Singapore Art Museum shows probe afterlives of performance and common objects

SINGAPORE – When a performance ends and its material decays, what remains of art?

For almost a decade, a lush green dress hand-knitted with threads of leek has been eating itself while it rests in a conservation room. The wearable artwork, made over the course of a 180-hour public performance, has been emitting gases which only accelerate its decay, in a metaphor for auto-cannibalism.

Since it entered the Singapore Art Museum’s (SAM) collection, Malaysian artist Chia Chuyia’s organic garment has been hurtling towards its inevitable end.

Curator Teng Yen Hui is hauling it out of storage for the first time since it showed at the 2016 Singapore Biennale. She says about accessioning Chia’s Knitting The Future: “We made a note in our system that it may or may not last another showing.”

The garment’s outing is also the final one in its current form. Now desiccated and browned, it is splayed under a glass casing at a new SAM exhibition – which opens on Sept 12 – but will be laid to rest in a final performance on Jan 24, 2026.

Chia will attempt to don the garment, then fold it up and return the work to the museum’s collection in a form that is more durable and persistent.

Second life of a performance

It is on show at The Living Room, an exhibition curated by Ms Teng which reflects on the afterlives of performance and asks how the ephemerality of performance-based art can be collected and presented in new ways.

The Living Room is one of two new exhibitions at

SAM’s one-year-old Collection Gallery

, which also hosts Talking Objects – a show which explores the rebirth of everyday objects in contemporary art.

Both exhibitions, says Ms Teng, 37 – who is also SAM’s manager of collections – deal with unconventional materials and the question of how to care for and re-present them.

“Artists have a whole universe of materials and many can be untested. Traditional conservation is about prioritising and preserving the object. But in a lot of our works, it’s not necessarily the object that needs preserving. Sometimes there is no object at all, or the essence of the work is found in the idea of the object.”

The Living Room, a collaboration with the Seoul Museum of Art and Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, looks at how to convey the liveness of performance beyond more conventional photography and video archives.

South Korean artist Rim Dong-sik recreates an old riverside performance through a vivid oil painting, for example, while Singaporean artist Jeremy Hiah records performances past with his surreal charcoal collage-scroll.

The reckoning with how to collect performance-based works across three museums reflects the increasing centrality of the practice for art institutions, even as performance had more anti-institutional roots.

Singapore ceased public funding for performance art for a decade from 1994 after artist Josef Ng’s offending performance at Parkway Parade, which involved him snipping off his pubic hair.

Fittingly, the exhibition will not be static. Artists will perform within the exhibition room and leave new traces that inevitably alter what is on show.

On the opening weekend of Sept 13 and 14, catch performances by Hiah and Singaporean artist Ezzam Rahman, as well as a commanding improvisation work by New Zealand-born Samoan artist Brian Fuata, which responds to the works on exhibit.

During Singapore Art Week 2026, South Korean artist Kim Ga Ram – also a professional hairdresser – will stage a pop-up hair salon at SAM and invite the public to speak to her about social issues while getting a free haircut. The simple act of snipping hair has always carried political connotations, which is what Kim gestures to in her participatory performance.

Kim’s practice here is reminiscent of Singaporean pioneer performance artist Amanda Heng –

who is Singapore’s 2026 representative to the Venice Biennale

. In Heng’s Let’s Chat (1996), she offers an intimate space for the public to talk while peeling bean sprouts.

Objects reborn as art

In Talking Objects, the gallery turns from the ephemeral to the materiality of everyday items which, like performance, can also imply the presence of the body which uses the objects.

Singaporean artist Suzann Victor

uses eggplants in a work on show at the National Gallery Singapore.

Here, she uses a suspended metal-framed bed draped with a quilt made from 3,000 Fresnel lenses to suggest the human form in birth, death, sex and sleep.

Each lens in Victor’s Third World Extra Virgin Dreams (1997) – reflecting many contemporary artists’ penchant for unconventional materials – is also dabbed with human blood.

Curator Ong Puay Khim, 46, says of the questions such a work’s presentation poses: “How much of the trace of past stains do we keep that is important? And how much of it should be cleaned away?”

Many works on show are also realised only with visitor interaction – which requires a shift in perspective on how they should be conserved.

Ms Ong – who is also SAM’s director of collections, public art and programmes – says these works, rather than having to be kept pristine, are “meant to allow or embrace the traces of its use”.

Visitors are invited to tap on Indonesian artist Christine Ay Tjoe’s typewriter in Lama Sabakhtani #03 (2010) and hear the sounds change, or play on Filipino artist Alwin Reamillo’s grand piano, reconstructed from discarded parts of a defunct piano workshop owned by the artist’s father.

The humble object in Reamillo’s work speaks to larger economic shifts. In the 1990s, cheaper imported pianos forced his father’s workshop to close.

Similarly, Indian artist Subodh Gupta’s Hungry God (2005 to 2006) is, on first inspection, a cascading barrage of household stainless steel pots, pans and pails. But it also speaks to India as one of the world’s top steel producers.

Gupta’s work is being shown for the first time since the museum announced in 2024 that it had received the work as a donation from investment firm co-founder Sameer Sain.

But for works like Reamillo’s – a piece SAM has shown before which can be installed in various ways – every new display is an opportunity to do something different.

“It’s only through presenting it and having real challenges when encountering the work that we know more,” says Ms Ong. She adds that the late Reamillo’s instructions for displaying the grand piano – which is also accompanied by a bevy of other wood objects – is an open-ended one “to create a cosy space”.

Ms Ong, too, is talking to the objects. “Each time we show a work, we learn more about it.”

Book It/ Talking Objects and The Living Room

Where: Level 3, Gallery 4, Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, 39 Keppel Road
When: Sept 12 to July 19, 2026, 10am to 7pm
Admission: Free for Singaporeans and permanent residents; $10 and $5 (concession) for foreign residents
Info:

str.sg/CthT

and

str.sg/t8Cc