Basheer Graphic Books is a 25-year-old bookstore located in Bras Basah Complex that specialises in books about architecture, design, fashion, and art. Through conversations with the owner, Mr Abdul Nasser, learning about the history of the bookstore, its present situation, and its plans for the future, the artist decided to: (1) Ask him to recommend 10 books about time; (2) Purchase the books to create an artwork; (3) Offer to reorganise the books in the bookstore together with him.

Close your eyes. Imagine that you’re in an empty white room. You are hungry. Cold.

What would you most like to eat now?

With this scenario in mind, audiences were invited to draw their dream dish, with the promise that their dish would be ‘prepared’ for them at the end of the experience.

Artist:
Nithiya N

Hosts:
Su Pei and Mike

Scattered around the living room are pictures of onigiris - snapshots of Su Pei and Mike’s frequent travels to Japan. Over hand-made onigiris, the hosts share about their experiences with convenience food using their own love for pre-packaged onigiris as a starting point.

The onigiri served to the audiences was a delicious chicken rice onigiri, wrapped and packaged in plastic film, mimicking those found in convenience stores. For host Mike, chicken rice was the quintessential dish of convenience and comfort to Singaporeans. 

Artists:
Su Pei and Mike

Audiences were invited to a blind taste test of two laksa broths. One was Su Pei’s favourite laksa premix by Prima Deli, while the other was Nithiya’s home-cooked laksa made with fresh ingredients from Tekka Market.

Over bowls of laksa, Nithiya, Su Pei and Mike prompted audiences to consider their biases and share which laksa broth they preferred. Why do they prefer the laksa that they do? Is it familiarity? Depth of taste? Tastiness? What do they really look for in a bowl of laksa? 

Artist:
Nithiya N

Hosts:
Su Pei and Mike

"The dish you ordered is ready!" Audiences are shuffled into a small room in groups of three with the promise of their dream dish.

As each trio enter the dimly lit room, they are greeted by name and welcomed to sit down by a server. They are served a small box containing 9 coloured cubes. The server sprays scents mimicking their dream dish onto the box.

"Your meal has been served. Please leave."

Audiences are then shuffled out of the home and into the common corridor to enjoy their "dream dish".

What audiences experienced was in fact Nithiya, Su Pei and Mike’s imagination of the Restaurant of the Future, where food becomes simply a necessity. Each coloured cube served was infused with a superfood that mimicked the possible future and direction of food consumption. The sharp, cold and jarring experience prompted audiences to ponder over their own relationships with food.

Artist:
Nithiya N

Hosts:
Su Pei and Mike

How often do we listen to our bodies? Stemming from Cheryl's own TCM body-check ins, the experience starts with a simple yet important act of listening to one's body.

Over the course of 10 minutes, audiences were made to be keenly aware of the inner workings of their body, noting every ache, tension and sore. At the end of the segment, they were instructed to identify where their body ached the most and to use that part of the body to sign their initials in the air. This was the first in many ways which they will use an unfamiliar body language to express themselves.

Artist:
Pat Toh

Hosts:
Cheryl Beh

Walking is an accomplishment of the whole body in motion. After Cheryl's body check-in, Pat invited audiences to walk very slowly and become more mindful of each joint that makes up the simple repetitive gesture of walking.

After articulating the act of walking, Pat introduced the element of speed. Walking at speeds 0 - 10, from slowest to fastest, Pat noted how she related to each speed personally.

At the end of the segment, audiences were invited to leave traces into the grass, signing their names into the land with their footprints.

Artist:
Pat Toh

Hosts:
Cheryl Beh

We all move differently. What may be natural to us is tense and awkward for others. Audiences were invited to relate their own bodies to others around them in this segment by mirroring with other participants.

Often leading to a chaotic mix of movements between each person, they were forming social bonds through movement.

As audiences mirrored each other, they were instructed to form an imaginary triangle with two other audience members. Without saying a word, strange configurations developed as each participant became more keenly aware of their positions in relation to others. Some ran, others walked, but everyone kept a faithful eye on their own end points as they readjusted to maintain their imaginary triangle.

Artist:
Pat Toh

Hosts:
Cheryl Beh

What lies outside the body? How do we find our place outside our own skin? Building upon the Social Body, audiences were brought through a slow yet important act of listening.

As the social body came to a close, audiences were told to still themselves. As they stood completely motionless, they were prompted to be aware of how the body can never stay still - our heart beats, our lungs gasp for air. And beyond that, the rest of the world too. As the quietened themselves, they heard the distant sounds of the Woodlands Stadium, the muffed train tracks from the MRT and the sound of crickets chirping.

As they spent a moment situating their own bodies in the environment around them, they were invited to hum a note they were comfortable with. As they did, they were gestured to slowly gather in a close intimate circle.

Artist:
Pat Toh

Hosts:
Cheryl Beh

As the group gathered into a small intimate circle, they were prompted to closed their eyes and share how they felt about the body. From their aches and injuries, to their own personal stories of ageing, beauty and pain, audiences opened up their own stories of their body. In moments where audiences were not vocalising their perspectives, they were still invited to contribute through their hums.

Artist:
Pat Toh

Hosts:
Cheryl Beh

Audiences were invited to explore Pauline’s home freely while listening to an audio tour. As they encountered a pillow fort, a reflective bunker, a library of books and layouts of homes, they were accompanied by Yen’s voice. He took on different personas, speaking to audiences as a contractor, a real estate agent, and eventually, himself. Each person reflected on the idea of ‘home’.

Artist:
Yen Phang

Hosts:
Pauline Gan

The guided tour invited audiences to explore the artworks and home through along with Yen himself. The tour began with a sharing by the artist and ended with a drawing session, in which audiences were asked to remember and draw the layouts of their homes.

Artist:
Yen Phang

Hosts:
Pauline Gan

Goliath is a stop-motion film of an artist painting artists painting their self portraits. The figure in the film morphs from Carravagio’s self portrait in David with the Head of Goliath to Velázquez’ self-portrait in Las Meninas before Oei reveals his hand.

Paintings are constructions of reality, representations that lend order to messy, complex events. In Goliath, Oei uses the artist's self-portrait and its complex interrelations of the artists' hand, the gaze and the subject (in this case, you and me), as a way of turning our encounter of Jalan Besar back unto ourselves. What are some of the preconceived notions or biases that cloud our gaze when we walk through this neighbourhood? How have different hands imposed different representations of Jalan Besar into the national imagination?

The work is presented in a 34-year-old carpentry shop founded by Mr Phua (or lovingly known as Jackie Chan of Jalan Besar). Behind the artwork is a secret garden hand-built by Mr Phua. He is representative of the last surviving tradesmen in the neighbourhood.

Artist:
Alan Oei

In both works, Nature Shankar uses repurposed fabrics and objects of personal significance to create works that are not only a documentation of personal experiences but an object of resistance.

Shankar’s practice is rooted in the use of materiality to investigate her identity and place in Singapore as a mixed-raced individual. Fabrics are torn apart and put together before being assembled and reassembled in a meditivate, movement-driven and intentional process. This simultaneous destruction and creation parallels the unlearning of internalised racism and construction of identity on her own terms.

Shankar’s work extends beyond the personal gaze to engage with the social gaze — how do we understand the Other? Have we attempted to force-fit the complex into simpler categories? Jalan Besar has been romanticised as a “nostalgic slice of Old Singapore”. At the same time, it is a “dirty red light district” and “the grittier cousin of Tiong Bahru”. Like Shankar, this neighbourhood has had to create an identity for itself on its own terms, separate from the labels imposed on it by others.

Artist:
Nature Shankar

UTOPIA is fundamentally about migrant justice, and was created with the intention of being a vehicle for the stories and voices of migrant workers themselves.  Subhas’ practice is rooted in action. In contrast to the pure artist gaze, he engages with the migrant worker community in Jalan Besar directly — using his time, energy and body as a means for activism and speaking truth to power.

The installation was presented at Dibashram, which translates to "daycare" in Bengali. Before the pandemic, this was a social space where migrant workers gathered to jam, write poetry and get-together. These spaces are important and provide opportunities for the migrant worker community to socialise and enjoy recreational activities beyond the dormitories.

Dibashram also doubles up as the office of Mr Mohsin, the editor of Singapore's only Bengali newspaper, Banglar Kantha (The Voice of Bengal). The newspaper covers current affairs in Bangladesh and Singapore, and also has a creative writing platform for short stories and poetry, contributed by migrant workers from all over the world (Singapore, Malaysia, Dubai).

Artist:
Subhas 

In collaboration with Migrants Band Singapore

Migrants Band Singapore was founded in 2015 by band leader, Nilsagar Shahin. The band, which comprises 15 members between 23 and 34, practises every Sunday in the second floor of a shophouse along Rowell Rd. They have performed at The Substation, the Esplanade and the National Library.

In Hampshire Road, Min-Wei Ting assumes an observational mode of filming to document the scene at the bus depot along Hampshire Road. This bus depot was built in response to the 2013 Little India riots to prevent the spontaneous boarding of buses and trucks.

The realism of Hampshire Road highlights the state’s tight control of the space as well as the heightened levels of surveillance imposed on the migrant worker community. By using a disconnected, detached, almost voyeuristic gaze, Ting creates space for viewers to experience their own organic thoughts and emotions in response to the film.

Artist:
Min-wei Ting

Vakantie in Indonesië (Holiday in Indonesia) explores the critical role that photography plays in moulding the perspectives we have of the colonised. The artwork features photographs of colonisers in awkward circumstances while holidaying in the Mooi Indies. In doing so, it recalls the staged photographs of locals taken by colonial photographers, who subsequently framed them as anthropological facts. The work’s sardonic reversal of circumstances underscores how our ways of seeing have been shaped by the colonial gaze, while highlighting the power imbalances that continue to persist in the present.

Artist: 
Agan Harahap

C-print
Dimensions variable

The Picturing Power series of photomontages responds to the use of photography as a means to expand colonial power. By drawing on and appropriating specific elements from archival images from the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam — an institution founded in 1864 to present knowledge from Dutch colonies overseas — to create new scenes, Yee I-Lann has generated new ways of apprehending the relationship between colonist and colonised. In doing so, the work prompts us to recognise image-making’s function in establishing and maintaining power hierarchies.

Artist: 
Yee I-Lann

Courtesy of:
The Gouws Collection

Giclée print
63 x 180 cm

Eddy Susanto hybridises two 13th-century literary works: the Book of Hours, a type of personal prayer book originating from Europe; and Smaradahana, a 12th-century Javanese poem. In doing so, the artist highlights the universality of cultural literacy during that time period, despite the differences between these two cultures. Moreover, through the inclusion of an MP3 player within the installation, the artist also argues for the importance of recognising these medieval texts as ancient forms of technology that shaped the cultural identities of today.

Artist: 
Eddy Susanto

Courtesy of:
The Gouws Collection

Acrylic on canvas, wood, MP3 player
180 x 291cm

BARONG Singa Laut 700 and BARONG Singa Laut 200 bring into perspective the extensive history of the island of Singapura. These “lion-dance” costumes draw multiple allusions to the Merlion, a Singaporean motif, and the Barong, a Southeast Asian one. While both creatures are of seemingly mythological origins, the chimerization of their attributes also makes apparent their distinctions: while the myth of the Barong predates the 10th century, the Merlion was conjured only as recently as 1964.

Artist: 
Jimmy Ong

Courtesy of:
The artist and 3Pumpkins, in collaboration with the Tak Takut Kids Club (TTKC)

Quilted repurposed textiles
Dimensions variable

A proponent of the ‘Nanyang Style’ of paintings, Chen Wen Hsi was proficient in both Western and Chinese approaches to painting. Though he worked across media and subject matters, Chen was partial towards painting animals, even keeping numerous species to serve as live studies. Within his prolific body of works, his depictions of gibbons may perhaps be regarded as his most iconic — and perhaps most ubiquitous as well, considering the placement of Two Gibbons Amidst Vines on the reverse of Singapore’s fifty-dollar bill.

Artist: 
Chen Wen Hsi

Courtesy of:
JH & KH Collection

Chinese ink on paper
33 x 43 cm

Artist:
Tew Nai Tong

Courtesy of:
JH & KH Collection

Oil on canvas
106 x 106cm

Artist:
Chuah Thean Teng

Courtesy of:
JH & KH Collection

Batik dye on cloth laid on paper
61 x 45cm

Through the process of printing texts and images on threads and weaving them into new textiles, Fyerool Darma mirrors the progressive illegibility of stories as they are transmitted through time. The artwork melds screenshots of textual and visual archives drawn from numerous sources into a singular image. In doing so, the artist examines the complex relationships  in the advent of nationhood. Moreover, the work plays on the etymology of the word "text" – which means "to weave" – as a means of revalorising the conceptual underpinnings of Malayic fabrics.

Artist: 
Fyerool Darma

In collaboration with: 
Lee Khee San and Amas Leong

Handwoven polyester, dye sublimation, aluminium, stained plywood, velvet adhesive, plexiglass and vinyl
121 x 68 x 2cm

Momotaro: Sacred Sailors, released in 1945, was commissioned by the Japanese government as a piece of WWII propaganda targeted at children. Filling in on the film’s omissions of war-time agony, the artwork highlights Gillman Barracks as the site of the final battle between the British and invading Japanese forces.

Reflecting the losses suffered by The Loyal Regiment (2nd Battalion) that was based here in Gillman Barracks, the installation consists of 180 containers, each filled with 5 litres of black paint — approximating the amount of blood in an adult human’s body — and bearing a military identity tag. Accompanying the installation is a children's song extracted from the film, which was used by the Japanese forces to educate local peasants about the Japanese Hiragana alphabets.

Artist: 
Anthony Chin 

180 glass containers, black acrylic paint, military ID tags, sound track
Dimensions variable

A handwritten copy of Singapore's National Pledge resides within a glass vitrine, sheltered by a blue sailcloth awning — a remnant from Dennis Tan’s self-constructed kolek featured in the Singapore Biennale 2019 commission, Many Waters to Cross.

The Pledge, written with two pencils at once, gives the illusion of an image out of focus. In bringing these elements together, The Contract pays homage to Singapore’s maritime roots, while alluding to the challenges of nation-building and the aspirational nature of the pledge.

Artist: 
Dennis Tan

Special thanks:
Trika

Handwritten National Pledge in vitrine, housed in a re-purposed blue sailcloth tent 
Dimensions variable

Kanchana Gupta incorporates seemingly sculptural techniques in the creation of her two-dimensional works. Employing techniques such as layering, tearing, burning, peeling, stacking, folding, bundling, heaping, arranging, compressing, and cleaving, her process of creation is reflective and meditative. Jute — the material which the oil paint skins are layered upon — also references a material utilised  across construction sites and temporary homes. In this regard, both materials and technique allude to the topic of labour, of which the artist is deeply concerned.

Artist: 
Kanchana Gupta

Courtesy of:
The Gouws Collection

Stacked oil paint skins burnt and stripped off jute and mounted on wooden structure
173 × 131cm

Approaching abstraction as a distillation of personal experiences of the real world, the artist likens the process of artmaking as one of recollecting. Yet, rather than faithful imitation of the aforementioned experiences, the work conveys the intuitions of the artist by concerning itself with shapes, contrasts, and motion.

Upon stretched linen, monotone hues and flourishes of colours seem bound within a frame, while the use of differing brushstrokes and varying intensities of colours evoke a sense of dynamism as the distinct layers of paint coalesce on a single plane. The work’s title, They Came In from the Sides, suggests continued interaction of these elements that expand even beyond the borders of the painting itself.

Artist: 
Ian Woo

Courtesy of:
The Gouws Collection

Acrylic on linen
183 x 147cm

In the Floating Rays of a Wanderer series, Lavender Chang compresses extended durations of time into singular images. The image, created by means of prolonged exposure aboard a public bus in Singapore, amalgamates the different sights from the fixed routes the buses ply. Beyond serving as chronicles of journeys undertaken, the work also documents Singapore’s ever-changing landscape. Moreover, with the compression of the journey’s entire time frame into a snapshot, the work intimates the haziness of the time that elapses between the point of departure and arrival.

Artist: 
Lavender Chang

Courtesy of:
The Gouws Collection

Fine art inkjet print
81.45 x 100 cm

Kentaro Hiroki painstakingly replicates a photograph of the sky as seen from Zubir Said Drive and a piece of rubbish collected there. The title of the artwork takes after a chapter within Zubir Said’s biography, and the hyper-realistic drawing and paper sculpture is also accompanied by the same text fashioned from the colour-pencil shavings derived from the process. The Malay text, loosely translated as “Where the sky above I hold, the earth beneath I tread”, simultaneously grounds Hiroki’s artwork as a contemplative deliberation of the anthem’s significance in shaping a country and moulding a national identity.

Artist: 
Kentaro Hiroki

Colour pencil on paper
Various dimensions

These vernonia creepers — widely known to Southeast Asia’s horticulturalists by the moniker ‘Lee Kuan Yew Creeper’ — have been pruned by Nila Choo to spell out the letters L-K-Y. The greening of Singapore, giving it the nickname, The Garden City is one of numerous initiatives conceptualised and spearheaded by the founding Prime Minister of Singapore. His demise in 2015 has done little to quell architects’ penchant for incorporating this creeper into green construction initiatives. In conceptualising this living botanical artwork, Choo seems to pose the age-old question of nature versus nurture in relation to a country’s development.

Artist: 
Nila Choo

Installation with vernonia creepers
Dimensions variable

Annie Cabigting’s artworks have always placed other works of art as her subject of inquiry – reproducing iconic pieces, at times going to the extent of painting in audiences engaging with the artwork in question. With Martin Creed, Work No 127 The Lights Going On and Off, the artist renders photographs of both states of the notorious light artwork as oil paintings. In presenting them side by side and lit with theatre lights similarly programmed to switch on and off.

Artist: 
Annie Cabigting

Courtesy of:
Michelangelo & Lourdes Samson Collection

Oil on Canvas, Light Box, Lights
127 x 180 cm

Damag’s practice centres on the reclamation of the bulol – wooden carvings of an Ifugao rice god – from Western colonial plunder troves. In How I Paint Certain of My Paintings, Damag goes over photographs of Ifugao artefacts – captured by himself and residing in foreign collections – with brushes dipped in bleach.

Artist: 
Gaston Damag

Courtesy of:
Jim Amberson

Photograph and Acid
100 x 150 cm (quadtych)

Tan is a contemporary artist based in Singapore. Influenced by geometry, her interest in material and construction led her wearable works to evolve into sculptural objects and site-specific installations. Although Tan’s objects have been created from common fasteners such as moulded tag pins and cable ties, their de-contextualisation from their everyday use and environments to be placed as objects of study within a Wunderkammer of sorts re-frames them as cultural artefacts.

Artist: 
Grace Tan

Courtesy of:
Michelangelo & Lourdes Samson Collection

Wall-mounted Stainless Steel, Acrylic Structure With LED Light, Objects Made From Polyamide and Polypropylene Tag Pins and Nickel-plated Brass Tubes
94 x 73 x 16 cm

Nature and natural history are the recurring subjects in Geraldine Javier’s multi-media paintings and installations. Her works are about display, about filling the space with dead specimens and dressing them up to make them seem alive, but it is also a personal process, simultaneously emptying out and remembering. Red Tree is one of a pair of trees created by the artist reflecting the duality of life and death. While Red Tree, symbolic of life, featured seemingly blissfully sleeping birds aloft in hammocks.

Artist: 
Geraldine Javier

Courtesy of:
Michelangelo & Lourdes Samson Collection

Mixed Media
218 x 155 x 76 cm

Siripattananuntakul’s oeuvres are grounded on social, political, economic, and political ecology issues that question the meaning of life. Racharudee (Zhu Clan) consists of individual sheets of handmade paper made by the artist by pulping her own family ancestry book. With the destruction of an heirloom that has been kept within the family for years becoming the basis for the creation of a new artwork, the process of creation entails numerous reversals in perceived value: an object with historical value is rendered worthless only to become an object imbued with artistic value.

Artist: 
Wantanee Siripattananuntakul

Handmade Paper
90 x 60 x 60 cm

Kray Chen's practice largely deals with lived experience and body politics, reflecting on the body and the self within the economical machine, observing the fissures and ruptures of the psyche arising from the parallel quests to progress and to conserve. His chair and stools reframed as erogenous traditional furniture suggest the contortions of the body that can happen when one allows oneself libidinous encounters.

Artist: 
Kray Chen

Between the Butt and the Chair #3 (One for each butt cheek)  
Wood and Aluminium
46.5 x 60.5 x 44 cm

Between the Butt and the Chair #4 (Heatsink and Longevity)
Stainless Steel
115 x 92 x 84 cm

Between the Butt and the Chair #7 (Double Happiness Goes Both Ways)
Stainless Steel
40 x 40 x 45 cm

Marla Bendini is a cross-disciplinary artist and trans woman working in painting, text, sound and performance to articulate the infinitely faceted transgender experience on her own terms. Her figures in her durational wall “mural” unfold to embody trauma, anxiety, and hope, questing for the remembrance of a history and community that are tied up with Orchard Road.

Artist: 
Marla Bendini

Stealth / Where Do Wounded Soldiers Go?  
Oil on linen
122 x 122 cm

Where Do Prayers Go? / This Is Not The End, Where Do Desires Go When They Are Forgotten?
Oil on linen
122 x 91 cm

Where Do Thoughts Go When They Are Forgotten?
Pastel, Photographs From Artist’s Archive on All Mural
Dimensions Variable

Marla Bendini is a cross-disciplinary artist and trans woman working in painting, text, sound and performance to articulate the infinitely faceted transgender experience on her own terms.

Artist:
Marla Bendini
 
Live Performance at Tanglin Shopping Centre, #01-02/03
51 Min

Khairullah Rahim is a Singapore-based artist working across mixed-media installation, object-making, painting, photography and moving images. His explorations delve into complex strategies of resourcefulness for everyday survival in environments under constant surveillance. Recurring points of departure in his work premise around themes of queerness, desire, resistance, aspiration, labour and ethics of disclosure.

Artist: 
Khairullah Rahim

Courtesy of:
The Yan Collection

Acrylic on Canvas
160 x 110 cm

One of Singapore’s preeminent contemporary artists, Jimmy Ong has been noted for his large-scale, figurative charcoal works on paper. His works explore how multiple identities and perspectives – whether sexual, ethnic, national, or even generational – can coexist within the individual. His deeply personal works have taken inspiration from a stark analysis of his own experience, and indeed of his physical form, an ongoing process of what he calls “creative self-therapy".

Artist: 
Jimmy Ong

Courtesy of:
Shi’ai Liang Collection

Charcoal on Paper
89 x 61cm

Zulkhairi Zulkiflee is an artist-curator committed to a practice centred on Malayness and its social ontology. His reframing and queering of Cheong Soo Pieng’s 1953 painting, Malay Boy with Bird, leads one to ask about the desiring dynamics between the painter and the pictured. The present subject’s refusal to look back also raises uncharted questions about Cheong’s painting contrary to the viewer’s expected deference.

Artist: 
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee

Courtesy of:
The Yan Collection

Lightbox With Fabric Print
122 x 87 cm
Edition 1 of 3