Singapore Art Week 2025: Artists showcase works amid buffet of events
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SINGAPORE – Singapore Art Week returns from Jan 17 to 26 with more than 130 events packed into its 10-day span.
The annual visual arts extravaganza runs the gamut. There are the industry-focused affairs such as the Singapore Art Week Forum, themed Art Publics, featuring American artist Theaster Gates as the keynote speaker.
Serious art lovers will be presented with a buffet of art shows, from sneak peeks at personal collections such as gallerist Richard Koh’s to new works from home-grown veterans like artist Yang Derong and photographer Chia Aik Beng.
There will also be crowd-pleasing fare, such as the popular Light To Night festival, organised by the National Gallery Singapore, which features sculptor Han Sai Por’s experiments with new mediums.
Meet some of the must-see artists showcased in this event, organised by the National Arts Council and supported by the Singapore Tourism Board.
Sculptor Han Sai Por turns Padang into forest at Light To Night festival
Singaporean sculptor Han Sai Por, 81, at the rooftop of the National Gallery Singapore overlooking the Padang, where her 9m-high work will show as part of the Light To Night festival.
ST PHOTO: BRIAN TEO
A 9m-high installation on a patch of the Padang is the closest Singaporean sculptor Han Sai Por has got to her dream project, as the 81-year-old has always wished she could make a landscape work the size of a football field.
The petite artist has spent her career punching – or rather hammering and chiselling – above her weight. The Cultural Medallion recipient’s rugged hands bear the marks of her practice, which involves whipping tough materials like stone and granite into hefty works of public art that can weigh on the mind.
Despite a recent hospitalisation from a lung infection, Han is still finding ways to chase scale. Her newest work, Travelling Through The Tropical Rainforest, was meant to be twice its current size if not for budget constraints. It nonetheless stands as her largest work.
Theaster Gates says beauty is a choice to give care
American installation artist Theaster Gates will be delivering a keynote lecture at Singapore Art Week 2025.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF THEASTER GATES STUDIO
Midway through the 40-minute video call, American artist and professor Theaster Gates slows his voice and speaks in meditative tones: “You can now hear yourself walking. The tiles are making an impression on your feet. You smell things. You hear things faintly, which requires that you listen more.”
His intonations would fit on mindfulness channels, but he is describing the experience of one work at his 2024 solo exhibition at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum.
His sculptural installation A Heavenly Chord comprises a Hammond B-3 Organ – a staple in black churches – and seven Leslie speakers that stream gospel soul chants performed by Gates and collaborators The Black Monks.
Photographer Chia Aik Beng thinks ‘Singkarpor’ can be quirkier
Singaporean photographer Chia Aik Beng, known for his street photography, will present a series of large-scale photographic collages in Singkarpor Remixed as part of Singapore Art Week 2025.
ST PHOTO: BRIAN TEO
Singaporean street photographer Chia Aik Beng observes that the city has more quirky characters after Covid-19 but, compared with Bali and Bangkok, the 56-year-old thinks: “Singapore is a bit too safe.”
Having dinner in the Thai capital one evening, Chia saw from the corner of his eye a man in body paint picking up trash, and immediately whipped out his camera. In Singapore, he says, encountering such a scene can still feel as difficult as winning the lottery.
But the self-taught photographer makes it up with his keen eye for the candid and kooky. He is known for capturing some of the city’s stranger figures – like a man who hides cigarettes under his tongue – as well as the disappearing facets of everyday life, whether inside Singapore’s oldest nightclub or the backstage of a Teochew opera performance.
Artist Yang Derong weaves a digital tale of Singapore
Singaporean artist Yang Derong will have his multimedia installation work DIGikat staged at Singapore Art Week from Jan 17 to 26.
ST PHOTO: BRIAN TEO
Artist Yang Derong’s studio located in a Tiong Bahru apartment is an Aladdin’s cave brimming with both finished art and multiple works in progress. Walls are hung with paintings and displays, bookshelves are packed with tomes and collectible figurines, and the kitchen counter hosts an elaborate display of fake food, part of an ongoing project.
The physical space reflects the man’s fertile mind, seemingly sprouting different ideas every other minute as he guides visitors through the warren of objects.
His DIGikat project for Singapore Art Week is a multimedia installation woven from multiple threads of thought. The work, which is on at The Arts House’s Annex from Jan 17 to 26, features a giant digital “loom” weaving an ikat “fabric” composed of animated soundwaves drawn from recorded conversations the artist had with about 30 people.
Melati Suryodarmo mixes dreams with technology in S’pore performance
Indonesian performance artist Melati Suryodarmo will stage If We Were XYZ, an exploration of the ways dreams intersect with technology, at Singapore Art Week.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF MELATI SURYODARMO
Indonesian performance artist Melati Suryodarmo has a semi-comic claim to fame. In 2012, a video of her work Exergie – Butter Dance was edited by a YouTuber to sync with English singer-songwriter Adele’s wistful hit Someone Like You.
In a cocktail dress and heels, she dances – or more accurately teeters and totters – over 20 blocks of melting butter.
The “transcreation” created a small cultural moment, attracting over one million views within weeks.
Private collector Richard Koh says exhibiting his collection is like exposing himself
Richard Koh with an artist proof of British artist Thomas Houseago’s The Walking Man.
ST PHOTO: KEVIN LIM
Enter Osbourne House, the site of The Private Museum, and one comes face to face with the muscular physicality of British artist Thomas Houseago’s gigantic sculpture The Walking Man.
It is breathtaking, but also the last time this exhibition of Malaysian gallerist Richard Koh’s private collection relies on scale to impress.
“Too obvious,” the 60-year-old Koh says when asked to pose in front of this artist proof, which he had wrangled through his connections in the art world.
