This month, Singapore Art Week (SAW) returns for its eleventh edition with more than 130 events spread across the city featuring over 700 regional and international artists and curators. Alongside two major market platforms – S.E.A. Focus by STPI and the inaugural ART SG fair – SAW also has a diverse programmatic lineup at various independent and artist-run spaces. The photography center DECK is hosting ‘Pictures in the Mind’, an exhibition that explores public memories of one of Singapore’s oldest shopping malls, and the independent spaces Supper House and Starch are putting on ‘after/party’, a series of collaborative activations revolving around the practices of respite and relaxation. Drawing on the synergy between efforts in orienting the regional art market and more communal initiatives that engage with an ever-expanding and hungry arts public, galleries in Singapore are likewise abuzz with creative energy. Here are six of our most anticipated exhibitions.

indieguerillas, ‘:D’
Mizuma Gallery
January 13 – February 19, 2023

A continuation of indieguerillas’s 2021 show at Mizuma Gallery’s Tokyo location, ‘:D’ furthers the Indonesian husband-and-wife duo’s exploration of everyday life alongside traditional Javanese motifs and pop culture. The nine new works in the show include paintings, wall installations, and sculptures, and mark a maturation in the artists’ signature style: a vivid and expressive visual language that brings together the flatness and cleanliness of their graphic design origin, a pop sensibility with a sly, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, and the inclusion of various Indonesian cultural symbols. In Driftless Flowing Motion and Intense Colors of Joy (both 2022), for example, faces and figures emerge from a field of swirling colors that draw upon shapes commonly found in the topeng masks of traditional Indonesian dances alongside culturally significant fauna like roosters and monkeys. The refinement of this distinct aesthetic comes across as a tactical politic for maintaining a sense of historical and cultural continuity, as well as for questioning larger forces of capitalism in contemporary Indonesian society. A self-professed ‘collage of our moments of happiness’, indieguerillas’s bold, bright, and fluid compositions inject levity into a Southeast Asian discourse that often wrestles with the weight of coloniality and recent geopolitics.

Melati Suryodarmo, ‘Unpacked’
ShanghART Gallery
January 7 – March 12, 2023

A small retrospective of sorts, ‘Unpacked’ highlights the practice of Indonesian artist Melati Surydoarmo through a new installation and a series of performance-lectures that revisit and restage a selection of her shorter pieces from the late 1990s to early 2010s. Concerned with the relationship between the body and the cultural milieus it occupies, Suryodarmo transmutes her observations of specific subjects and phenomena – such as her experiences of migration and spirituality as an Indonesian woman in Germany – into performed rituals and gestures. She’s known for rigorous and physically intensive durational pieces, having created a performance vocabulary that is shaped by her background as a dancer and incorporates a visceral tactility: in Love me tender (2001), she methodically fills and bursts twenty black balloons while singing and dancing to the eponymous song; in Tarung (2002), she play-fights with a sword while holding a dead chicken filled with coins. While literally referring to the baggage containing her props and costumes that have accompanied her travels over the years, ‘Unpacked’ also alludes to the itinerancy and transience of performance-making and the continual process of deconstruction and reconstruction that the artist undergoes in her practice.

John Clang, ‘So this is what it feels like to be free’
FOST Gallery
January 7 – March 4, 2023

‘So this is what it feels like to be free’ is both a truism for escaping confinement and the title of the latest solo exhibition by Singaporean artist John Clang at FOST Gallery. Each of the three new bodies of work in the show adopts an expanded perspective on the shapeshifting role of image-making and furthers Clang’s ongoing investigations into the themes of identity and interpersonal connections. For the series ‘Sans the Face’ (2019–ongoing), Clang has made over 100 portraits of strangers whose faces he asks to cover with oversized Post-it notes before clicking the shutter, mimicking the way in which the sticky notes have been used to obscure webcam lenses. Meanwhile, ‘The Mobile Park’ (2023) is a series of images featuring parked cars with newspaper-covered windows, alluding to the act of creating private spaces in the public sphere, ostensibly for intimate reasons, which sporadically happened in Singapore throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Lastly, in ‘Reading by an Artist’ (2023–ongoing), the artist shuns the image entirely and draws upon Chinese metaphysics to perform acts of divination for individual visitors. In each of these series, Clang muddies the relationship between gaze and agency to excavate the power structure behind how we perceive ourselves and, in turn, how we can shape how we are perceived.

Ming Wong, ‘Pictures from the Wayang Spaceship’
Ota Fine Arts
January 7 – February 26, 2023

Chinese street opera, or wayang, takes center stage in ‘Pictures from the Wayang Spaceship’, Ming Wong’s first solo exhibition in his home country in over a decade. Weaving together the tropes of science fiction and futurity with the media history of the traditional type of performance, Wong’s eponymous series of photographic collage prints was produced in tandem with his Wayang Spaceship installation at the Singapore Art Museum. Seen together, the images imagine a fantastic futuristic narrative composited from found archival materials including photos of Singaporean and Malaysian wayang actors, Soviet-era illustrations of space exploration, Chinese brush paintings, and dichroic films. In Number 4 from Pictures from the Wayang Spaceship (2022), an arc of satellites surrounds a cut-out of a wǔ dàn, or woman warrior, set against a background of shifting contours, bringing to mind the kitsch aesthetics and ideological contexts of the Space Age and its definitions of the future. Through the process of layering, Wong speculates on how imaginaries of ‘the future’ are constructed and proposes his own language of performing futurity that exists at the intersections of gender, tradition, and technology.

Zac Lee, ‘Another Day’
Richard Koh Fine Art
January 7–19, 2023

As part of a double-bill of exhibitions focused on contemporary Malaysian painting, Richard Koh Fine Art presents ‘Another Day’, featuring recent work by Zac Lee. Centered on the documentation of daily life, Lee’s paintings utilize a muted palette to depict mundane routines and gestures that capture the cadences of contemporary existence: in Love is Love (2021), a young man squats on a rocky reef in contemplation of the viewer; in Wolf (2022), a young woman’s foot is raised from her sandal as she flips through a book atop a crowded table; and in If You Are Sad, Add More Lipstick and Attack - Coco Chanel (2021), a woman concentrates on applying lipstick in a mirror while leaning over a messy dresser. Through a delicate awkwardness in each composition, Lee avoids the overt romanticization common to such subject matter and celebrates passing moments as part of the zeitgeist.

Genevieve Chua, ‘grrrraaanularrrrrrr’
STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery
January 14 – February 26, 2023

The culmination of a fruitful collaboration with STPI’s print- and paper-making workshop over the course of the past four years, ‘grrrraaanularrrrrrr’ continues Genevieve Chua’s explorations of dimensionality and textures in a formally rigorous yet playful register. Building on her training as a painter, the works in the Singaporean artist’s new series extrude from the pictorial plane to create spatial articulations that reposition the possibilities of two-dimensional materials. In Pathway #2, Steadfast (2022), a thread pulled taut across three points fixed at indentations on a piece of cement-infused paper creates an optical illusion that confuses a viewer’s depth perception. In Apex and Depressions (2022), the contours of an irregular shape sculpted into the paper creates natural shadows that divide the plane into sections, recalling Cubism’s varied perspectives. Other works, such as Chua’s ‘Breeze Blocks’ (2020–21) series of digitally composed acrylic prints on linen that feature the extensive manipulation of a pattern derived from a basal shape, also speak to the artist’s growing sensibility for perspectival possibilities.

Alfonse Chiu is a writer, artist, and curator based between Taipei and Singapore. They were the Fall 2021 e-flux journal Fellow and are currently the director of the Centre for Urban Mythologies (CUM).

Top image: John Clang, Sans the Face 13 (detail), 2020. Courtesy of the artist. A dark filter has been applied over the image for readability.