[2025 Singapore Attraction] Travel Guide for Singapore Art Museum (Updated Mar)

Singapore Art MuseumThe Singapore Art Museum opened in 1996 as Singapore's first art museum located in Singapore's cultural district. Known as SAM, the museum presents contemporary art from a Southeast Asian perspective to artists, art lovers and those interested in art at multiple venues across the island, including a new venue in the historic port district of Tanjong Pagar. The museum is building one of the world's most important public collections of Southeast Asian contemporary art and aims to connect art and artists to the public and future generations through exhibitions and projects. SAM is committed to responsible practices in its processes for a humane and sustainable future.[Current Exhibitions]Seeing ForestOpening until May 18, 2025SAM Gallery 3Following its presentation at the Singapore Pavilion at Biennale Arte 2024 in Venice, Seeing Forest by Robert Zhao Renhui returns to Singapore. The observation of the ultimately unknowable in the natural world is a hallmark of artist Robert Zhao Renhui’s praxis. Since 1998, under the auspices of his own semi-fictional Institute of Critical Zoologists, Zhao’s many and varied projects have served as lenses that highlight the resilience of nature and the various interactions that occur when such resilience overlaps with human life and society. Notably, over the last seven years, he has been focusing on secondary forests in Singapore — forests regrown from deforested land due to human intervention such as development and plantation — and the new ecosystems that have developed within it. For the Singapore Pavilion, decades of Zhao’s accumulated observations are condensed and organised into an intensive installation, which returns to Singapore after its exhibition run at the Biennale Arte 2024 in Venice. Through this exhibition, we see how the island of Singapore has evolved to arrive at the present day, revealing some of the ways in which human urban design can shape the natural world itself, resulting in an ecosystem of migrant species that echoes the trajectories and makeup of the city’s human population. At the same time, Seeing Forest also highlights phenomena that are universally relatable to those living in any urban environment.Yee I-Lann: Mansau-AnsauOpening until March 23, 2025SAM Gallery 1Mansau-Ansau in Dusun – the language of the Dusun and Kadazan of Sabah – means to walk without a predetermined destination. It evokes a wandering path that welcomes chance and possibilities. Translated into a weave, it manifests as a pattern without pattern, a pattern that follows its own rhythm. The exhibition Mansau-Ansau attends to Yee I-Lann’s journey of discovery and creation over two decades, navigating domains of knowledge old and new, and reimagining the forms and dynamics of power. Travel across a range of media, from photocollage, silk and batik, to bamboo pus and pandanus, to encounter a horizon that teases, where the kerbau stand their ground and mats ‘eat’ tables, to experience karaoke beyond language and meet the turtles as they return home.Pratchaya Phinthong: No Patents on IdeasOpening until March 23, 2025SAM Gallery 1No Patents on Ideas is the first solo exhibition of Bangkok-based artist Pratchaya Phinthong in Singapore that presents major explorations underpinning two decades of the artist’s practice. Through video, installation and objects, the exhibition examines the cultural and economic systems that structure modern life. Phinthong’s art carry layers of significance drawn from their journey through production, use, and exchange. These items are shaped by their cultural roots, shifting ownership, and connections to historical events. The exhibition also features a new commission, Undrift, a video installation that reflects on the implications between cultural circuits of vernacular knowledge and everyday material cultures.Learning GalleryOpening until June 29, 2025SAM Gallery 2Established as part of Singapore Art Museum’s continued support of art education, the Learning Gallery is dedicated to the engagement and understanding of broader issues through contemporary artworks. These artworks have been specially selected from the National Collection or commissioned to extend the learning of contemporary art to all ages. This issue of the Learning Gallery is themed around childhood, encouraging people to maintain a childlike curiosity when engaging with art. We invite you to embrace the spirit of exploration and establish an unfettered relationship with the world: to observe, feel and live fearlessly. The exhibition features artworks in a variety of media and forms, touching on multiple themes such as family, nature and environment, people, place, memory and time. They also raise important and timely questions about what it means to live in the contemporary era, evoking everyone's emotions and experiences in the process.Everyday PracticesOpening until July 20, 2025SAM Gallery 4“My art is doing time, so it’s not different from doing life or doing art, or doing time. No matter whether I stay in ‘art-time’ or ‘life-time,’ I am passing time.”—the artist Tehching Hsieh thus describes his durational performances, which turn the banality of life and the passage of time into medium and subject for his art.Building on Hsieh’s philosophy, the exhibition Everyday Practices examines the inventive ways artists have appropriated quotidian routines and lived experiences to express powerful statements of resilience and endurance. Through their works, we witness ongoing conflicts, humanitarian crises and asymmetrical power relationships. In this context, the gestures that the artists have employed, by dint of repetition, reveal themselves as small acts of resistance that return agency to the individual. Art, as we see here, offers a means of sense-making and coping in the face of adversity.Drawing from the collection of Singapore Art Museum, Everyday Practices brings together artworks by diverse artists across different generations and geographies in Asia. They affirm that the collective strength found in individual actions cuts across cultural practices and conditions. The question that is universal to us all is: “In the face of life’s challenges, how do we go on going on?”