SINGAPORE – A pale yellow concrete “pineapple” has sprouted at a corner of the open-air carpark of Shenton House. Titled Sweet Water, the work by Singapore artist Finbarr Fallon references a fresh water spring discovered on the site when construction began in the early 1970s.
It is one of seven works by eight artists commissioned by the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) as part of its public art initiative, The Everyday Museum. Momentary Pulses: Art In The Central Business District, its third art trail, will be on till December 2027.
The first two trails, launched in 2023, orbited around SAM’s Tanjong Pagar Distripark (TPD) home. Those works have mostly been taken down and will go back to the artists, says Ong Puay Khim, SAM’s director (collections, design and public art), despite hopes that they would be adopted by sponsors.
Ong adds: “With all our commissions, we do want to see whether people grow to like them, whether people want to take ownership or even if the site owners want them. In the case of our first two commission projects, a lot of the land was state-owned and different agencies were taking custody.”
The shift to the Central Business District (CBD) for this latest edition thus presents new opportunities with artworks located at public spaces that are privately owned.
Ong says: “We want to explore how we can work with corporations and the private sector to put art in public spaces. We didn’t go in saying, ‘Do you want to adopt this artwork?’ But we wanted to show them what art can do in these spaces and then maybe cultivate their interest. Hopefully, some of these works can stay beyond the display period.”
The trails have a two-year lifespan and, of the seven works for the new trail, two are yet to be unveiled.
A work in one of the earlier trails ran into trouble when members of the public and the People’s Association complained about banners which prompted passers-by to stare into residences.
Ong acknowledges the lessons learnt from that episode: “What we could have done better was to engage residents earlier on to share with them what was going on.”
For the latest trail, SAM worked closely with site owners and considered outreach more carefully. Ong says: “When we want to engage, we also consider what kind of channels and platforms to use. We reach out to tenants or residents to offer tours at times convenient to them.
“For our programmes, we always want to be more intimately sized so that we can engage more meaningfully as well.”
What attracted SAM to the CBD, besides the lure of private partnerships, is the area’s deep history. “This is where the colonial authorities established the first commercial site in the 1820s; the landscape and architecture have changed very much over the centuries,” says Ong.
Artists were invited to consider, and react to, the social, commercial and historical contexts of various sites.
Fallon’s Sweet Water, for example, is moulded in strong angles and simple curves, mirroring the Brutalist architecture of the building, the last survivor of the “three sisters” of Shenton Way. Shenton House, like its demolished siblings Robina House and UIC Building, is due for the wrecking ball in 2027.
Artist Yang Jie with his kinetic sculpture, Clock Of The Everyday, at Raffles Place.
ST PHOTO: BRIAN TEO
Yang Jie’s Clock Of The Everyday at Raffles Place MRT station’s Exit E references the Seiko Flower Clock, which was the centrepiece of the rooftop garden of Singapore’s first underground carpark located on the same spot.
The kinetic sculpture will activate every day at 7.45am, noon and 4pm, with objects in its four facets moving to create small noises, plinks and plonks as a basket cradle bounces and teacups rattle.
The engineer turned artist says the work will also activate at unexpected times, including a late-night slot which nods to a nearby club that opens late.
Sound artist Zul Mahmod’s sculpture, on the other hand, employs tambourine cymbals for soft chimes in a shiny stainless-steel and acrylic tube.
LOOP – The Resonance Of Motion, located next to an escalator at Asia Square Tower 1, seeks to capture “a constant sense of movement beneath the apparent stillness of architecture”, he says.
Artist Zul Mahmod with his installation, LOOP – The Resonance Of Motion, at Asia Square Tower 1.
ST PHOTO: BRIAN TEO
There is also, inevitably, a digital work drawing on large language models, which are artificial intelligence systems that have been trained on vast amounts of text data to understand and generate human-like text.
Thusspoke.baby lives in a digital screen on the OUE Link facade. Creators Teow Yue Han and Federico Ruberto say the work will evolve through its two-year incubation and generate everything from philosophical rants to fragments of text.
(From left) Artists Federico Ruberto and Teow Yue Han with their artwork thusspoke.baby, a real-time generative video and text transparent light-emitting diode display, at OUE Link.
ST PHOTO: BRIAN TEO
In contrast, Catherine Hu’s A fountain when it rains is determinedly analogue: The two sculptures, tiled in classic void deck-furniture style and topped with birds, become “fountains” only when it rains.
The artist discovered in her research that the Urban Redevelopment Authority guidelines suggest fountains as one possible use of privately owned public spaces. “Fountains occupy an interesting space between functionality and ornamentation,” she says. “They can mask traffic and building noises. They are used also for fengshui purposes.”
Artist Catherine Hu with her artwork, A fountain when it rains, at One Raffles Quay.
ST PHOTO: BRIAN TEO
The last two works in the series – Immanuel Koh’s Neural Panoptic Black and Song-Ming Ang’s Still Afloat – will be unveiled at a later date. Koh’s architectural sculpture will be located in the CBD, while Ang’s will be at SAM’s TPD home.
Meanwhile, those who work in the Raffles Quay area might want to look out for a performance by Sigma Contemporary Dance at OUE Link on July 9, 6pm. Dis.connected Body, a dance duet, was commissioned by SAM as part of the ancillary programme for the trail.
Performers presenting Dis.connected Body, by Sigma Contemporary Dance in collaboration with the Singapore Art Museum, at Asia Square Tower 1 on July 1.
ST PHOTO: BRIAN TEO
There will also be curator tours as well as talks by artists and performers. For more information, go to SAM’s website.