National Gallery Singapore’s Art Remembers features local Counter-Strike and crushed iPhones

SINGAPORE – Recall playing Counter-Strike in a virtual Choa Chu Kang Housing Board estate? Turn-of-the-millennium LAN shop gamers can relive a version of the first-person shooter game map in a playable artwork at the National Gallery Singapore’s (NGS) newest show, complete with hearty Singlish soundpacks and comfy Razer chairs.

Created in 2001 by avid gamer Charles Lim Yi Yong – better known today as a Singaporean contemporary artist – and online portal Geek Culture’s founder Lim Yeong Chun, or Yonk, the iconic modified map has been restored. It shows, with new additions, in the exhibition Art Remembers (Aug 21 to Oct 18), which explores how South-east Asian artists engage with archives to deal with history and memory.

Although archives have an ill reputation of being dusty and officious, the curatorial quartet wants audiences to walk away with “archive fever”, discovering how idiosyncratic, personal, self-made and appropriated archives can reveal much about histories unrecorded by official sources. Says co-curator Seng Yu Jin: “Archive fever is really about agency – all of us have our own compelling stories to tell.”

Amid serious themes, expect eccentric approaches that call attention to a range of everyday archiving technologies contemporary users take for granted. A 2026 series of “powdered iPhones” by American artist Josh Kline, who is of Filipino heritage, is made of pulverised smartphones and dyed cotton pulp which Kline made at a recent STPI residency. He is known for using crushed materials, and worked with BYD car parts, Dyson vacuum cleaners and even plant waste from Gardens by the Bay during his recent Singapore residency.

The other members of the show’s curatorial team are Lisa Horikawa, Phoebe Scott and Kathleen Ditzig – the original curatorial team for the delayed After The Monsoon: Art & War In Southeast Asia exhibition, which was slated to take place where Art Remembers is staged. While themes of war and occupation are major threads in this show and both exhibitions feature some of the same artists, an NGS spokesperson says this is a new, stand-alone exhibition and that the deferred exhibition remains postponed until any further notice.

On the artist’s role as historian and storyteller, Seng says: “Art is good for remembering what is overlooked, what is forgotten, what needs to be reclaimed, because art tends to look for what is marginalised. It makes visible what was previously invisible.”

The exhibition, which includes seven commissioned artworks among the 20, shows a range of methods artists use to intervene in dominant state and colonial archives which often dictate official and/or accepted narratives of history.

Some artists, in following the trail of the official archives, expose its violent logic. Singaporean artist Sim Chi Yin’s own archive fever led her in an ongoing 15-year search for the story of her late grandfather, one of 30,000 people deported to China during the guerilla war known euphemistically as the Malayan Emergency (1948 to 1960). Reprinting photographs of the conflict from the Imperial War Museums on glass, colonial index notes on the back overlapping with the violent subjects on the front, Sim makes visible how archives work.

Others actively reinvent and intervene in the archive. In Block Out The Sun (2019), Filipino artist Stephanie Syjuco reclaims privacy for some of the 1,200 Filipinos paraded in a 1904 World’s Fair “human zoo” in Missouri by obscuring their faces with her hands in rephotographed versions of the historical images.

For more occluded histories, artists resort to generating their own archives. Singaporean artist Ho Rui An’s Fuelling Apocalypse (2024 to 2025) gives visual form to the little-known fact that Singapore-refined fuel powered American military craft during the Vietnam War. Ho generates surreal dystopian scenes with an artificial intelligence model trained on images from film-maker Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 war film Apocalypse Now and Louis Wesseling’s 2000 book Fuelling The War: Revealing An Oil Company’s Role In Vietnam.

Asked about what he thinks is the nature of South-east Asian artists’ approach to archiving, Seng says humour is often deployed to disrupt the seriousness of an existing archive. While human-centric perspectives dominate, the team also introduces non-human perspectives into the mix, most strikingly in Singaporean artist Robert Zhao Renhui’s The Fish Does Not Know The War Is Over (2025), which offers a fresh take on the Japanese Occupation through the eyes of a tilapia.

Moving away from a human-centric view of archives, Seng points out, has contemporary currency amid discourse about climate change. “It’s so relevant to stories about Maju Forest,” he says. “The forest is an archive, if you think about it, because it contains not just species, but the histories of the land itself.”

Despite the exhibition’s relatively easier opening with playable art, Art Remembers – which leans more heavily on contemporary art – is one of NGS’ denser shows, requiring a different kind of attention from the gallery’s usual exhibitions.

“As a curator, I personally believe that we should be as demanding of our audiences as they are demanding of our exhibitions,” Seng says. “The agency of our audience to have their own critical way or their own perspectives – that is as relevant as anything else.”

Book It/Art Remembers

Where: City Hall Wing, Level 3, Singtel Special Exhibition Gallery 1 and City Hall Chamber, National Gallery Singapore, 1 St Andrew’s Road
When: Aug 21 to Oct 18
Admission: General admission ticket required; free for Singaporeans and permanent residents and $20 for other nationalities
Info: www.nationalgallery.sg/sg/en/exhibitions/Art-Remembers.html