The Great ‘Bust’ Up Award goes to SG60 art exhibitions

SINGAPORE – Received historical narratives in Singapore have been undergoing recalibration, particularly with the declassifying of pioneer leader Goh Keng Swee’s Albatross file.

In less dramatic fashion, art exhibitions in 2025 also sought to retell Singapore’s story, fitting for a year celebrating the Republic’s 60th birthday.

The most memorable exhibition was one centring the “bust” of this eponymous award, a loving tribute by private collector Chong Huai Seng that may come to exemplify a new approach to history – individual and personal.

In his Artist’s Proof: Singapore At 60, he used a rare “melancholic” bust of founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew by British sculptor Sydney Harpley as a bridgehead to critique ideas of Singapore art. The show at Tanjong Pagar Distripark in July comprised nearly 100 works by more than 50 artists.

Patriotic portraits were hung alongside politically sensitive ones. Jon Chan presented a pair of small-scale paintings of “offices”, one belonging to Mr Lee and the other to former political detainee Chia Thye Poh, who was held for 23 years without trial.

Sonny Liew created three toy figurines of Singapore’s first-generation leaders that reference controversial moments in Singapore art history, including a pair of scissors for artist Josef Ng’s offending Brother Cane in 1994.

This was a potent reminder that Singapore’s history must be seen through both political and cultural lenses, and that the two are closely interrelated.

It is as much a plea from the 74-year-old Chong for intergenerational understanding. The exhibition was unique in its generosity in linking Singapore’s older Nanyang painters with their more international successors, from Suzann Victor to Ming Wong to artist duo Chow and Lin.

Institutionally, 2025 also marked the completion of the revamp of the National Gallery Singapore’s Singapore gallery, in time for the 10th birthday of the museum.

It is a concerted re-ordering that steers away from formal didacticism and one that allows for more detours, especially an engrossing and fertile second section featuring experiments with abstraction, pointed nude portraits, ceramics and ink.

In line with the times, there is the corrective of greater representation of women and minority artists and a deliberate effort to showcase individual artists’ works in diverse mediums, against art history and Singapore’s tendency to pigeonhole. Nonetheless, the gallery has come under some fire for some glaring omissions, including of artist-run art space 5th Passage and The Substation.

In the juxtaposition of these two shows is where the productive “bust-up” can be found: from a more haphazard affair in the private sector, which is demonstrating increasing muscle with more ambitious shows and spaces, and the other a grand institutional effort that, despite some curatorial reticence, commands with its immense resources and reach, as well as the provision of a dominant skeleton chronology.

Does Singapore post-60 now require a more direct reckoning with sensitivities or a more polite gesturing? Will honesty improve or damage people’s engagement and trust? This award equally goes to the conversations worth having and the underrated potency of art as a non-textual medium to navigate the necessary nuances in the country’s biography.