Singapore
After seeing “How To Dream Worlds,” the second edition of SAM’s biennial to support emerging Singapore artists, I kept thinking about Chu Hao Pei’s Nasi Goreng Diplomacy #3 (all works 2025). The installation staged a surreal encounter consisting of a curtain of stitched rice sacks draped above a political round table, surrounded by four video screens showing the preparation and consumption of nasi goreng, or Malay fried rice. Playing on the power of capital with a sense of buffoonery, Pei reduced grand ideals and political ambitions to the insignificant business of eating fried rice.
Questions about space and spatiality came to the fore in Pei’s installation and most of the other works on view. In can haunting be another way of enduring?, Masuri Mazlan recomposed an interior living space as an obscure theater of hallucinations, with large, slimy black resin and foam sculptures (akin to bodily organs or vestigial lumps of flesh) creeping between crooked chandeliers, half-open wardrobes, and empty bed frames, all illuminated by blood-red lighting that cut through the darkness. Like a nagging lament, the work spoke to dislocations felt by displaced subjects facing disturbed territories, disrupted histories, and shifting national identities.
Lee Pheng Guan’s Pretty, Please (Sleep Tight), a multi-part work made of lalang—a hardy, invasive weed commonly found in overlooked corners of Singapore—offered places of resistance. Neatly trimmed and contained in three separate metal containers, the wheatlike flower spikes rose above slender clumps of grassy foliage to reach toward an overhead ceiling lamp, which threw strong shadows across the space. If Lalang could speak, its words might be: “I am located in the margin. I know struggle to be that which makes us strong, to survive even in poor soil and harsh conditions.”
In the mountain lovers club, Syahrul Anuar constructed a literal and metaphorical platform to reconsider relations between spatial and historical imaginations of Singapore, in particular the urbanization processes that have reshaped the island state and everyday life within it over the past 60 years. A video installation mounted on an elevated wood and steel stage gave visitors an opportunity to refresh memories of Singapore’s industrialization, which began in the 1960s. The footage shows a flat, tropical island morphing into a city, which is then demolished and rebuilt, as blocks of old buildings come crashing down and bulldozers and cranes emerge to prepare foundations for new buildings and skyscrapers.
NEO_ARTEFACTS’s Secrets, Sweat and Sand led viewers into places where the real and the imagined, fact and fiction, became spectacularly confused. The real archaeological site of Gunong Padang (located in West Java, Indonesia) here became Gunong Perandaian, a simulated installation which ironically showcased replicas of the Holy Grail and other famous Indiana Jones objects, as well as Lara Croft’s necklace and the Triangle of Light from Tomb Raider.
These works focused on how spaces are saturated with specific histories, narratives, subjectivities, myths, and images. The sixth work in the exhibition, Chok Si Xuan’s solid_state, reimagined the human body as a space akin to electronic circuitry. Hanging kinetic sculptures made of silicone and nylon were draped over electrical components and shape-memory alloys, emitting whirring motor sounds, thereby using the cyborg as a metaphor for a postmodern sense of self. By recognizing the spatiality of human life, SAM’s biennial posed thoughtful questions about the onset of a new era of crisis associated with the post-modernization of the contemporary world.
