National Gallery Singapore is Asia’s first Healing Arts Centre of Excellence

SINGAPORE – The National Gallery Singapore has been designated as Asia’s inaugural Healing Arts Centre of Excellence by the Jameel Arts & Health Lab, a global initiative set up in 2023 with the support of the World Health Organisation (WHO).

It now joins the famed concert venue Carnegie Hall in New York City and the Scottish Ballet, Scotland’s national dance company in holding the appointment, in a sign that museums can play a vital role in supporting health and wellbeing.

Ms Alicia Teng, the gallery’s deputy director of community and access, said the designation positions the Gallery as an anchor institution in Singapore’s growing arts-and-health ecosystem. 

The gallery was picked as it makes use of art as a tool that supports emotional wellbeing, strengthens community bonds and makes the museum more inclusive for people of all ages and backgrounds. Among its offerings is a calm room that was launched in June 2022 for visitors with sensory needs.

Its appointment, which took place on Dec 8, signals the start of a multi-year undertaking in Singapore that aims to demonstrate the positive effect of the arts on public health in the country, Mr Stephen Stapleton, the lab’s founding co-director, told The Straits Times.

The collaboration starts with Healing Arts Singapore, a nationwide initiative that is part of the lab’s Healing Arts initiative that aims to embed the arts within systems of care and advance evidence-based programmes that can be scaled across nations to improve health and wellbeing.

The Jameel Arts & Health Lab was co-founded in 2023 by the WHO Regional Office for Europe, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University, Saudi Arabia-based philanthropic organisation Community Jameel and UK social enterprise Culturunners, which is headed by Mr Stapleton.

“While billions, maybe trillions of dollars in that time (during the Covid pandemic) was funnelled into pharmaceutical, biomedical responses to the emergency, what many of us noticed was the role that art was playing for our own sanity and mental health, both in making art to help us stay connected with ourselves,” he said at the Dec 8 event held at the National Gallery Singapore.

The lab then started the Healing Arts campaign to challenge the separation between the science community, the arts community and the policy community, he said.

Healing Arts Singapore, which runs Dec 8 to 12, is co-led by the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Centre for Music and Health at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), University of the Arts Singapore, and the Jameel Arts & Health Lab.

Ms April Lee, Technical Officer at the WHO Western Pacific Regional Office, told ST: “Sometimes, we don’t make that connection between the arts and our health and well-being but there’s a huge benefit for the two sectors to work together, and we should harness that.”

While the WHO European office has been harnessing the arts for health, it is a relatively new area to the organisation’s Western Pacific region, which includes 38 countries, from Mongolia to Singapore to New Zealand, she said.

The focus came about as the region launched into promoting social prescribing – a model connecting individuals to non-clinical community services – as a way to address the social determinants of health, mental health, loneliness and social isolation.

“Our main goal was to connect health and social services, and through introducing social prescribing, we noticed that a lot of social activities involve the arts,” said Ms Lee.  

For instance, an arts activity can be prescribed to a person who enjoys art, to address social isolation. 

Evidence on the benefits of the arts on health is gradually emerging. In 2023, the Jameel Arts and Health Lab, for instance, convened a landmark series in medical journal Lancet that connects international researchers and artists to present evidence on the value of the arts in clinical and public health. 

More recently, in October 2025, a British Journal of Psychiatry study found that group singing sessions can significantly reduce symptoms of postnatal depression in new mothers in the United Kingdom, with benefits lasting up to six months.

Mr Stapleton said that the options for people who are struggling with mental health issues like anxiety could be singing classes, a programme at the museum or at the Botanic Gardens, for instance.

These alternatives provide a different treatment pathway for mental health, especially since pharmaceutical options don’t work for everyone, but for the arts to be embedded into the healthcare systems, the impact of the specific programmes on health needs to be quantified, he said.

Mr Stapleton said the lab will soon start the six-month process of picking two to three pilot programmes in Singapore that will be studied for two years. It will announce the pilots in May 2026, when it will also report on the evaluation of the December Healing Arts Singapore event.

The ultimate goal in Singapore is to have the arts integrated into policy, said Mr Stapleton. 

“Our model accelerates things, it brings in more funding and more partners and helps identify the most impactful projects and that in turn, brings in more funding and allows it to scale,” he said. 

“Ultimately, we are looking at impacting people’s lives. The arts could be an additional resource to help improve the health of people.”