository and that sifting through the archive’s silences and stock images is as much the work of serious scholars as it is the work of artists who interrogate history-making with a playful slant.
Info: Free, ongoing till Feb 1. Go to thestrangearchive.sg
3. Isang Dipang Langit: Fragments Of Memory, Fields Of Now
Ten Filipino artists showcase large-scale installations in Isang Dipang Langit.
PHOTO: SINGAPORE ART WEEK
A fluffy, larger-than-life cloud of nylon fish nets by Filipino artist Oca Villamiel sits aptly by the harbour at Tanjong Pagar Distripark.
Throughout the breezy gallery at 37 Keppel Road, artists from the Philippines make use of materials that are striking – fish bones, metal from historical ordnance, raw metal and polyester bottles.
The deliberate rawness of the show is a departure from The Columns Gallery’s usual ones at Gillman Barracks and its venture out to present work in a new venue has paid off with higher footfall. It is the second time this particular unit has staged a show with maritime themes – Singapore Art Museum first did so with Charles Lim and Simryn Gill in 2024 – befitting the space.
Info: Free, ongoing till Jan 31. Go to str.sg/9Em7
