{"id":597943,"date":"2026-08-19T09:22:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T09:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/597943\/"},"modified":"2026-08-19T09:22:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T09:22:12","slug":"national-gallery-singapores-art-remembers-exhibition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/597943\/","title":{"rendered":"National Gallery Singapore\u2019s Art Remembers exhibition"},"content":{"rendered":"

SINGAPORE \u2013 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\u2019s (NGS) newest show, complete with hearty Singlish soundpacks and comfy Razer chairs.<\/p>\n

Created in 2001 by avid gamer Charles Lim Yi Yong \u2013 better known today as a Singaporean contemporary artist \u2013 and online portal Geek Culture\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Although archives have an ill reputation of being dusty and officious, the curatorial quartet wants audiences to walk away with \u201carchive fever\u201d, discovering how idiosyncratic, personal, self-made and appropriated archives can reveal much about histories unrecorded by official sources. Says co-curator Seng Yu Jin: \u201cArchive fever is really about agency \u2013 all of us have our own compelling stories to tell.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cpowdered iPhones\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The other members of the show\u2019s curatorial team are Lisa Horikawa, Phoebe Scott and Kathleen Ditzig \u2013 the original curatorial team for the delayed After The Monsoon: Art & War In Southeast Asia exhibition<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

On the artist\u2019s role as historian and storyteller, Seng says: \u201cArt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Some artists, in following the trail of the official archives, expose its violent logic. Singaporean artist Sim Chi Yin\u2019s own archive fever led her in an ongoing 15-year search for the story of her late grandfather<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\"At<\/p>\n

At Art Remembers, Singaporean artist Sim Chi Yin\u2019s own archive fever led her down an ongoing 15-year search for the story of her late grandfather, one of the 30,000 people deported to China during the 1948 to 1960 guerilla war known euphemistically as the Malayan Emergency.<\/p>\n

ST PHOTO: GIN TAY<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Fair \u201chuman zoo\u201d in Missouri by obscuring their faces with her hands in rephotographed versions of the historical images.<\/p>\n

\"At<\/p>\n

At the National Gallery Singapore’s Art Remembers, Filipino artist Stephanie Syjuco’s Block Out The Sun (2019) reclaims privacy for some of the 1,200 Filipinos paraded in a 1904 World\u2019s Fair \u201chuman zoo\u201d in Missouri.<\/p>\n

ST PHOTO: GIN TAY<\/p>\n

For more occluded histories, artists resort to generating their own archives. Singaporean artist Ho Rui An\u2019s 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\u2019s 1979 war film Apocalypse Now and Louis Wesseling\u2019s 2000 book Fuelling The War: Revealing An Oil Company\u2019s Role In Vietnam.<\/p>\n

Asked about what he thinks is the nature of South-east Asian artists\u2019 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<\/a>\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Moving away from a human-centric view of archives, Seng points out, has contemporary currency amid discourse about climate change. \u201cIt\u2019s so relevant to stories about Maju Forest<\/a>,\u201d he says. \u201cThe forest is an archive, if you think about it, because it contains not just species, but the histories of the land itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"(From<\/p>\n

(Clockwise from bottom left) Art Remembers curators Kathleen Ditzig, Phoebe Scott, Seng Yu Jin and Lisa Horikawa, and curatorial assistant Ashley Lim.<\/p>\n

ST PHOTO: GIN TAY<\/p>\n

Despite the exhibition\u2019s relatively easier opening with playable art, Art Remembers \u2013 which leans more heavily on contemporary art \u2013 is one of NGS\u2019 denser shows, requiring a different kind of attention from the gallery\u2019s usual exhibitions.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a curator, I personally believe that we should be as demanding of our audiences as they are demanding of our exhibitions,\u201d Seng says. \u201cThe agency of our audience to have their own critical way or their own perspectives \u2013 that is as relevant as anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Book It\/Art Remembers<\/p>\n

Where: City Hall Wing, Level 3, Singtel Special Exhibition Gallery 1 and City Hall Chamber, National Gallery Singapore, 1 St Andrew\u2019s 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<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SINGAPORE \u2013 Recall playing Counter-Strike in a virtual Choa Chu Kang Housing Board estate? Turn-of-the-millennium LAN shop gamers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":597944,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-597943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/597944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}